Recent Posts

33151

Screenshot Captor / Re: Hey Mouser, Check out Kidsnapper...

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 09:01 PM »

fun idea.

actually you really should be able to use screenshot captor's built in ability to configure external tools in the Tools menu to do this and lots of other stuff like one click uploading of a file to an ftp site, mailing screenshots, etc., if some people just took some time to find some commandline drivable tools for this kind of stuff.

33152

Find And Run Robot / Re: Minor Bug - First character of relative location dropped

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 02:20 PM »

nope, first time i've heard about it; thanks for the bug report jan.

33153

Find And Run Robot / Re: A unified FARR / Launcher Interface Proposal

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 02:18 PM »

i would *love* to see some hard user interface testing data on tree based configurations.

what surprises me is that i am a huge fan of hierarchical information and i *should* prefer the tree based configurations, but for me what happens is that all the options just sort of blend in together and i feel lost.  i just seem to be able to find stuff easier with more visual clues like boxes and stuff as seen in a tabbed configuration.  maybe its just me..

33154

Best ScreenCaster / Re: Wink 2.0 in the Works

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 01:59 PM »

great to hear!

wink forum: http://www.debugmode.com/userforums/


Wink Features

• Freeware: Distributed as freeware for business or personal use. However if you want to redistribute Wink, you need to get permission from the author.
• Cross-Platform: Available for all flavours of Windows and various versions of Linux (x86 only).
• Input formats: Capture screenshots from your PC, or use images in BMP/JPG/PNG/TIFF/GIF formats.
• Output formats: Macromedia Flash, Standalone EXE, PDF, PostScript, HTML or any of the above image formats. Use Flash/html for the web, EXE for distributing to PC users and PDF for printable manuals.
• Multilingual support: Works in English, French, German, Italian, Danish, Spanish, Serbian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified/Traditional Chinese.
• Smart Capture Tools: Capture screenshots automatically as you use your PC, based on mouse and keyboard input (great time saver and generates professional captures).
• Performance/Quality: Creates highly compressed Flash presentations (few kbs to few hundreds of kbs, much smaller than competing commercial products) ideal for using on the web.

 
 

33155

BrowserTraySwitch / Re: add new command to the trayicon contextmenu

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 01:37 PM »

agreed 100%, long over due.
also infact philkc showed me a way to maybe autodetect all installed browsers, i've been meaning to add it and make an update.
let me try to have a new release next week.

33156

General Software Discussion / Re: Transferring licenses

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 01:35 PM »

or what if the license doesnt address it?

i'm curious to know people's experiences with this and thoughts on this as well.

33157

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR version 2 - discuss the best way to handle 'actions'

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 01:34 PM »

an attempt to clarify what i mean.

right now we have what we call group aliases, which when they match what you type present a menu of choices (and the ability to use regex to grab some part of what you write to use in a command).

ok now

what if we generalized the group concept as follows:

lets do away with "group aliases" and just have the general concept of "keywords"

when you define a keyword you specify:
1) the keyword/name
2) optional overrides for search directories, file patterns, and scoring
3) the action to perform ('launch","delete", run some abitrary command, etc)
4) or instead of #2 you can specify a special some SPECIAL lists to be displayed in results window:
a) control panel applets
b) recent app list
c) a fixed list of items specified manually (this is would amount to current group alias funciton)
d) list of running processes
e) list of toplevel windows
f) a regular expression to match from editbox, combined with a fixed list of items
g) ... other possibilities


ok so

i might add a keyword called "*mp3"
which restricted the search directory to e:\My docs\Music
and gave high bonus score to *.mp3

or the keyword "email" which
used option f) to specify a regular expression to match "email (.*)" and then launch email client

or use keyword "*kill" which
with a 3) command the kills a running process.
used option d) to show a list of runing processes,
so when you type *kill scree.." it would be narrowing down the list of running processes to those that match "scree" and then when you select it it would KILL it.


or use keyword "cpanel" to work with option a) to show control panel applet list and launch on select.



opinions?

33158

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR version 2 - discuss the best way to handle 'actions'

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 01:16 PM »

yet another possibility:
use the menu solution BUT allow some special action keywords which if typed exactly could be used by experts.

like if you typed
*edit dylan

then it would really search for dylan (and not the *edit) string and when triggered it would use a special action edit instead of the default launch.

and user coul


actually this has some real strong appeal for one main reason,
it was basically the same approach we have suggested for handling the idea of search "modifiers", where you say that a certain keyword alters the search directories or scoring.

yes, this to me sounds like it may be the most satisfactory approach..

does everyone follow what i'm saying?

33159

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR version 2 - discuss the best way to handle 'actions'

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 01:13 PM »

here's another theoretical, consistent solution that would have the benefit of clarity and ease of use.

what if you ALWAYS got a second prompt.

so you type "et." and up come the results as nontroppo shows.
you hit enter or alt+1 or whatever you currently use in FARR to "launch" the app, but
in this new approach,
that doesnt trigger immedate launching.
instead it progresses you to stage 2, action selection mode,
where the textbox is cleared and you see the prompt
"With Ethereal.link do:"
and then your results list is now filled with actions, the first of which would always be "Launch"
so you could hit enter again to launch it, or do an incremental search on the actions list,
or use a number to choose a specific action..

we could also offer the ability to bypass this 2 stage mode depending on alt+ctrl key states..

yes it requires an extra keypress, and having a searchable action list is not trivial, but its at least comprehensible.

33160

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR version 2 - discuss the best way to handle 'actions'

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 01:08 PM »

have a menu that pops up (or slides out AFTER you select the item and hit a key) is not technically hard,
but i keep thinking of wanting to choose actions through a similar key-based menu (like with alias groups) or incremental search..

for example:

what if you when you hit alt+1 (or hit enter once or twice) it would launch result 1.
but if you hit ctrl+1 it displayed in the status bar like "With Ethereal.lnk do.." and then in the results list appeared all the actions appropriate for that file (launch, delete, zip, etc.). which you could then search within, etc.

i don't know, feels like of messy and confusing, but you see what i'm trying to get at, to bring the actions into the same search based system rather than a menu.

an action menu may still end up being the best way to go but it just seems not quite to fit with the method.

i cant help but think there is a wonderful user interface puzzle here that we might be able to solve somehow..

like here is a CONSISTENT solution that would work, but it would require some adjustment to thought process.

one solution might be like a special character saying you are specifying an action, like you would type

dylan *edit

that would basically search filenames for "dylan" and searching ACTIONS for "edit"
we'd still have to find a way to show the list of actions..

the thing is that 95% of the time people arent going to be using actions, so altering the display for this case seems troublesome.

33161

Living Room / a grid of cool animal flash games

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 12:43 PM »

found this from a link posted on allen's strange and cool chat script page.

http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/

tons of flash games on that page (check out this cool one: http://www.ferryhali...orisinal/g3/cats.htm)

33162

Find And Run Robot / Re: A unified FARR / Launcher Interface Proposal

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 12:34 PM »

i don't think as a rule i will be using this for configurations.  some people like tree configurations, i personall prefer the tabbed approach even though i know it can get confusing.

this is much more of a serious configuration for working with hundreds or thousands of nodes, letting user drag and drop and copy and paste, and create and delete nodes and drag in files from a file explorer, etc.

its just it can also be used as options configuration as well.

it is however, well suited to stuff like FARR list of alias groups, etc.

33163

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: anyone want aaai2000 proceedings book?

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 12:28 PM »

ok, it's yours then. topic closed.
email or send me a message through the forum with your mailing address please.

33164

Find And Run Robot / Re: A unified FARR / Launcher Interface Proposal

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 12:12 PM »

Do you have a screenshot?

this doesn't quite do it justice, but here's a teaser.  there are tons of different kinds of nodes (including virtual folders as requested above) that have different configuration panels.

basically the tree configuration can be used to generate launchbars and menus.

33165

Find And Run Robot / Re: A unified FARR / Launcher Interface Proposal

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 10:57 AM »

funny you should mention that but the entire new interface ive been working on for context menu commander and launch bar commander is all about tree based configuration, so we're on the same page.

33166

Find And Run Robot / Re: FARR version 2 - discuss the best way to handle 'actions'

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 10:51 AM »

ok now the trouble starts.


5) but suppose instead of opening the document you want to perform some other ACTION on a DOCUMENT.

this is where farr does not seem as easy to use.

now you basically search for the document, and then you have to select the result you care about and then trigger the right click context menu, which presents you with some common options, or select a submenu items to view the default system shell menu, where you can perform other operations.

it's not very efficicent or keyboard centric.


it is this case #5 that i think we are trying to find a useful solution to, in terms of presenting a gui interface.


it would be nice if we could figure out a solution that let you choose ACTIONS to perform on files in the same kind of keyboard centric incremental search system used to select files.

sort of like, first you select the file, then you could hit some special key and be shown a menu of actions like "open, delete, zip, etc." which you could then select using number keys, or search and refine by typing letters, etc.

it seems quicksilver supports something like this, and our mission is to find the perfect solution, which does not interfere with cases 1-4 above.




6) an alternate but similar approach might be when you know the ACTION first and then want to search with stuff that matches that operation.
for example nontroppo has talked about process management,
so maybe you want to be able to type:
"kill "
and then see a list of running processes which you could choose from and hit enter to kill.

in this case, the first word you type someone is detected as an ACTION which then presents a context sensitive list of results (here processes, but other times maybe the normal full file searching).


the problem is it's not always easy to resolve the inherent conflicts in these cases.

33167

Find And Run Robot / FARR version 2 - discuss the best way to handle 'actions'

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 10:41 AM »

the single most unresolved issue at the moment for me regarding farr (aka "Mercury Runner") is the best way to be more flexible about letting the user choose "actions", which is a request that has been made several times before.

let's look at the different things people want to be able to do:

1) find an application program on the start menu and launch it - the main intended function of farr, and still the dominent use and most important thing to do efficiently.

here we want speed and ease of launching, so we have incremental search based on program name, followed by a simple hitting of digit key, or alt+digit key corresponding to its number, or hitting enter once or twice if its at the top of the results.  or double clicking the result of our choice.


2) using alias groups
here we have a preset group of applications or documents that we want to treat like a named menu.
we type the name of the menu (or partial), and then again simply hitting of digit key, or alt+digit key corresponding to its number, or hitting enter once or twice if its at the top of the results.  or double clicking the result of our choice.


3) use a regular expression to specify a command with an argument
here the user types some string like "define subjunctive verb"
and the keyword "define" matches a regular expression which knows how to grab the "subjunctive verb" string and knows to present one or more actions associated with the keyword which the user can launch just as above cases #1 and #2, simply hitting of digit key, or alt+digit key corresponding to its number, or hitting enter once or twice if its at the top of the results.  or double clicking the result of our choice.


4)  suppose instead of launching a program you want to open a document.
this is also easy, you can search for a document by typing the name of the document; it is incrementally searched for just like any other file.
now you have a list of candidate matches in your result list.
if you want to do the default opening of the file, like a double click would do, you can, as in cases 1-3 above simply hitting of digit key, or alt+digit key corresponding to its number, or hitting enter once or twice if its at the top of the results.  or double clicking the result of our choice.

cases 5+ are next..

33168

Find And Run Robot / Re: Discussing major features to add to Find and Run Robot 2 continued..

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 10:34 AM »

i split off this thread to a different title since i think it's focusing more on features to add.
i'm also starting a new thread on the issue of Actions, post there to discuss that most difficult user interface issue.

33169

Find And Run Robot / Re: A unified FARR / Launcher Interface Proposal

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 10:29 AM »

i think we need to have a good conversation on the concept of "actions" and the various "workflow" cases, ie. what is the best way to do the different tasks.  but it really belongs in that other thread where we were discussing it before.  let's leave this thread for the launchbar merge idea.

33170

Find And Run Robot / Re: What's the correct abbreviation?

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 10:09 AM »

the real problem is illustrated by your point about the acronym.
the word "and" sounds nice in a program name when you say it but it's hell in print.
is it F+R robot, FARR, f&r, the list goes on.
even if we all agree on one, its still in all these different forms on the internet..

plus i think the term "robot" confuses people.

i am warming to the name "mercury runner" as a play off the speed of the god of mercury and the name quickseilver (competing product for the mac) and keeping the name "runner" in it...


ps. for the history buffs, the original name was:
"super happy find and run robot"

33171

Find And Run Robot / Re: A unified FARR / Launcher Interface Proposal

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 09:59 AM »

kfitting, this is sort of where the idea of merging the new application launchbar / context menu codebase with farr is getting interesting, because those kinds of features will be present in the launch bar, in addition to the submenu construction gui that nontroppo was mentioning.. so adding that technology to farr seems like a natural thing to do..
in fact, the launchbar configuration gui, which i have spent a couple weeks on and which i am EXTREMELY proud of, is fully working and seems to me might be well suited for the new farr configuration system which i have been dithering about.

it does mean you should prepare for a totally different configuration experience for farr2.  hopefully you'll agree it's a better one.

i mean in a sense if you look at the toolbar in farr now, its a launch bar already.  i mean that is already what we are talking about, it's just a tiny little one.  so this idea is really more of following that through and making the launchbar more robust, and also giving user the ability to dock it on the screen for permanent viewing if desired..

ok i like it, let's go for it.

we still have to figure out this issue with quicksilver style choosing of actions on files that im still unsure of how to handle best.

33172

Living Room / Re: Where's CarolHaynes?

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 07:55 AM »

i'd like to associate myself with those sentiments; very well said.

33173

Find And Run Robot / Re: A unified FARR / Launcher Interface Proposal

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 07:46 AM »

from irc channel i was telling  jgpaiva my response to seeing his avatar this morning:

i nearly spit out my tea when i saw it
actually i closed the browser
and then i had one of those double take moments
where i was like
wait a second...
what the f, did i just see what i think i saw... and had to repoen browser and there it was..

(in case anyone doesnt know what im talking about, that avatar is based on the lores icon used for find+run robot program

33174

Find And Run Robot / Re: A unified FARR / Launcher Interface Proposal

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 07:43 AM »

congratulations on your 100th post.  i wonder if we should have prizes of some sort..

what i mean about the regex is:
some alias groups are used to do things like open an email to a user, or search website for some string.

now if you put that on a menu, what exactly are you saying..
the closest thing you could do is maybe when they select that item it pops up an input box where they can type what string to use in that command.

33175

Find And Run Robot / Re: A unified FARR / Launcher Interface Proposal

« Last post by mouser on February 02, 2006, 06:31 AM »

holy cow this thread has turned amazing.

look at jpaiva's avatar, haahahahah!!!!
and that david lanham art is outstanding.

i really like the idea that the groups be displays as tool menus in that farr menubar - it seems to me that sometimes you want to locate by name, and sometimes you like to browse visually, so it's a nice idea.  not sure exactly how to handle the case of groups where there are regular expressions involved..