Mason McCuskey » Software

The Must Install Freeware Short List

mason — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 18:26:13 +0000

I got a new toy! It’s a netbook, an MSI Wind U100 specifically bought for its dual-boot capabilities. I’ve got it booting the 2 OSes I use, (as well as the Windows 7 beta, but that’s a whole nother post), but setting up all the partitions was a pain, and I ended up having to install Windows a few times.

So I got really good at installing software, and it also helped me separate the software wheat from the software chaff. Here’s the shortlist, the free software I find useful enough to immediately install on a fresh OS:

AVG – always the first install.
Firefox and Thunderbird – my Internet Explorer history will only ever contain one entry – getfirefox.com.
DropBox – my wife and I share a dropbox because hamachi’s mac support is woefully lacking.
CDBurnerXP – tiny and handy for when I have to plug in a USB burner…
Deamon Tools – … but most of the time I just mount an ISO on the network.
Hamachi – so I can get secure access to the contents of my PC anywhere.
Evernote – this has gradually overtaken Onenote for my personal datastore.
TweakUI Powertoy – mostly for its autologon feature. The cleartype tuner on that same page is also handy.
Digsby – facebook chat aside, the feature this has over trillian is that your settings are stored online, so you don’t have to reconfigure anything, just install, login, and you’re done.
DOSBox – cause Impulse Tracker won’t run directly under Windows, but runs under here using an emulated gravis just great.
FoxIt Reader – this is the PDF reader that acrobat should be. I think the guys who made Acrobat and the guys who made Vista search should get together and build something that doesn’t matter.
Launchy – great little app for launching programs via keyboard.
Songbird – I hope they put in iPhone sync soon. Death to iTunes!
VNC – another tiny tool that lets me remote desktop in (over hamachi!)
VLC – the best movie player out there, if you’re cool with your movie files having traffic cone icons.

And no, I didn’t forget about chrome. The abridged chrome rant: a) no plugin support, b) UI sucks (we’ve had minimal UI for years now, hit F11), and c) why suckerpunch mozilla?

Google chrome is like the Ralph Nader of browsers. Ha, well, that’s a far cry from where this post started, so I’m taking that as a sign I should stop. :)

Great Moments in UI Design

mason — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:53:22 +0000

Train the peepers on this little gem, courtesy of Outlook 2007:

Check out the Send/Receive option. Initially this caught my eye because it’s the one option that isn’t checked, and I am very aware that yes, I actually do have a send/receive button. My first thought was, “Huh, OK, so a checkmark bug?” Nope, notice immediately below it, the exact same send/receive item, CHECKED, and disabled. But the home run is that if you check the one you can check, you end up with 2 identical send/receive buttons on your toolbar. You can hide every other button, but you can have either 1 or 2 Send/Receives. Wacky! Maybe this is the fault of some add-in? If so, fair enough, but otherwise, come on!

I was crestfallen to see the same crap UI when I fired up Outlook 2007 for the first time. I’ve been using Word’s new ribbon bar (the official name of its “super toolbar”), and I like it, and couldn’t wait to see what they’d done to Outlook, the app that needed the most ribbon bar love. Not much. The ribbon bar is on other windows, but the overhaul of Outlook’s main view that I was hoping for still stands as long overdue.

Also on this same subject, I don’t like how new apps hide the pull down menus completely until you press Alt+F. Windows Media Player did this, but the annoyance was lost in the noise, in that app. But since, I’ve seen it in Live Messenger, and a couple other applications. Why make the menu bar secret? Everyone, and I mean literally “everyone,” as in, most of the people on this PLANET, are now familiar with the concept of a menu at the top of your (app,screen) that you use to access features.

Supposing you buy the argument that we need to replace menu bars because they’re a crap UI construct (and maybe they are, I don’t agree but I see the validity of that argument – hunting for options through them is difficult), there’s still the issue of why, then, the menu bar is there at all. If the menu bar sucks, take it out entirely, and don’t regress – let me do everything I could do with it via some other UI. But it’s incorrect to hide the bar when it contains functionality you can’t get anywhere else.

Maybe you want to phase it out? Fine, but then in that case – it should be a preference: “Use New UI” vs. “Use Classic UI” or something. And again, there should be feature parity between both options.

The “secret” menu bar just teaches people to press Alt+F if they’re stuck.

Content!

mason — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:04:36 +0000

I got to thinking today about how in the late 90s I wrote a lot of stuff online. Back when Y2K was still selling bomb shelters, I had a pretty regular stream of writing going – most notably at gamedev.net, but in the 7 or 8 years since, it’s kind of fallen by the wayside. But, I decided today that letting that happen was a sad thing, and have thus resolved myself towards more active participation in this here “Internet Thing.”

I will christen this re-emergence by giving a shout out to some of my favorite OTHER blogs (in no particular order):

Pharyngula – science goodness with a dash of cephalopod
Coding Horror – obligatory reading for programmers
Joel on Software – again, obligatory
And finally, the gawkers: LifeHacker,Giz, Consumerist, and Kotaku.

Save this IP! More episodes of C# on Two Beers, more chords, more articles, and more awesomeness in general all coming soon.

The International Conspiracy

mason — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 05:38:56 +0000

I’m working with some friends to make a game for dream/build/play, and we’ve decided to keep a blog about our experiences this year. So, if XNA’s your thing, and you want to watch the spectacle that is our group, The International Conspiracy, head on over to http://internationalconspiracy.wordpress.com to catch the action as it unfolds.

C# on Two Beers, Session 1: MonitorSwitcher

mason — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 09:37:02 +0000

Tonight I decided to combine two things I greatly enjoy: Sam Adams Boston Lager and building tiny applications, in a personal experiment to see if my Ballmer’s Peak was different in C# than in C++.

I have this projector in my living room hooked up to my PC in my closet through a wicked long HDMI cable. Watching shows off the PC like this rocks, but all the clicking I have to do to set it up doesn’t. Set the display mode to 1280×720, disable the screensaver, and make sure my power management settings don’t turn off my monitor. Then when I’m done watching I have to put everything back. Blah.

Tonight I spent a couple hours writing a C# app that does this for me. It runs in the systray. When I press Windows+~, it toggles between “projector mode” (1280×720, no screensaver, no monitor powerdown), and “monitor mode” (1600×1200, screensaver and monitor powerdown enabled). I can also right click it and force it into one mode or the other.

Here’s the code.

There’s all sorts of wackiness at play in this little app. For starters, there’s the method by which I toggle between 1600×1200 and 1280×720.

I have an nVidia card with 2 DVI outs; one goes to my monitor, one to the projector. To windows they appear as two monitors, which I’ve set up in “Clone” mode. The nVidia drivers are smart; they remember the last resolution used for a given primary display. So, I made my LCD panel the primary display and set its resolution to 1600×1200. I hit Apply, then went back and made the projector the primary, and set its resolution to 1280×720. Now simply swapping the primary display also switches the resolution. Cool. As it turns out this is the only viable way to do it, because you can’t switch your primary to a resolution it doesn’t support, and my LCD doesn’t support my projector’s native 720p.

Next step: automating this swap. At first I thought I’d have to fake a right click on the little green nVidia icon in the systray, which is, at best, a real pain in the ass to do in code, and at worst, impossible. Glory be! Some internet searching revealed a command line interface, where you list off the connections in order, primary first.

So to make the first DVI connection (aka (D)igital connection “A”) the primary device:

Rundll32 nvcpl.dll,dtcfg setview 0 clone DA DB

To make the second DVI connection, aka (D)igital connection B, the primary:

Rundll32 nvcpl.dll,dtcfg setview 0 clone DB DA

There are other options outlined in this post. AA is analog connection A, etc.

OK cool. Beer one and problem one down, onto the second element of wackiness: disabling the screensaver and monitor poweroff. I thought in C# this would be a no-brainer: some properties somewhere that you make false, but it’s not. The only way I found to do it was through crap P/Invoke and overriding your WinProc. Oh well, maybe it’s easier in .NET 3.0. For now it’s just a lot of googling for function signatures and WM_xxx ID numbers.

Registering a global hotkey is easy; for this particular app the one snag was that Windows associates a hotkey with a window handle, so if you are doing things that will invalidate the Handle on the form you registered the hotkey from – things like hiding/showing the form (d’oh!) – then you have to re-register the hotkey.

The rest of the code is decipherable even after two beers. Doing sysTray apps in C# is a joy compared to C++. As is launching processes and waiting for them to finish. After that it was all sizzle (form fading out, and the most important part, the about box!)

I hope it’s useful!

Here’s the executable.

No install program, no warranties, a license to do anything with it – just drop it wherever, and make a shortcut to it inside your Startup folder. Icon by Copland.