Recent Posts

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General Software Discussion / Re: Sophos no whiner

« Last post by Darwin on October 26, 2006, 10:17 PM »

SpySweeper has just relesed their latest version which now incorporates the Sophos engine as well so you get anti-virus and anti-spyware in one app. Anyone have any experience wtih Sophos? I'm running AVG 7.5 Pro and am happy with it - my subscription is still good for over a year but I can get a year of SpySweeper/Sophos for $10. Anyone have a strong opinion one way or the other?

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General Software Discussion / Re: Best Auto-complete Intelli-sense type utility ?

« Last post by Darwin on October 26, 2006, 06:30 PM »

Just to add to the above, DA opens Outlook in about 2 seconds - AW takes 7 seconds. Disappointing to have my "gut" feeling confirmed. I've invited the AW developers to participate here, so hope to be welcoming them soon as well!

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General Software Discussion / Re: Best Auto-complete Intelli-sense type utility ?

« Last post by Darwin on October 26, 2006, 04:14 PM »

PS Above using latest build of AW Plus (1.9) and latest build of DA (1.2, released today).

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General Software Discussion / Re: Best Auto-complete Intelli-sense type utility ?

« Last post by Darwin on October 26, 2006, 03:50 PM »

Interesting, I've been following up on my assertion that DA is quicker to load files and programs than AW. I've found that in opening my web browser, notepad, and Outlook overall that DA is indeed the quicker of the two.

They both open my webbrowser at about the same rate (3-4secs from the trigger being selected and the browser - Maxthon - opening) but DA opens metapad in a second or less whereas AW takes about 3.5 secs. I'll keep playing around and post back with more later, but take my boys to the pool for lessons.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox 2 hints and tips

« Last post by Darwin on October 25, 2006, 05:28 PM »

Yeah, reading and writing American English does tend to colour one's thinking. I hadn't realised that there were so many different perspectives on how words should be spelled. If I can ever get organised enough, perhaps I'll try to find an on-line dictionary that outlines the differences between American (and Canadian and Australian and New Zealand and South African) spellings and utilisation and British spellings and utilisation...

 

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General Software Discussion / Re: Best Auto-complete Intelli-sense type utility ?

« Last post by Darwin on October 25, 2006, 10:46 AM »

The other great thing is that maximizing the program by double clicking on the system tray icon or the Direct Access Hub and then closing it releases the memory - its usage drops to 3164K... Very nice.

Just to add - DA has now been rock solid at 6940K for about 10 minutes...

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General Software Discussion / Re: Best Auto-complete Intelli-sense type utility ?

« Last post by Darwin on October 25, 2006, 10:39 AM »

Wow! Andrea - you've tamed the beast! I've had DA running for about 20 minutes and have been working with it and Outlook, Excel, and Maxthon and it's footprint is very small (12,748K at the moment). I'll keep monitoring, but looking good right now!

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General Software Discussion / Re: Outlook 2003 - PST file corruption. Is it X1 ?

« Last post by Darwin on October 25, 2006, 10:02 AM »

Just to bump/add to this discussion. Over the last week or so, I've been having repeated warnings from Outlook about another programme that was accessing my pst closing unexpectedly and my pst being unavailable. I've disabled X1 and for the last two hours all has been well. My pst is at 218 MB, so I'm also going to try dirhael's advice and create a new pst  I cannot afford to lose any data!

At any rate, with real regret, I am leaning toward walking away from X1/YDS.

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General Software Discussion / Re: SCRIBUS - Open Source Desktop Publishing

« Last post by Darwin on October 25, 2006, 09:12 AM »

I heard back from the developers of RagTime today. Here's (an edited version of) what they had to say:

The terms of the license for RagTime Solo have...often been misinterpreted or consciously violated - and that’s why we have decided to discontinue RagTime Solo. There will be no private version of RagTime 6...

RagTime would like to thank all users of RagTime Solo for their years of loyalty and also thank them for their constructive and valuable support during the Beta test of RagTime 6. We will soon contact all _registered _RagTime Solo users with an attractive transitional offer for RagTime 6.

We will also be offering a lower-priced version for students at school and at university or college for the duration of their studies. At the other end of the range of applications we have created a site license with RagTime XL, which can be used in all workplaces within one single company.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Best Auto-complete Intelli-sense type utility ?

« Last post by Darwin on October 25, 2006, 09:08 AM »

Welcome Andrea! Sorry I haven't dropped you a private e-mail listing my observations about DirectAccess. Despite my "complaints" above, I love the look and feel of DA and its speed. As I've said above, it shows great promise and is very impressive or a piece of software that's only been in the wild for a few months. I wouldn't have purchased a license had I not been confident that the issues that I've seen will be addressed in future builds. I'll take a look at the unofficial version.

To address your question: "I read Darwin wrote "Thus, if you type the command incorrectly, you won't see that dialogue popup...". What do you mean? What behaviour would you expect?". Essentially, on this thread] a couple of comments were made to the effect that AW does not offer a warning to indicate that a command hasn't been entered correctly. I was pointing out that via the confirmation tooltip (my "dialogue pop-up") in both AW and DA NOT appearing, the user is alerted to the fact that they haven't entered the command correctly.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Software Frustrations

« Last post by Darwin on October 24, 2006, 06:40 PM »

OMG! Shitware has to be the best laugh I've had in ages! Some of our most distinguished posters here post over there, too. No holds barred, potty talk. Love it. Zaine, I had no idea such imagery was possible - I'll never be able to read a techie review of a Macintosh product in quite the same way again...  tsaint and nudone also put in cameos. Shitware is the donationcoder forums UNRATED and UNCUT.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Best Auto-complete Intelli-sense type utility ?

« Last post by Darwin on October 24, 2006, 06:31 PM »

Most of my usage of AW is as a spellchecker/auto-corrector. Though I do still use it as a launcher -  probably only 25% of what I launch I do via AW, though. This is because most of the time I've already clicked with the mouse to get where I want. I use AW to launch apps most when I am typing a document and want to open up a different app. Provided I've assigned an AW to it (and can remember it), I find it quite convenient to use an active word to launch it.

I find the spellchecker very good, though it can be annoying e.g. I type e-mail and web addresses with both bc and ca (www.nic.bc.ca) in them and bc becomes B.C. and ca CA. There is a workaround, of course, the "nap" command, which is very handy - and how I managed to type the web address above "correctly". While I find things like that annoying I find that when I don't have AW running, such as when I'm playing with DA instead, I really, really miss the auto-correction.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Best Auto-complete Intelli-sense type utility ?

« Last post by Darwin on October 24, 2006, 06:01 PM »

PS I am running DA again and AFAICT, there is no autocomplete and no indicator that you've entered a command incorrectly. Like AW, however, when you type a command it pops up a dialogue box requesting that you confirm the command by typing the trigger. If you type something else, the dialogue just disappears. Thus, if you type the command incorrectly, you won't see that dialogue popup... Note, too, that both AW and DA will play a sound when a command is recognised.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Best Auto-complete Intelli-sense type utility ?

« Last post by Darwin on October 24, 2006, 05:48 PM »

DirectAccess has promise. I'd like to see greater configurability of the trigger and it's resource usage tamed a bit (it's not that bad, but is about 10-15% greater than AW). Where AW has a number of exe's running on my machine, DA fields only one, but it hovers in the 50MB or RAM range constantly, whereas AW is somewhat lower (at the moment it's using 37588K of RAM spread over four exes). To be fair, I've just closed AW and opened DA. All I've done is open it and close the main window, which appears at startup and I that it started at 46000K of RAM and change and has risen to 50,004K where it seems stable, for now. It's much prettier than AW and launches files and exes much more quickly. I've no experience using either for boilerplate text insertion because I don't use that feature. DA is not as well behaved when it comes to triggering it - AW recognises the word that you type and, if you provide the trigger, opens whatever you specified and deletes the word that you used to trigger the action. In DA this works right up to deleting the word at which point DA for some reason does not always delete the word, sometimes it deletes the whole thing, sometimes not at all and at other times (as just happened here) all but the first letter. This is kind of annoying when you're typing a letter and decide to laucnh something else. Another issue has arisen as I've written this: I had DA set to trigger when I hit the spacebar (just as I have it setup in AW - though I hit spacebar twice to trigger in AW) and note that I have three instances of word open! [I've also had to come back in here and retype word in three times]. THis is what I was getting at about making triggering a word more configurable. For now, I've switched from spacebar to enter as my trigger. Note that the result of triggering word three times is that memory usage has crept up to 55,596K...

A final note about memory usage is that when I am runnning AW my OVERALL memory consumption seems much lower than when I am running DA - out of proportion to the memory consumed by DA itself. Weird. The difference in overall memory consumption is 50-60 MB. Of course the AW total was before Word had been opened three times, so this may not be fair at all. However, this has been my impression each time that I've done this comparison. Total memory free right now (according to Maxthon's counter in the information bar at the bottom of my screen) is 254MB with DA running. I'm closing DA and launching AW right now... The total in the information bar is 301MB. After launching word three times via AW: 239MB with all instances of word running and 311 MB after I've closed them all. I realise that I'm obsessing about memory consumption and that these figures probably mean less than I'm trying to read into them, but still...

Overall, DA seems to have the speed and aesthetic advantage but AW has an advantage in overall feature set and resource usage.

Oh - just took a look at the link you posted and like your points in that discussion. I haven't had any trouble with typing incorrect active words - I have the monitor bar set to dock at the top of my screen but to autohide. Whenever I type and activeword, I get a drop down text balloon that says first ActiveWord Recognized and if I hit my trigger it changes to ActiveWord Processing. Thus, if I don't see this, I know that I've entered my ActiveWord incorrectly. Your list of suggestions, such as drag-and-drop to create AW, is great - all great ideas that would extend it, in my opinion.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Best Auto-complete Intelli-sense type utility ?

« Last post by Darwin on October 24, 2006, 04:09 PM »

PhraseExpress looks interesting. Fair comments about AW. I wax and wane on the issue of its speed - at the moment I am quite pleased with it. It's not that it runs faster or slower at times, it's my perception that changes... As for the developers not issuing updates - there have been three since I bought it - two this year with the most recent being about a week ago. Granted, these are not point releases but the programme is being worked on.

Funny, I read the article you linked to over the summer and have actually had the same experience, though I returned to the fold. I had to uninstall AW at one point because of a conflict with another app that I was trialing. In the end, I left it off my machine for about six months. I survived without it but when I got around to installing it again it was like welcoming an old friend. I get the author's "big picture" point about activation but don't really see that it's an issue with AW. Anyway, in my usage it's well behaved - doesn't hog resources - and does what it's been advertised to do. I've never had a crash with it and it hasn't failed me. My biggest complaint would be that it opens quite slowly when set to start at system startup (but inexplicably opens quickly when opened on its own after the system has started). This seems to be a sporadic issue based on my perusal of the forums.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Utility to search XP registry using keywords?

« Last post by Darwin on October 24, 2006, 03:48 PM »

Resplendence Registry Manager has also just been updated to verson 5.

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The Getting Organized Experiment of 2006 / Re: The Power of Personal Organization: A Great GOE Example

« Last post by Darwin on October 24, 2006, 12:46 PM »

I completely agree with you, Lilly. However, I know people that brush their teeth right after getting out of bed and relieving themselves. Most of them brush their teeth after breakfast as well, though...

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General Software Discussion / Re: Best Auto-complete Intelli-sense type utility ?

« Last post by Darwin on October 24, 2006, 11:55 AM »

ActiveWords is one you should definitely have a look at.

I have this and DirectAccess (i.e. licenses for both) but use AW. DA looks promising and I decided to support development by buying a license. AW is much more feature rich and IMNSHO easier to use, but it's GUI is definitely mired in Win 9x. [added in edit]: DA is the new kid on the block, having been released this summer, while AW has been around for quite a while - five years or more.

Anyway, both DA and AW insert boilerplate text but only AW features auto-complete in ANY app/dialogue box. AW also features universal spell checking while DA does not. AW is $49.95 and I have no idea what the upgrade policy is - there have been bug-fix releases since I purchased in 2004 but no point releases and certainly no major upgrades! It works so well, though, that I am not complaining... [added in edit]: Just to clarify, while there have been no updates, AW is fully supported, has an active community forum (in which the developers are frequent posters) and there is a roadmap for future versions.

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Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: MetaProducts TrayIcon Pro 1.7.219

« Last post by Darwin on October 23, 2006, 11:47 PM »

Agreed - I do need to upgrade. Would you please, please stress to my wife how important this is?! I can dream... Actually, I am hoping that work will buy me a new notebook, effectively allowing me to do an end run around my financial mana er, wife 

About ObjectDock Plus - on my machine it uses between 800kb and 3 MB of RAM and negligible CPU depending on whether or not I have one dock or two open. The last time I installed it, I just used the default docks from which I removed the weather widgets (have never gotten them to work for Canadian ciites) and added a few shortcuts and it ran in this configuration at under 2 MB. Not bad when you consider that in this configuration it is duplicating my system tray, my taskbar and my start menu plus providing me with a bunch of other functionality, such as a calendar. In the case of the taskbar, it is actually triplicating it because the taskbar is on both the main dock and the tabbed docks by default (can't figure out why that is set up like that by default, but there it is). Anyway, to my way of thinking this is an acceptable resource "hit". Like vegas, though, I just don't have a use for it and I uninstalled it earlier today. I *think* I'd use it a lot if I wasn't so hooked on TrueLaunchBar - which I bought using a donationcoder discount AFTER I had purchased ObjectDock Plus.

Anyway, rather than buy a new computer, I just install ObjectDesktop every six months or so and play around with the GUI. That way I effectively get the geewhiz, neato effect of a new computer for nothing (well, for the $45 or so that ObjectDesktop and ObjectDock Plus cost me a year ago). I find that this effect wears off after about a week, at which point I uninstall everything and revert to Windows Classic (themes service disabled) and I am as happy as a bug in a rug! Your review of TrayIcon Pro just happened to come at the end of one such week, so I had everything installed this morning and was able to check into ObjectDock's resource usage.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Two New Internet Explorer 7 Reviews

« Last post by Darwin on October 22, 2006, 03:40 PM »

I'm with you on the Roboform issue, Josh. It's a deal breaker for me with Opera. I have Opera installed but rarely use it because I am that dependent on Roboform...

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General Software Discussion / Re: Two New Internet Explorer 7 Reviews

« Last post by Darwin on October 22, 2006, 10:29 AM »

Hi Renegade (how's Seoul treating you?),

It's a bit more drastic (or perhaps less, depending on your viewpoint), but you could install Maxthon , which comes with mouse gestures built-in and they work brilliantly. The developer is working on Maxthon 2.0, which promises to be a big step forward, but the latest build is very solid and very capable.

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Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: MetaProducts TrayIcon Pro

« Last post by Darwin on October 22, 2006, 10:22 AM »

Welcome, Whitelion. I tend to agree with you on almost every point in your review (though it would be nice if you provided a link to TrayIconPro ). I've tried all of the docks that I've been able to get my mits on, and even purchased ObjectDock Pro (to get the tabbed docks), and agree with you that they are nice in principle but really don't deliver in practice. Having said that, my experience with ObjectDock has been that its feature set blows everything else away and its resource usage is minimal. In fact, Stardock's apps in general seem to be very well behaved. The only time I run into trouble with them is when I have many different Stardock apps running, then I run into the limitations of my integrated graphics (Centrino notebook). I digress...

I don't have ObjectDock running (though I did reinstall it to see if I could fall in love with it, but that's not happening...). The app that I settled on to provide the functionality that TrayIcon Pro offers, is TrueLaunchBar . I'm also anxiously awaiting a functional beta of VistaStartMenu 2 , which is supposed to be released imminently.

Overall, I run a tight ship - minimal icons on my desktop and a very organised start menu. I use TrueLaunchBar to access folders in My Documents and to create specialised folders from which to launch programs. Both of these features are possible from the Start menu but the way in which XP's start menu (using either the default or the win9x/2k layout) functions doesn't "work" for me... I'm not clear how, or if I'd use VistaStartMenu, but I like the developer's ideas and will try it out when a functioning version is released.

I'm also monitoring development of Mouser's LaunchBar Commander - it looks very promising, though I am in the camp that feels that it might be profitable to merge it with Find and Run Robot...

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General Software Discussion / Re: Multi-Document AND Multi-View Text Editor?

« Last post by Darwin on October 22, 2006, 10:02 AM »

Hi tim254 - I agree, the screenshot you linked to of Notepad++ looks amazing. I wish uedit had this feature, though I can drag and drop text from one file into another with their tiling method, I am unable to display the same document, or set of documents, side by side. Very nice, I'm tempted to give it a go!

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General Software Discussion / Re: Multi-Document AND Multi-View Text Editor?

« Last post by Darwin on October 21, 2006, 07:21 PM »

Sort of... just confirmed with my install of uedit 12 that this is possible:



And a number of tabs opened (as Oshyan points out, this is done via tiling the displays):

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General Software Discussion / Re: Internet Explorer 7.0 Final is out

« Last post by Darwin on October 20, 2006, 09:12 AM »

tsaint - I'm having the same problem with Maxthon. Another IE7 specific issue (that affects Maxthon as well) is that some webpages render wrong - the margins get cut off. Actually, I've noticed this on one website in particular - it's a Canadian newspaper ( here's an example) - if you visit the comments section for any story the right hand margin is cut off so that you can just see the right most edge of the number of the comment. You can't, however, make out what the number is! Zooming the view in or out doesn't help, either. Firefox renders these same pages perfectly, as did IE6. Note, though, that I can't get Firefox to render Outlook webmail properly either, so in my case I defninitely need two browsers installed (our e-mail accounts for work are ONLY accessible with an e-mail client when accessed from the work domain and then only as IMAP).