Thinking in Visuals

Blogger arrives on Android

2011-02-04T01:51:00.001+05:30

Mobile blogging

2011-01-14T15:11:00.001+05:30

Trying out blogaway from android.

Taskbar Magic

2010-08-27T20:30:00.001+05:30

Windows 7 introduced “Superbar” which is like a Taskbar on steroids. What strikes you immediately is that Taskbar buttons are the right size for touch operations, which of course is built into Windows 7. However, there are many cool features like Jumplists, Aero Peek, Combining of Taskbar buttons and desktop peek. I am sure if you are using Windows 7, you must have discovered this by now so I am not going to talk about it. I am going to talk about certain apps which are taking advantage of the new Taskbar capabilities. In TechED 2010 I presented a session on WindowsAPICodePack and how to program the Taskbar button using C++/COM or .NET code but don't worry, I am not going to show programming code here . We are beginning to see new apps using the Taskbar very innovatively. Lets look at some of these applications.

Taskbar Meters

Traditionally we have had applications which show us system information in system tray (Task Manager) and Desktop (Sidebar) but this cool little utility called Taskbar Meters put it right on the Taskbar. It actually uses a feature meant for showing progress bar on the Taskbar button. You must have seen this in Windows 7 when you run Setup, the progress is indicated on the Taskbar itself so that you can minimize the window and yet keep getting visual feedback of the progress. Well, this utility sets the progress value to current CPU, RAM and Disk utilization. Real Neat.

Here is a screenshot of all 3 meters

If it takes too much space on your Taskbar, use Combine option to make them more like thumbnails or run only the one you want to keep an eye on (e.g. CPU).

Gmail Notifier Plus

Gmail Notifier Plus is another cool application which act as a notifier from the Taskbar itself. As shown in the image, the Taskbar button shows the Gmail icon with unread count and right click bring up the “JumpList”. It makes very innovative use of JumpList by providing a set of user actions like “Compose mail”, “Go to your inbox”, “Check for new mail” and “Change settings”. But along with it, it also provides a list of unread mail in the Jumplist itself. The pin feature doesn't work so you cannot Pin a mail to the list and I don't know if it will make sense to pin a mail to jumplist.

When you install this app, it starts off with a configuration window which allows you to add multiple Gmail IDs (including Google App domains id). It uses a pull mechanism instead of push, so you have to specify the frequency for checking for new mails. The interface is simple and clean.

But what takes the cake is the Aero Peek feature of this app. The preview window displays first few lines of your mail with an icon to open the mail in your default browser to read. and also provide back and next button to view your unread mail.

All in all its a cool utility if you use Gmail.

Taskbar Stacks

Mac OSX introduced a concept of stack on its dock which is like a “spring up” list of apps, recently opened doc etc. Windows developers were not far behind in implementing this feature on Windows 7. There are 2 stacks which provide similar functionality – 7Stacks and Standalone Stack.

While both are equally good, I found the UI of 7stacks a bit more pleasing.

7Stacks

Windows 7 allows you to pin programs on your Taskbar thereby merging erstwhile Quicklaunch features into Taskbar. However, if you use a lot of applications, your Taskbar can fill up very quickly with these pinned programs. I regularly use different browsers to test web sites and therefore have at least 6 browsers in my list. If I pin all of them (apart from MS office apps), my Taskbar will be half full (or half empty). 7Stacks allows me to take any folder and convert it into a popup stack (as shown in the image), there by occupying only one button space on the Taskbar but allowing me to quickly access a group of applications with 2-clicks. Once launched, these apps behave normally and appear on the Taskbar.

When you install 7stacks, it creates a desktop shortcut for creating a stack. All you need is a folder which will be made into a pop up stack and icon to represent the stack on the Taskbar.

As you can see in the image above, you can select virtually any folder and convert it into a stack. It gives you a quick access button SF for Standard Folders like My Documents, My Videos but also like Control Panel, Start Menu, Program Files etc. Once you choose a folder, specify an icon to represent it, choose the stack style (Vertical, Grid or Menu).

Once you click on “Create Shortcut on Desktop”, it will generate you stack shortcut, simply drag and drop it on the Taskbar and you are done.

The above image shows a stack in Grid layout with an option to explore the folder in regular Windows Explorer.

Check out Standalone Stack and decide which of these two (or both) you want to use.

Conclusions

Taskbar has some great features and while applications like these are making innovative use of those features, we are likely to see many more developers take advantage of Taskbar in future.

Have you come across such utilities which make innovative use of Taskbar? I would love to know about it, so drop me a comment.

Happy Tasking

Why haven’t I used IE in months?

2010-08-26T19:55:00.001+05:30

I think I was conducting a training on “Windows programming using C” in a company called VeriFone Bangalore when I first saw Internet Explorer. Like Netscape, it had a logo on top right which would rotate as the page was loading. I was fascinated with the UI and thrilled that I could look up information so easily and quickly. On the other hand there was Netscape, a powerful browser which was the de-facto standard. I think Netscape was $50 while Microsoft started giving away its browser free with the operating system which led to a massive law suit and Browser wars. The browser war was good in a way because it made both companies bring host of innovation and rapid changes eventually helping the customers. Its another thing that Netscape lost the war and IE became the de-facto standard on the web. I was siding with IE thru the war as I found it to be a better browser than Netscape.

Phoenix rises from the ashes of Netscape

As Netscape lost the battle and made the source code open, the code base gave rise to another project called Phoenix (rising from the ashes of Netscape). Phoenix was however already a registered name so the team tried to rename it to Firebird, which too turned out to be registered so they finally called it Firefox. I have been using Firefox since Phoenix days but did not pay too much attention as it could not match the capabilities and features of IE. But I did keep an eye on the browser as it matured. Then one day it happened… I discovered add-ons and extension which allowed me to customize, configure and personalize the browser the way I wanted. Also, the new JS engine made its way into Firefox, speeding it way beyond IE performance.

Missing IE?

When people don’t like or use a software, they tend to remove or uninstall it. However, IE is one software which remains on every Windows installation that it there. Why? Because you never know when you will need it. There are hundreds of site which work with IE but not Firefox. This may not be intentional but due to the fact that IE did not enforce strict adherence to HTML and web standard while Firefox always did. So a missing closing tag would still render in IE whereas it would refuse to show up in Firefox. Imagine you test your web site in IE and a day before you go live, out of curiosity you open in it Firefox and you are horrified as the page is a mess. Can’t imagine? Ask Chandrasekhar “Netscape” Vyas who earned this moniker precisely for this reason

Stop switching between FF and IE

If you use Firefox regularly but have to switch to IE because of certain sites, now you can get IE Tab Plus. What this Firefox add-on does is it loads IE in one of the tabs in Firefox. I am not talking about emulating IE, I am talking about loading the IE engine in the tab so that you can open all those IE specific sites in Firefox without having to even launch IE. Go ahead and download IE Tab Plus from Firefox Add-ons site and lets roll.

Once you install IE Tab Plus, you will see and icon in the system tray. This icon toggles between FF and IE.

Lets get to work

The number of sites which work only with IE is reducing fast but there are still some sites which either refuse to work with anything other than IE or don't work well with non IE browser. Lets take a look at such sample site.

This site flatly refuses to work with Firefox. It clearly says “Sorry, this site requires Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or later.” Now lets switch the site to IE by clicking the FF icon in status bar.

There are variety of ways in which you can switch the engine from Firefox to IE. The easiest way is to click in icon. Another way is to right click the page which brings up Firefox context menu which allows you to switch rendering engine. If you right click on the icon, it brings up a menu (as shown in the image). You can take a call if you want to switch the engine in the same tab or launch the page in IE.

Here is a screenshot of the same site, still running in Firefox but being rendered using IE engine. As this is not simulated (browser-agent switching), you get real experience of IE. As you can see in the screenshot, if you right click on the page, you get IE context menu and not FF. To switch back, simply click on the icon back. If you require full IE interface, you are welcome to use “View Link in Internet Explorer” which will launch IE and not use FF tab.

Configuration

You can configure IE Tab Plus to share cookies with FF or even allow AdBlock Plus. You can also decide in-tab switching or opening a new tab. It also allows a site filter where you can specify sites which will always open in IE (at one point of time windowsupdate was the most gruelling IE-only site).

Conclusion

So now you know why I haven't used IE in months

Happy switching

Growl for Windows

2010-08-25T18:28:00.001+05:30

Every OSX user eventually comes across Growl as either it gets downloaded along with some app or stumbles upon documentation which talks about Growl. In fact, some OSX users tend to believe that it ships with OSX itself. I have been using Growl since my MacMini days and when I got my 17” MacBook Pro, it was one of the first apps that I downloaded on my OSX partition.

What is Growl?

In very simple terms, Growl is centralized notification system which receives notifications from apps and displays them in a consistent, configurable manner so that every app does not have to build its own notification mechanism. You can use Growl to decide which notifications to show, how to show them and what action to take if the user interact with these notifications.

Growl for Windows

I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Growl for Windows which neatly mimics the functionality and features of Growl for Mac. While OS X version has support of many applications, Windows apps do not come with built-in support for Growl yet.

Apps and Displays

Most applications build their own notification systems from scratch. Think of Live Messenger popup toaster, Outlook’s new mail alert, System alert for low battery and so on. Then there are web based apps like Gmail, Facebook etc. which have their own notifications which are either delivered when you go online on the site or via email. Some may even have custom built alert apps just to notify you. Growl can unify all these and provide a consistent user experience.

Apps can be applications which have built in support for Growl or a helper app in from of a plugin, extension or add-on which detects changes and relays the notification to Growl. The list of such apps is increasing steadily and cover a range from web based apps like Gmail, Twitter, Facebook to desktop apps like Outlook, Skype, Visual Studio to even hardware automation like ECS & ZWave automation systems.

Displays are notification UI and notification styles which can be configured and customized. Display is a misnomer because apart from the typical notification toaster window and sound, you can even configure it to send SMS, email, post to twitter account or run an application.

Forwarding and Subscriptions

Imagine that you are an administrator managing a dozen of systems in an office. Instead of checking and verifying every system periodically for regular maintenance issue, you install Growl on each one of them and forward their notifications to your administrative system. So if someone has low disk issue, you can remotely run disk cleaner.

In addition to forwarding, you can subscribe to notification from other system including web site to be informed of events occurring on those systems.

Phones, SMS and Email

Growl supports forwarding notifications to iPhone thru plugins in Prowl, Howl and you can also forward notifications to an email which makes it ideal for being able to keep track of events while on the move. If you can also send notifications to your system thru email and other means, coupled with triggers, you can launch commands and control your system remotely.

Conclusion

Growl is a nice move in the direction of unifying notifications on Windows on the lines of Growl of Mac and we should soon see a lot more native support built into applications in future. Meanwhile try and get a helper application for the popular applications and website and enjoy!

Happy Growling

UI Candy or Visual Feedback?

2010-08-23T20:53:00.001+05:30

I am a software junkie and try out lots and lots of software and utilities to see what works for me. It gives me a chance to discover new software which help make my life easy. I alternate between multiple browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari. My main browser currently is Firefox while I use IE and Chrome for testing my blog and ASP.NET apps I tinker with. One feature that I really liked about Safari is that its progress bar which is displayed as part of the address bar itself.

Visual Feedback

Wait, its not a UI candy thing but a very sensible feature. When we type a URL, our eyes are looking at the AddressBar and after hitting ENTER they do not automatically shift to the status bar to see the progress bar. In fact, they continue to gaze at the AddressBar and waiting for the page to load. So what Safari has done is put the feedback about the progress right in front of our eyes.

Here is a screenshot of Safari loading a page with visual indication of the progress.

Fission

Meet Fission, a Firefox add-on which not only mimics Safari in displaying progress bar inside AddressBar but goes one step further showing “Connection Status” of Waiting, Connecting, Transferring too.

Check out the image above (click on it to enlarge if you like) and you can see that a yellow bar is indicating overall progress while on the right side of the AddressBar shows the current stage of “Connected”.

Needless to say, you can configure the colour of the progress bar and decide if you want to see connection status on the right side of the AddressBar or not.

The last option is interesting one too… When you move the mouse over links in a page, it does not obstruct your view by popping up the link url as a tooltip, rather, quietly changes the URL in the AddressBar temporarily.

Conclusion

Sometimes, User Experience is not about nice images and smooth fonts but about understand how users interact and providing visual feedback in the most natural way like Fission does.

Happy Browsing

Don’t read it now, ReadItLater

2010-08-22T19:30:00.001+05:30

Information Overload

Have you noticed that the pace of life is increasing and we are always short of time? Our commutes are getting longer and information overload doesn't help either. Look at the sources of information we have in todays time – Newspaper, Television, Telephones, Car-radio, Messenger, Facebook, LinkedIn, Email, RSS Feeds, Stumble Upon and the list goes on. Wait, add my neighbour who is like BBC broadcast about the going-ons in my building.

Unutilized time

Imagine this scenario, you are getting ready to leave for work in the morning and checking your mail while sipping tea and you notice a great article someone sent you in mail. You want to read it but don’t have the time, so you keep the mail in the inbox and rush out to catch your bus and train. You are going to spend next 30-90 mins commuting but you aren't reading what you wanted to.

Better utilize you time

Now re-imagine the same scenario differently.. you open the mail, notice the link which is of interest. When it opens in your web browser, you simply click “Read it later” and it syncs the article to your iPhone, Blackberry, Android, PalmPre, WinMo etc. Once you are in your bus, you take out your phone and start reading the article you saved. You don't even have to be online on GPRS if the Wi-Fi sync at home transferred the entire article on your phone. After reading, the article is automatically marked “Read”. When you reach office, you start your browser and the browser shows you a list of articles still not read.

ReadItLater

ReadItLater is an add-on available for Firefox and other browsers (IE, Chrome, Safari) and also supported on SmartPhones (iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, Nokia N60). Once you install ReadItLater and create a free account, login from your browser. It adds an icon to your Toolbar and AddressBar. If you come across an article that you would like to read but don't have time at that moment, just click the icon in the AddressBar and it will sync the entire page into your reading list. This list can then be synchronized to your phone and even other browsers. If you turn of offline viewing, it can download web view or text view and keep it locally so that you can use it while using laptop in flight or on phone while travelling on a bus/train.

Reading It Later

Having marked all your articles, you can click on the ReadItLater button anytime to pop up a list of articles, choose one and it opens it in a tab (even if you are offline). Once you are thru reading, it can either automatically mark it as read or you can configure it to wait for you to manually mark it as read. You can configure multiple locations and multiple browsers so sync your links across.

Imagine this.. You are at home and logged into Firefox and mark a set of sites in ReadItLater. Now when you reach office, you login to ReadItLater using IE or Chrome and you will see the same list available to you there. Mark them as read and when you come back home, the reading list is automatically synchronized.

Google Reader Integration

There are many website we stumble upon while surfing but a lot of them could come from RSS Feeds. I use GoogleReader to keep track of things of my interest and ReadItLater integrates beautifully with GoogleReader too.

You can see from the image above that ReadItLater puts its faint yellow caret sign at the beginning of feed title which you can click to transfer that particular item into the reading list rather than the entire page.

Conclusion

Use ReadItLater to schedule and utilize your time better so that you have more time available for important thing. If you can configure you home pc browser, smart phone and office pc browser, you will not miss out on important article and keep track of things.

Happy Reading

Cool Switcher

2010-08-22T12:32:00.001+05:30

The easiest way to switch between running apps on Windows is ALT-TAB. Windows XP and earlier has a small popup window which display just the icons of running application. It displayed the title of the running app only when you “cycle” thru them to figure out which one you wanted to switch to.

Windows Switcher

Vista and Windows 7 made it easier with switch window which shows a thumbnail preview (which looks a lot like OSX switch except that OSX has cool feature of bring it up with 4 fingers swipe sideways ).

As shown in the screen shot, ALT-TAB does show thumbnail previews but the are too small and if there are multiple instances of an application running, it still doesn't help you in differentiating them until you alt-tab to them and read the description.

I have been using large resolution displays like 1900x1200, which tends to make the icons smaller unless you change the DPI. I understand that switcher window is not a regular app but why does the window have to be so small?

VistaSwitcher

Welcome to VistaSwitcher. Don’t go by the name, it works on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. It replaces the ALT-TAB key so you can continue to use your finger memory to switch apps.

The advantage of VistaSwitcher are:

Large Window – Clear visibility
Full window preview – You can actually read the contents
App titles – You can see without cycling thru
Numbered List – quick selection by number

It also adds another cool feature with ATL-` which allows you to switch between multiple instance of the currently selected app. Example, if you have multiple instance of IE or Word open and you want to switch to another, no need to use ALT-TAB and wade thru other apps, just press ALT-` (This one also come from OSX Cmd-` feature).

The above screen shot shows ONLY instance of IE and not the other running apps to quickly switch to another IE window.

Wait.. there is more

You can use mouse instead of keyboard to bring up the switcher.. but you need to enable it from preferences.. Right Click + Wheel Scroll.

Mouse can also be used to select apps from the switch window and it even allows right click to take actions on the running apps For example, you could select a set of apps and tile, cascade and even end task them.

Conclusion

VistaSwitcher is a free app which adds a lot of features to ALT-TAB switching and provides large, crisp and readable preview to make switching between tasks easier.

Happy Switching

Who NOT to follow

2010-08-20T14:53:00.001+05:30

Right after I posted a blog on GreaseMonkey, I read Janakiramm vent his frustration on Facebook about how Twitter is mimicking Facebook. Twitter has recently started “Who to follow” section on its site where is suggests people you should be following. Its not only irritating but badly implemented too as the same names keep appearing repeatedly. Its ok for sites to implement new features but they should allow the user to disable it. The least they could do is let user specify “I do not know anyone from here”. For people like Janakinamm and me who probably prefer a clean interface (I think I have Interface OCD), GreaseMonkey can be of help. Install GreaseMonkey (if you don’t have it already) on Firefox (Download it if you aren’t using it) and lets fix the Twitter problem.

Who NOT to follow

If you are ready and armed with Firefox and GreaseMonkey, just head over to this link Remove Who to follow (Twitter) and click on the Install button (If you also have GreaseFire add-on then you can simply right click on GreaseMonkey icon and Click on “xx scripts available”and search in the GreaseFire window. Check my previous post on how to do that).

Once installed, simply refresh your twitter and Voila! Who to Follow is gone.

Seriously, if you haven’t got Firefox and GreaseMonkey yet, go get it now. It will reduce clutter and irritation you might be having with your favourite sites.

Happy Tweeting

Quit monkeying around and take control of the web

2010-08-19T22:12:00.001+05:30

Web based applications are cool as you don't need to download software, maintain and upgrade them. However, web applications tend to target lowest common denominator of web standards as browsers have varying capabilities limiting the richness in User Interface.

As a user, one of the first things I do when I install any desktop software is rush to the Tools > Options menu to figure out what customization possibilities does it provide. It kind of gives you an inkling about the capabilities of the product and also richness of its UI. Most web apps lack extensive customization and hence GreaseMonkey.

What is GreaseMonkey?

GreaseMonkey is an add-on for Firefox browser which extends the capabilities of web sites in imaginatively endless ways. It basically works on the content Firefox receives from a web site and can rearrange, remove, add elements from the contents using small bits of JavaScript. There are thousands of readymade free scripts available which you can use as they are or even go an tinker with them to customize them to suit your needs.

Installing GreaseMonkey

GreaseMonkey is a add-on for Firefox browser, so head over to https://addons.mozilla.org and search for GreaseMonkey.

Click on Add to Firefox button and once installed, restart Firefox. Nothing spectacular happens as of now, just a small icon appears in the status bar.

What does it do?

Well, basically by itself.. nothing. Its an engine and host for fantastic user scripts which can completely transform websites without any help from the website itself. This can range from eliminating parts of the web page (like irritating ad sections) to rearrange elements (move Gmail chat from left to right) to completely skin the page (Better Gmail). The possibilities are endless. So let’s get some scripts. All these scripts are not written by the creator of GreaseMonkey but countless developers and even end users. Thankfully, rather than searching all over the web for these scripts, there is a central site called UserScripts.org which hosts these scripts and even allows you to install them in one click. Lets see what we can do with these scripts. We will take a list of popular websites and apply some GreaseMonkey Scripts.

Lets take a look at some sample sites and scripts.

Google FX

Let try a sample GreaseMonkey script on one of the most used sites – Google. GoogleFx is a GMScript which totally transforms Google home page and search page to add a set of useful functionality. The script is located at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/31950.

Click on Install and it will pop up a dialog box giving you details of the script. This includes a short summary, sites the script runs on and even the option to view the Script source. All GMScripts are available in source form which is comforting as you can view the source to see if everything is above board and also becomes a source to learn JavaScript in case you want to write your own scripts.

Once you have installed the script, it will show up in the GreaseMonkey configuration. You can disable/enable/uninstall the script whenever you want. While the author of the script specifies which web sites it runs on, you can add more sites (e.g. Google.co.jp) or put certain sites in exclusion list (Google.co.in).

Having installed the script, now lets head to Google and see what this script does. Remember, these changes are not coming from the server but happening locally AFTER the page contents are received by Firefox.

As you can see that the script has changed the look and feel of the main Google page. (Click on the image above to see a bigger preview). The links on the top are now tabs with icons, there is a colour theme chooser at extreme right. FX has also added its own preference Icon “Fx” so that you can customize what you like.

The search page has also been modified. Don’t be taken aback with the amount of information. Most of it is actually quite useful and if you don't like something, you can always customize it to remove the options you don’t like. Some of the things this script does

You can switch between tabs (Web, Images, Video etc.)
The scrolling is auto paging.. just keep scrolling down
Select time ranges (last hour, day, week month)
Switch search engine (Bing, Ask, AllTheWeb..)
Displays related searched on top right prominently
Displays Wikipedia articles if any
Display Twitter, YouTube, Maps, Books etc.

Don't like it? No worries.. Just right click GreaseMonkey in status bar,uncheck GoogleFx from the popup menu and refresh your page and everything will be back to normal. No need to uninstall or restart the browser.

Here are some more popular sites “Before” and “After” photographs

GoogleReader

Google Reader is online RSS aggregator and reader which has the standard look and feel of Google

When applied with Mac OSX SnowLeopard skin available on http://userstyles.org/styles/16900 transforms the site to mimic OSX look and feel.

GreaseMonkey scripts are on userscripts.org but userstyles.org is the home for another Firefox add-on called Stylish. Stylish scripts are compatible with GreaseMonkey and hence can be loaded by GreaseMonkey without requiring Stylish add-on.

BetterFaceBook

This one is my favourite as I got sick and tired of all the StupidVilles (FarmVille, PetVille, FishVille) and Notifications like “So and so has become a friend of so and so or joined this or that group, which used to fill my news feed. BetterFaceBook script allows you to control virtually any aspect of Facebook. Just follow this link to install GreaseMonkey script for Facebook http://betterfacebook.net

Who is going to spend so much time searching scripts?

I agree.. While the scripts can do amazing things, who has the time to wade thru thousands of scripts on userscripts.org and userstyles.org? How about this scenario – You visit a website and somehow GreaseMonkey could tell you how many scripts are available for that site, their popularity, rank by downloads AND allow you to install the script right there in Firefox? Sounds great? Well, then what we need is another Firefox extension called GreaseFire. It adds a menu item to GreaseMonkey menu indicating the number of scripts available for the site.

The image shows that there are 32 scripts available the current site and clicking it brings up a dialog box which lets use browse, preview and install the script with a single click.

But what about other browsers?

GreaseMonkey was developed Primarily for Firefox given its extensible architecture and pluggable add-ons. The testimony for GreaseMonkey is that many sites actually implemented the features GreaseMonkey script tired to add on client side (e.g. Right click preview in GMail).

Google Chrome

GreaseMonkey creator Aaron Boodman now works at Google and has added GreaseMonkey capabilities to Chrome natively. This means that most of the 40,000+ scripts can be added directly to Chrome without having to first install any add-on. Chrome directly converts GreaseMonkey script into Chrome Extension (.crx).

IE, Safari and Opera

While GreaseMonkey was created for Firefox and now the creator has added native support for Chrome, there are other ways it is possible to run GreaseMonkey script with varying degree of success in browsers like IE, Safari and Opera. Check them out here.

Conclusion

GreaseMonkey is one of the most popular Firefox add-on and has amazing abilities to transform web sites in their look & feel as well as functionality. I am sure you will explore, browse and try out GreaseMonkey scripts, if you like any drop me a mail or a comment on this post.

Happy Monkeying

GMail tricks

2010-08-16T19:14:00.001+05:30

I am sure many users are aware of this:
GMail ignores . (dot) in the userid part of the email id
so first.last@gmail.com can be written as
- firstlast@gmail.com
- f.i.r.s.t.l.a.s.t.@gmail.com
- .......first......last.....@gmail.com

GMail allows extra characters to be added to the userid part of the email id
so first.last@gmail.com can be written as
- first.last+funny@gmail.com
- first.last+imp@gmail.com

This allows us some interesting possibilities.

A. Control SPAM
When registering on sites which is one off, try using first.last+once@gmail.com. The confirmation mail will get delivered once and thereafter you can direct all emails on this ID to the spam folder

B. Discover who sells your email id to spammers
When registering on sites where you expect notifications or useful responses, try putting the sites name in the userid part, e.g. first.last+facebook@gmail.com. Now you should be getting notifications from Facebook only. If you start getting mails from site offering to enhance you-know-what, you will know who shared your email id with spammers.

C. Create GMail Filters with Labels
GMail allows 7GB of email space but does not have concept of folders. It has something better.. Labels. A Label is a tag which can be applied to any mail and multiple labels can be applied. You can apply labels manually or automatically using filters.

1. For example, you need to remind yourself of something important, send yourself a mail first.last+IMP@gmail.com. Now in GMail > Setting > Filters > Create Filter > To: first.last+IMP@gmail.com > Next > Apply Label > IMP. You can also specify colour to the Label.. like Bright Red. Now whenever you send yourself a mail on first.last+IMP@gmail.com, it will appear in your inbox with a Label called IMP in bright red.

2. Another trick is to create a filter from: first.last@gmail.com to: first.last@gmail.com and apply label TODO. This way you would have a list of pending tasks showing up in your inbox. From the labels list you can click TODO and it will show a list of all pending task. Once you have completed the task, open the mail and remove the label by clicking on the X sign on the top of the mail.

3. Many a times we search for attachment of specific type and have to wade thru thousands of email. At best we can try and recollect some words which were there in the mail containing that presentation and search for it. A better way would be to create a filter to apply specific label based on the attachment. e.g. You can create a filter PPT and specify in the filter that the attached file extension should be .ppt or .pptx. This way you can categorize PPT, MUSIC, PIC etc.

Another advantage is that you can limit your search to a specific category. You can click label PPT which shows only those mails which are labelled as PPT and then search for Budgets.
Filters are very powerful but unfortunately underutilized feature of GMail. It even allows you to export and import filters, so that you can exchange your filter with other users or re-use them in your alternate Gmail ids.

Do you have any interesting filters which you think are interesting and useful? Drop me a line

Aero Effect in browsers

2010-08-12T19:23:00.001+05:30

People have been asking me how I am able to get Aero effect on browser like Chrome after they saw the screenshots in the previous post). I kind of like the transparency effects in Windows 7, especially the change from Vista where maximizing the window no longer makes it title bar opaque. While transparency is built in and automatic for some applications, you need to tweak or even install add-ons and utilities to bring transparency in some applications.

Enabling Transparency

First of all you need to enable Aero in your Vista or Windows 7 by going to Desktop > Right Click > Personalize menu and choosing “Enable Transparency”. I tend to choose the lightest colour (Frost) for Windows borders, start menu, and taskbar. It gives almost clear glass like transparency effect. You can also adjust the colour intensity which will adjust the opaqueness of your title bar. Least intensity will make it look like clear glass whereas max intensity will make it look like frosted glass. Once you are done with adjusting aero, we can start looking at applying aero capabilities to various applications.

Transparency in browsers

I use 4 browsers for testing – Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Opera. Each of these browser requires a different method to make their toolbars transparent.

Internet Explorer – Built in transparency with Windows 7
Opera – Transparent skins available for download
Firefox – Add-on available for making the toolbar transparent
Chrome – Hacking the theme to convert the toolbar transparent

Lets take a look at each of these one by one.

Opera 10.x

Opera, like many other applications, has the concept of skin (theme). All you need to do is browse online themes from Opera menu and apply a glass or transparent theme. Opera comes with 2 built in themes – “Opera Standard” and “Windows Native”. While Windows Native provides standard windows colour to the toolbar.

Opera Standard applies glass effect to the tab area as well.

Applying Opera Standard Theme by itself give you transparency effect on Opera toolbar but if you want to extend it, there are a number of transparent theme available which can make the tabs and even empty page totally transparent. To browse and install these themes, go to Opera Menu > Appearances > Skins. Click on “Find more skins” radio button and browse for skins online.

Applying this skin makes the ENTIRE opera transparent, but don't worry, its only for the blank page and not when you open web sites

Firefox 3.x

Firefox is the most customizable browser out there and you don’t have to rely only on Mozilla to provide you with the feature you are looking for, you can browse thousands of add-ons available on the site and you are most likely to come across an add-on which satisfies your requirement. In this case, and add-on called “All Glass” which can be applied to Firefox to make its toolbar glassy like Internet Explorer or Opera. To install, go to Tools > Add Ons > Get Add Ons > Search for All Glass.

When you find it, click on the Add on name and select “Add to Firefox”. You will be instructed to Restart Firefox for the add-on to have the effect.

Restart and Voila! Your Firefox is all glass now.

Chrome 5.x

Chrome is the trickiest of the lot to glassify. Though if you were to search for Transparent themes, you will find them on Google site and these themes even show the white/gray square indicating transparent background (as depicted in PhotoShop/Gimp and other editing product). If you excitedly apply the theme hoping that the gray/white areas will be transparent, well.. they will be gray and white.

Chrome installs extension and themes and stores them under User profile. The theme contains a JSON file which specifies the theme attributes. It takes a simple micro surgery to remove the frame attributes altogether forcing Chrome not to apply ANY colour to its frame, leading to transparency.

First apply a theme you would want before making rest of the toolbar transparent. Having done that, lets find out where Chrome stores its theme attributes. To do this on Windows 7 you need to go to \Users\<YourLoginName>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\UserData\Default\Extensions as shown in the image below.

These are all the extensions that have been installed in Chrome. Unfortunately, Chrome does not use the extension name for the directory name making it difficult to figure out which extensions these are and more importantly, which of these directories is the theme directory. You need to search the directory which contains a folder called “i” and that’s the one in which we are going to modify the attributes. For me, its located in this folder

Now, edit the JSON file using any text editor and knock off the lines referring to the frame. For example, my current theme specifies:

We are going to take this modified extension and create a new theme (extension) out of it. So save the file and copy the version number folder (1.0_0) to another location, say on desktop. Next, in Google Chrome, go to Menu > Tools > Extensions. Make sure the developer mode is on and click on pack extension to create an extension file (.crx).

This will generate a file on the desktop 1.crx. Now just drag and drop the file anywhere on Chrome. Chrome will give a warning at bottom of its window that installing extension can be harmful.. blah.. blah. Just go ahead and click on continue.

And Voila!

Conclusion

Most applications either support transparency naturally or have tweaks and extensions to achieve it. There are 3rd party apps which are capable of applying transparency to any application, but the don't do it selectively, rather to the entire window.. which is not what you may be looking for.

Happy Glassing

Breadcrumb your Firefox address bar

2010-08-11T20:58:00.001+05:30

For most people a URL is merely an encoded string to access a page on the web, but for techie its like a treasure trove. You can glean out a lot of information by looking at the URL itself like whether is a TLD (Top level domain) or ccTLD (country specific domain). Which web platform it may be using (.asp, .aspx, .jsp) and the various other components like parameters. Sometimes the URL is hierarchical like site.com/archives/2009/09/01.aspx indicating classification. You may have landed up on the site thru some link but one look at the URL and you know that you can probably get more info from the site by merely changing relevant parts of the URL.

Editing the URL to get to other pages

However, editing such URL is a pain as you have to select the end part of the URL and backspace till you get to the part you want to change. E.g you may have landed up on a URL like this one http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/08/10/mad-at-google-the-question-is-are-you-mad-enough-to-stop-using-it-can-you-even-stop-using-it/ and you can probably spot that this site classifies it by year/month/date/article. Now you suspect that you can find more posts if you could delete the last part of the URL. But as shown in the image, it can be tedious to backspace on the URL to clear a whole bunch of stuff to reach the previous segment of the URL.

Breadcrumbs in Firefox

Firefox has an add-on called the LocationBar² which converts the URL inside the addressbar into breadcrumbs (much like Windows explorer paths in Windows 7). It helps immensely in accessing other parts of the URL and navigating up the URL path. Download and install the add-on from Mozilla site and lets configure it to provide us URL crumbs. Adding an add-on to Firefox if easy.. go to Tools > Add-ons and click on Get Add-ons tabs. Type the name of the add-on you are looking for.. when it comes up, click on it and select “Add to Firefox”. Once installed, it will prompt you to restart (I like the fact that Chrome doesn't ask you to restart browser when an extension is added, but then Chrome extensions don’t integrate as deeply as some of the FF add-ons do). The alternative is to visit https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ and search or browse for the add-ons you want.

Notice the green arrows in the URL bar after installing LocatioBar², they create clickable segments. You are currently looking at the original URL, but you can click the segment of URL which is “10” and probably signifies the archive date. Similarly you can click “08” for the monthly archive or “2010” to see the yearly archive. This of course would only work with those sites which use such hierarchy.

As you can see from the images, you can click different segments of the URL and move up to different parts of the website.

LocationBar²

LocationBar²has simple configuration. First of all, it allows you to hide protocols which are common and obvious, like http and https. You can add more like ftp if you like. It also has ability to show or hide to GO button inside the addressbar but most people I know simply press ENTER or CTRL-ENTER after typing the URL.

The gray subdomain option allows the domain name to be in regular colour while the subdomain in gray thereby highlighting the domain in the URL. I tend to even choose a different colour and make it bold (strong) so that with one look you can make out clearly which domain you are on.

Now comes the important part. As LocationBar²can provide Linkification, it allows allows an option to select the original URL with click or double click. However, as it breadcrumbs the URL into segments, click will select segments and not the entire URL. What if you want to copy the entire URL to paste elsewhere? In the Linkification tab it has options for “On top” and “On Bottom”. If you select “On Bottom”, the moment the mouse crosses over the lower border of the addressbar, the URL will become segmented, so to get URL in normal format, uncheck “On Top”. Now if you move you mouse over the top edge of addressbar and bring it back inside, the URL will become regular link and you can click or double click to select it.

Finally, the breadcrumbs can be for the entire host (domain and the rest) or for each segment. Apart from being able to navigate up and down on the URL, I also use it go quickly go “home” on any site. For example, I click the domain segment on facebook.com to quickly go back to the main page or click on mail.google.com in my gmail to reload gmail instead of just going back to inbox. I think LocationBar² add a very useful feature to Firefox and makes URL navigation a breeze. Go ahead and give it a try.

Happy Breadcrumbing

Customize Firefox to get more web viewing area

2010-08-10T21:43:00.001+05:30

Ban those toolbars.. NOW!!!

Does your browser look like this? And then you wonder why your internet is slow? First of all, do not install any toolbars which sneak in with these “free” utilities that you download. They not only take up viewing space, many contact their websites to refresh their buttons and contents causing the page load to be delayed. You may not notice this on a broadband connection but if you are on a slow network, you can see the toolbar refreshing itself before the page load begins.

Lets see what Firefox gives us by default

When you install Firefox for the first time and run it, you are greeted with a standard layout consisting of Titlebar, MenuBar, Navigation Bar, Bookmark Bar (Personal Bar) and Tabs. While on a standard size monitor there is enough space remaining for viewing area but on laptops and netbooks it greatly reduces the viewing area and causes a lot of scrolling. With a little tinkering and tweaking, you can increase the vertical size of the viewing area. The newer browsers like Chrome and Opera are focussing on larger viewing sizes too. Upcoming Firefox 4 (due Sep 2010) also has made UI layout changes by giving options to move the tab bar to the top. We can achieve the same thing in Firefox 3.6.x by tweaking the menu bar and other toolbars.

Default viewing area across browsers

The image compares four popular browsers on Windows with their default toolbar area height. From left to right – Chrome 5.x, Opera 10.6, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.6.x. To begin with, Firefox looks a bit kludgy and takes up the maximum height. That's because the other browsers do not show a menu bar any more. Most of them have put the menu bar either on the title bar (Opera) or tucked them away on the toolbar (Chrome and IE). In addition, Firefox has a separate Bookmark bar below the navigation bar taking up an extra row. While Firefox 4.0 will move the menu to a single drop down like Opera 4, it is still possible in Firefox 3.x to hide the menu to gain extra room.

Lets reduce the height of Firefox toolbars

1. Uncheck the menu bar and bookmark toolbar: First thing you can do is to uncheck the Menu Bar and Bookmarks Toolbar. This will immediately give you a lot of vertical space. Later we will be able to add the menu as a dropdown on the Navigation Toolbar itself.

As you can see the browser height is now increased, going past IE and becoming the same as Opera.

2. Use small icons on the navigation bar: Now we can further reduce the height of the toolbar by specifying “Use Small Icons” from Toolbar Customize Menu.

Now the vertical height approaches the height of Chrome. Its difficult to reduce it any further (without hacks) because Chrome puts it tabs on top. In fact the previous image is when both browsers are not maximized because when they are, Chrome actually put the tab on the title bar (non client area) and suddenly the difference is widened.

But Firefox is known for its Add-on which can dive deep into browser’s internal structures and come up with amazing things. One such trick is to remove the Tabs from top altogether. You can see that apart from the tabs (top in Chrome and bottom in FF), navigation height is roughly the same

3. Remove tabs from the top:
How do you do that? Well, its a bit of cheating and might defeat the overall purpose of getting more viewing area. But there are 2 add-ons – Tab Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar. Download them and configure them to hide the tabs bar when they are active. This way you get more vertical height but lose some horizontal width. If you want to recover the horizontal width too, you can install another add-on which retracts the sidebar when not in use. (Later on that add-on). So here goes…

Now the height of both the toolbars in Chrome and FF are exactly the same giving you more vertical viewing space. Chrome briefly flirted with vertical tab bars too when it had introduced –enable-vertical-tabs option in its command line switch, but as of Chrome 5.x I cant get it to work. Maybe the option will get polished further and make a comeback in Chrome later.

4. Put the menu/bookmark on toolbar: We have hidden the menu to gain more vertical height but we would need to use the menu occasionally. This can be done pressing the ALT key once and releasing it which brings up the menu (not a behaviour of FF but of windows). For those who might find this confusing or want to use mouse to use the menu can install Compact Menu 2 add-on. It puts the entire menu as a button on the navigation toolbar. The other add-on is called Bookmark Menu which similarly put the entire bookmark bar in a dropdown form on the toolbar. You can customize the location of these Compact Menu/Bookmark Menu using the Toolbar Customize option.

5. Add a touch of gloss: Nothing to do with gaining height but this add-on called “All glass” makes the toolbar semi transparent using the Windows Alpha Blend and will work only on Vista and Windows 7.

Conclusion

So with tweaking and using add-ons, we have not only been able to increase the viewing height of Firefox to that of Chrome but it even surpasses Chrome in non maximized state. This should be a bit of a help when browsing on small screens of netbooks, tablets and laptops. Here is a screen shot (Left to Right) of Firefox 3.6, Chrome 5, Opera 10 and IE 8.

Happy Browsing

I should be using Chrome but I use Firefox

2010-08-10T00:37:00.002+05:30

Well, some people can say that about Internet Explorer or Opera too. I have been in software industry much before internet came in, heck, for that matter even before GUI came in. I was there when Mosaic made a debut, I used the first version of Internet Explorer, I started using Firefox when it was not even called Firefox but was called Phoenix Browser and didn't even have a setup.. you simply had to copy the files in a directory of your choice and start using it. Yes, I watched the browser wars and saw IE beat Netscape.. I sided with IE then for the same reason I side with Firefox today. Let the better technology be used. I guess I am a technology junkie who wants to try out every piece of technology out there and figure out what works for me.

Do we really need multiple browsers?
HTML is supposed to be a standard and thus every browser should give us the same experience.. but reality does not follow standards and the fact it that each browser has different support for standard and different features

Today we have five major browser which are competing out there – Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome. There are many more lesser known or even unheard of (SRWare Iron, Flock, Stainless, Camino.. here is a complete list Mega list of Browsers). So, while theoretically all browsers should be born equal, all of them have different capabilities and feature and therefore users have their favourites and preferences.

So which is the best browser
Reading this far you may have started expecting that I would show you benchmarks and list out individual capabilities of each browser and maybe announce a winner… NO. I am here to say why I switched from Internet Explorer to Firefox and why I might switch to Chrome in future.

Why Firefox
I am not a fanatic type of techie, so I don't get taken in (at least very easily) by war cries like “Open Source”, “Multi Platform”, “anti M$”. For me, the technology should impress me, suit my purpose and generally make my life more comfortable. Personally I find Windows 7 a better platform over Mac (while Mac has a smoother UX, it doesn’t quite have the apps eco-system that Windows has), Firefox a better browser than IE, .NET a better development platform than Java, MS Office a better suite than OpenOffice and Thunderbird a better email client than Outlook. In fact, I wonder if having a better eco-system lures more users to a product. Look at it – Windows, Firefox, iPhone, Thunderbird and now Android. Most of these have a huge eco-system built around them.

The single reason why I use Firefox? Add-on. Yep, that’s right.. not speed, not open source, not HTML5 support but the ability to customize the experience for me. Chrome and Opera are busy making land speed records on browser but that does not make me lust for them. I believe, millions of other Firefox users are also with Firefox because it allows you to customize and control virtually every aspect of the browser. I am not just talking about visual themes and personas, but stuff like displaying all open tabs in thumbnail view in a sidebar, protecting yourself from rogue scripts on websites that you visit, synchronizing your password, bookmarks and even tabs across computers and devices. Firefox has created a vast eco system of extensions for its browser and while others browsers are waking up to it and realizing what a honeypot it is for the users, Firefox has raced way ahead in this area.

Firefox Add-ons
I am an avid surfer from the days when it was still called World Wide Wait and my lack of patience saw me opening multiple windows of IE (no tabbed browsing then) and switching impatiently between different windows to check which one has finished loading and rendering the page. With advent of tabbed browsing, all that changed was instead of windows, I was switching between tabs. Then one day I stumbled upon something called “extension” for Firefox called Tab Sidebar (check out the thumbnails in sidebar in the image). It allowed me to open multiple sites in different tabs but showed them in live thumbnail view on the side, letting me know when a particular tab has finished rendering or watching live preview in a tab while I am in a different tab. For many users this may not make much of a difference, but to an impatient user like me it brought a lot of calmness. It also introduced me to the world of browser extensions and how I could customize and personalize my browsing experience.

I have replaced Tab Sidebar with a similar extension called Showcase and till date it remains the single biggest reason why I haven't switched to Opera, Chrome or back to IE even though they are setting land speed records of performance. I have discovered a lot many more useful extensions like Fission, LocationBar, NoScript, CookieMonster (which I might blog about later). I am hoping that Chrome expands its extension capabilities the scope it has of today and the day it gives me a Tab Sidebar, its speed would become the differentiator for me.
So go ahead and give Firefox a try along with a few add-ons. If you don't like it, you can always go back to IE, Chrome, Opera or Safari.

Happy Browsing

Windows’ built in magnifier tool

2010-08-07T19:18:00.001+05:30

As I am growing old, the ability to read fonts on 1900x1200 resolution screen is becoming a bit difficult. I have a 17” MacBook Pro with OSX SnowLeopard and I had quickly discovered that CTRL-SCROLL zooms the screen and that too live, meaning that its not just a screen shot but magnified state where I can continue to click and type. It became a regular habit when filling forms on the browser or even editing. The transition is so smooth that you don't even feel any delay when going into zoomed mode. I have been using Firefox (largely due to showcase extension) rather than Safari and am also used to zoom for within the browser window using Command + and Command – in OSX (Command is the “Apple” key but mostly work like counterpart to CTRL key of Windows). When Windows 7 RC arrived, I excitedly installed it in my boot camp partition and was very happy with the improvements it had over Vista. I installed Firefox and started using it and in no time as part of habit, I hit the Command + key to zoom inside the browser. Wow! The browser didn't zoom but the entire desktop zoomed. Wow! Neat.

Windows 7 not only matched what OSX provides but actually surpasses OSX in terms of screen magnification. Lets discover the magnification features in Windows 7 and how to use them efficiently in our day to day work and during presentations.

Activating the Zoom

Pressing Windows and + key brings up the magnifier panel and zooms the entire screen to the last zoomed state. The Panel contains zoom out and zoom in buttons but you can continue to use Win + and Win to continue your zoom in and out.

Full screen zoom is a live zoom and not a snapshot, which means you can continue to work with windows, clicking things and type without having to switch the zoom off. This may be convenient in a situation when you are presenting to an audience in a large hall and want to focus on a particular part of the slide or screen. You can also use it while working when the fonts or images are two small and you want a clearer image.

Docking the old style

Before Windows 7 we did have zoom but it was always docked as a panel where you could see the zoomed image as you mouse moved on the screen. This option still exists and can be activated.

As you can see, there is a docked magnifier at the top, above the Opera window and you can see Opera title bar, menu button and address bar in magnified state. The Dock follows your mouse pointer and you show you the area under selection magnified..

How much dock to dock?

Magnifier dock starts off with a standard height but you are not limited to the standard size and you can resize the dock to a much larger size, covering almost the entire desktop (do this when you are going blind ). Take a look at the picture below.. the magnifier dock covers almost half the height of the desktop. Remember, you need to click at the bottom edge of the magnifier and drag it downwards. It has a small bug that it shows you a 4-headed “move” pointer and NOT the 2-headed “size” pointer which can be confusing as you can land up undocking it by “move”.

Undock the dock

Some people may not like the entire top section of their screen to be blocked by a magnifier, so a better way would be to “undock” the magnifier into a smaller window and keep it afloat on the screen as you work.

Wait.. there is more…

Lens mode is excellent during presentations as it shows you a lens like view which follows your mouse pointer magnifying the area around it. I find it useful when delivering presentations as it not only magnifies the code I want to show but also forces the audience to focus on what I am showing rather than getting distracted by rest of the screen. The lens is configurable in terms of size and you specify the height and width of the lens using SHIFT-ALT .. LEFT/RIGHT to adjust width and UP/DOWN to adjust height. You can also move the lens using keyboard shortcuts of CTRL-ALT-Arrows. The image below shows a section of the slide being magnified, focussing the attention of the audience on that section.

Getting back to Full screen zoom and getting perspective

Having experimented with Dock (CTRL-ALT-D) and Lens (CTRL-ALT-L), lets get back to full screen.

In this mode, as we started, the entire screen is in a “live” zoom state. While this maybe preferred by some, it can also get a little disorienting as to where we are on the screen. To get a perspective, press CTRL-ALT-SPACE and momentarily the screen will unzoom highlighting the area which is under zoom mode and then quickly return to zoom mode.

To end it all

Some people struggle to end the zoom as the key combination is not well documented or made obvious.It can be frustrating in middle of a presentation to have started Len mode zoom but struggling to return back to normal mode. If you are in full screen zoom mode, just keep pressing Win – until it restore to normal, unfortunately, that doesn't work in Lens or Dock mode. In fact Win+ and Win – control the level of zoom in all modes. To get the Dock or Lens mode completely off, just press the following..

Happy Zooming

How to delay Startup apps and influence performance

2010-08-04T02:05:00.001+05:30

Couple of years ago Raj Chaudhuri and I were talking about how it takes a long time for Windows XP to start up due to a lot of applications installing themselves into the Startup folder and Run registry. It seemed ALL applications back then wanted to run with windows Startup and live forever in your system tray. While most applications would politely ask if you wanted to install them in Startup, some sneaked in without asking and I am not talking about the virus variety here. Some others are even sneakier.. they install themselves not in Startup or Run registry but in Windows Task Schedule (e.g. Google Updater).

Back then, I used to have a folder on my desktop containing shortcuts of applications which I wanted to Startup but not all together attempting that at boot time. So after a quick boot and when Windows was usable and responsive, I would go to the folder and start them up one by one in between my current work. This was obviously tedious and sometime I would get too engrossed in my work and forget completely about. The Solution?

WinPatrol

WinPatrol is a small little utility which basically watches over your Startup folder, run registry, services and pops up a warning whenever any application tries to add itself to these. It even fights with those applications which on every run try to re-establish themselves into the registry by blocking every attempt. While this action can keep you safe from virus and unwanted program, you still land up adding quite a few application in your start up which delays your boot process.

Delayed Startup

Winpatrol has an option of Delayed Startup, whereby WinPatrol adds itself into Startup registry and then allows you to mark other Startup program as “delayed”. You can simply select a Startup app in WinPatrol window and select “Move to delayed Startup program list”. This by itself may not solve the problem but merely postpone it as these apps would again try and Startup together causing slowdown while you are working. So in addition to delaying the program, Winpatrol also allows you to specify the delay period. which can range from seconds to hours (Who really wants Java Updater to run the very second I boot up? I have it starting after an hour). So you can stagger your Startups with a few minutes delay between them, prioritizing apps based on how soon you would start using them (Open Outlook after 5 minutes of boot, Vuze after 10 minutes..). In fact, if you think about it, you may now want to add more applications to your start up and pop them up after few minutes or even hours like a reminder (Windows Live Writer pops up after 2 hours as a reminder to blog ).

After installing WinPatrol, launch it from system tray and select the “Startup Programs”” tab. This lists all the program listed in the registry, Startup folders, etc.

Now, right select an entry to bring up the context menu showing you a host of options. One of these options is “Move to Delayed Startup Program List”.

Once the program has been moved to delayed list, switch over the that tab and you will see a list of delayed apps with their deferred times.

Select an app and click on “Delay Option” button to specify the delay before launching this app. You can have a maximum of 60 minutes and 50 seconds of delay added.

Similarly, go ahead and defer each app with a different delay and your boot process with become snappy as all apps wont try to Startup at the same time.

There are other solutions available in market like Soluto (Wow UX), Startup Delayer etc., but they are too focussed only only delaying Startup, whereas WinPatrol doubles up as a sentry against applications trying to install Startup registry entries, services and scheduled tasks.

Happy Delaying!

PortableApps, SyncToy and Windows Task Scheduler

2010-08-02T21:17:00.001+05:30

Three things that Windows users should be using but they aren’t. Seriously.

First of all, like many other users, I am growing weary of applications that have to be “Installed” which make entries in Windows registry and spew files all over the file system. .NET framework gave a ray of hope as your application can be totally self contained in a single directory.. however, old habits die hard and we still have .NET apps which manipulate windows registry which makes it “unportable”.

Imagine this, you installed a software on your C: drive and now are running out of space, so you decide to move it to D: where there is ample space. So you move C:\Program Files\Microsoft to D:\Microsoft Office… what do you think happens next? Yeah, total chaos.. All your registry entries are still pointing to old C: location and nothing would work. This is true not only of Microsoft Office but most application which are available for Windows.

Portable Apps

PortableApps.com is a website which re-packages applications (mostly opensource) into applications which do not require windows registry or files outside its own folder. These applications can be simply copied into any location on your hard disk and executed from there. These applications don't even use User Profiles from their regular location like User\AppData\Local making it very convenient to move these application from one directory to another or one drive to another but also from one computer to another without any loss of information, history or preferences. In fact, these applications are meant to be installed on a USB drive which can then be used on any computer without having to transfer these application to that computers hard disk. However, if you are using PortableApps directly from the USB Drive, given the speed of USB, it can be slow to launch applications and writebacks to the USB can be even slower. But who says PortableApps are meant only for USB drives? I find them very useful even on my laptop, where I can copy them and run them without having to install and configure.

This brings us to another issue.. What if I want to use PortableApps on my laptop when connected but at the same time be able to carry them with me on a USB when I go out. I would want to carry all my applications, preferences settings on my USB drive and be able to bring them back to my laptop once I return. This lead me to go back to a less-used application from Microsoft.

Sync Toy

Sync Toy was released by Microsoft long ago for Windows XP and has been updated for Vista and Windows 7. It a simple application albeit a very useful one, which synchronizes files between any two folders. It is essentially meant for backups where you can copy files from work folder into backup folder on a periodic basis. SyncToy is perfect for our scenario as it will help us keep the PortableApps on the laptop as well as on USB to remain in sync. This way, I can download my mails using ThunderBird onto my laptop folder, sync it onto USB, go over to another computer, plug in the USB and have access to all my mails on that computer without having to install even one byte of any software. If you download mails when on that computer, once I get back, I will be able to sync back the changes back to the folder on my laptop and will have the newly downloaded mails now on my laptop too. Life is so Simple

To enable synchronization, just run SyncToy and create a folder pair. SyncToy asks for “Left side” folder and “Right side” folder to give a visual sense of the operation. Select your on-computer PortableApps folder on the Left side and choose the USB drive as the right side folder and select Synchronize option. Make sure to do a “preview” before you land up copying massive files into the USB due to choosing wrong folder setting.

Now you are set.. Use PortableApps on your laptop or desktop and when you are ready to leave just plug-in you USB, run SyncToy and copy all your applications, preferences, data files onto the USB drive and you are ready to go. When you return back, plug-in the USB again and SyncToy will Sync back the changes onto your hard disk. Don't worry about the direction as will figure out what has changed and on which side.

You still have to remember to run SyncToy every time you plug-in the USB though and that brings us to the third great application.

Windows Task Scheduler

It is possible the most underutilized feature of Windows while being capable of doing amazing thing. Task Scheduler is meant to schedule periodic tasks like drive backups, cleanups, daily mails etc. Most of these tasks are scheduled at a particular time but Task Scheduler is also capable of triggering on events like Hardware events, shutdown, start-up, user login etc. We need one such event to automate our SyncToy.

Run Task Scheduler and Create a new Task. Give it a friendly name like “Run SyncToy on USB”

Next step is to trigger it when the USB is inserted. This is a little tricky because we need to know which hardware event is triggered when the USB is inserted in the laptop. To find out, got Event Viewer and look at entries under Microsoft-Windows-DriverFrameworks-Usermode-operational. You will see the event ID for the USB you have inserted. In my case it is 2101. So, in the next step create a trigger for this event,

You are almost done, the last step is to provide an action of running the SyncToy. You should not run SyncToy in a mode where is comes up and starts copying the files automatically as you don't want this to happen to any USB you insert. It would be a good idea to just bring up SyncToy as a reminder when you insert a USB and then you can decide either to run it or close SyncToy without Synchronization.

There… you are done. Now, every time you insert your USB drive, it will popup SyncToy as a reminder to sync your PortableApps with the ones on your USB.

Happy Porting!

No, DropBox is not just for dropping files

2010-07-31T19:59:00.001+05:30

There are very few applications that impress me and DropBox is one of them. DropBox allows you 2GB of storage on the web which is synchronized with a folder on your local drive. It works on Windows, Mac, Linux and host of Smartphones too. I have been using DropBox on my Mac earlier and hadn’t paid much attention to it earlier. I, like most people would, thought of it only as a place you drop your files IF you wanted to share it with Windows, Linux or share it with other people. Maybe the name of the product promotes that kind of thinking. When I switched back to Windows and started using DropBox again, it struck me that my thinking was wrong. Its not some kind of application to take online back up (which it is) on a virtual drive (which it is not). I have used other applications like this before.. like SkyDrive and GDrive (GMail account mapped as virtual drive) and was always weary of them as copying/moving files into them seems to put explorer into a slowdown as it handles the virtual drive.

Not a Virtual Folder

DropBox creates a folder which is a real folder and not some virtual mapped drive. A service monitors file changes in the local folder as well as in your website account and silently synchronizes both ways. This means you can access files even when you are not connected to the internet and even add files into the folder and modify then, which will then by synced next time you are online. This is very different from other situation where you have to be online to access your files. Neat!

Cross Platform

While there are similar products in the market (e.g. Live Mesh, Live Sync, Box.net), none of them work on a wide variety of platforms and devices. DropBox works on Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, Android, iPad and Blackberry support coming soon. So when you decide to share your files with other users, you don't have to worry about which platform they are using. I use Dropbox to sync regularly across my Mac and Windows and for those times that I am not on one of my own computers, I simply access the site to download the file I need.

Its meant to be your new My Documents

When I started using it as first, I used it like an online backup, storing critical files in in. But soon I realized that its not meant as a safe vault, in fact, I would get more out of it if I started using it as “My Documents” folder, storing every new files that I created into the DropBox. Why? Because, first of all its not a virtual mapped drive which will immediately put explorer into a tizzy. Second of all, I don’t know which file I might delete by mistake or commit changes to which I might want to rollback. Thirdly, I don't have to bother whether I am online or offline and don't have to go online just to store files in it.

DropBox as Super Recycle Bin and Version Control

Yes, that’s right.. One of the biggest advantage of making DropBox as your My Document is that even if you delete a file (including shift-delete bypassing the recycle bin), the deleted file is retained on the site for 30 days and this does not count towards your storage limit. Of course, you can go to the site and permanently delete the “deleted” files whenever you want. Another cool thing is that it maintains a multiple versions of every file you store in the dropbox and that does not apply to products which support version control (like MS Office). In fact you can get previous versions of text files, executables and office documents from the site whenever you want.

Not a waste of bandwidth

It would appear that having an app like this all the time would consume a lot of bandwidth but the fact is the DropBox transmits only the changes and not the entire file. Which means if you have 1MB file and you modify 10 bytes, it would transmit just those 10 bytes and not the entire file. If you a still worried about frequent bandwidth utilization, you can make changes offline and then go online to sync everything in one go. Even then, you can set the upload/download limits for DropBox so that it does not hog the bandwidth.

What about Privacy?

Most people are rightly worried about online privacy. DropBox uses secure connection to the site when synchronizing by utilizing SSL connection so that data cannot be viewed in transit. On the site the data is kept in secured environment where even DropBox staff does not have access to the data. Still, if you want to be doubly sure for certain files, I would recommend using a free utility called TrueCrypt which allows you to create a virtual drive anywhere (including directly inside DropBox). You can continue to work normally with files inside this virtual drive but to rest of the world it will appear to be merely a file and that too encrypted.

My Document –> My DropBox

Go on! Make your DropBox as you new My Document folder and never miss a file or version ever again!

Weird C or is it?

2010-07-30T18:17:00.004+05:30

I guess I am one of the leftover dino from Mainframe and UNIX/C era. While I am enchanted by the progress programming in general has made with .NET, Java, frameworks and Web technologies, I cant help but feel that there is a need to understand the fundamentals very well. I am in no way say that “we” C programmers are better than Java and .NET, in fact, I am amazed at the spread of technology footprint that modern developers have to understand and remember. However, some of the developers look down upon C and C++ as outdated (which they may be soon), but miss the point… Fundamentals have to be strong and C/C++ kind of bring you closer to metal to make one realize that.

Check out the code fragment and explain why it works (I don't mean syntactically). It is based on some very sound principles of programming (at least in C/++), even though it looks completely useless (which it is) and syntactically incorrect (which is it not)

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
1; 2; 3; 4; 5;
6, 7, 8, 9, 0;

return 0;
}

Trust me, if you can explain the working behind this code snippet, you would understand a lot about statements and expressions in C/C++. Leave your explanation in comments.

Network bandwidth monitors

2010-07-30T01:58:00.002+05:30

Though I have unlimited usage account on my home internet connection, its not really unlimited in sense that I get 1Mbps speed up to 25GB transfer and thereafter it drops to 256kbps for rest of the month. Sometimes this happens within days and sometimes lasts a month. That of course depends on what I have been downloading.. (e.g.. I downloaded a copy of MS Office 2010 from my MSDN account). I wanted to keep track on how much I was downloading and also which applications were downloading the most. I searched the net for applications and came across BitMeter. While BitMeter displayed a graph of current network activity, it didn't really provide the customization and history of downloads. So after using it for a couple of days, I started looking for other tool and came across two different and complementary tools.

1. NetWorx

NetWorx is a bandwidth monitoring tool which provides a host of features which help you to effectively control the amount of network transfer. As expected, it provide a system tray icon so that you can keep an eye on the downloads. If the system tray is too small to be able to judge the network transfer rate, you can pop up a small window on your desktop which updates a graph of data transfer. To make this pop up window unobtrusive, you can make it semi transparent and also make it click-thru so that you can continue working with the window below while you are able to keep an eye on the download graph.

Apart from this basic feature which most network monitors provide, Networx provides a host of other features like quota control, usage reports for daily, weekly, monthly or for any given period of time. The reports show received, sent and total transfer for the given period and any dialup durations, if used. It can display these report for the current user or all users combined. The Usage reports can be exported to Excel for further processing or even backed up and restored in XML format. There are usual network tools like Ping, Trace, Netstat thrown in for good measure.

One way to control your data transfer is to use quota for daily, week and monthly usage and save you from spiralling bills. It would also be good for controlling internet usage of you kids as it can block usage once you exceed the quota. It has a password control mechanism which protects the quota system and also prevents the application from being exited. This should keep the newbie users from circumventing the quota lockdown and other restrictions. But in modern homes you have more than one computers connecting thru the same wifi or internet router. Rather than trying to configure the router and wifi AP, use Networx built in synchronization with other computers. This way you can see a consolidated usage from all systems.
However, one feature that I was hoping to see in Networx was the ability to display which application was consuming how much bandwidth. While NetStat feature of NetWorx provides list of application and the sites they are accessing in real time, it does not provider a summary or usage data for each application. To control utilization effectively, we need to know which application is downloading how much data. This led my search to another tool.

2. NetBalancer

NetBalancer is a network monitor tool which works are much deeper level than Networx, in sense that it installs as a driver and can monitor network traffic from lower levels in the operating system. NetBalancer shows real-time statistics of which application is online and uploading/downloading from the net. It shows current upload/download as well as cumulative transfers. It display a traffic graph along with information about the selected application and its connections.

However, NetBalancer does not show daily, weekly, monthly graphs like NetWorx and does not have features to show quota and control usage. By combining these two application, you can get a handle on your internet usage, figure out which applications consume higher bandwidth and track your hourly usage.

If you have come across good bandwidth monitor tools, drop me a line to update me.

Amazing 7Stack

2010-07-26T17:46:00.003+05:30

7Stacks is a nifty utility for Windows 7 taskbar. It installs like a regular application icon but behaves like a pop up stack (Also know as drawers). This is really cool because it allows you to group applications or files together. E.g. if you are a web developer and you test your site with multiple browsers, you can create a stack with all the browsers (as shown in the picture). This saves you from having to pin all the browsers n the task bar or having to search the browser from start menu and yet it takes only one icon on the taskbar. Of course, when you launch an application from 7Stack, it appears on the TaskBar like any regular program but is not pinned. You can create multiple stacks like Browser, Office, Media Players, Sysinternal Suite or even your favourite music.
The creation process is simple: Run the create stack utility and choose the folder you want to appear as a stack, choose the icon size (I prefer big icons, as shown in the picture), choose the text style and click on create shortcut. Once the shortcut is created, simply drag and drop it on the TaskBar and you are done.
As you can see, it has a nice Aero effect which makes it blend with beautiful looking Windows 7 TaskBar.

Just5: Cell phones for Luddites?

2010-07-08T04:44:00.002+05:30

They say they're targeting seniors, children, and the vision- and hearing-impaired, but Just5's new mobile phone line is really best explained as a talking device for Luddites.

"We want to open mobile phones to specific populations that may have difficulty using the latest and greatest mobile gadgets, especially the current generation of 'baby boomers' who need a safe, reliable phone," Alex Petrov, vice president of operations at Just5 Americas, said in a news release.

Just5 version 10 is due out in the U.S. in about three months.
(Credit: Just5)

Here's the setup. Just5 phones boast big buttons. They can be turned up louder than the average celly. An emergency SOS button can be preset with five phone numbers (i.e. 911, doctor, relative, etc.). It can send and receive calls and text messages, and it has Bluetooth and an FM radio. And that's about it.

Moreover, the company's newest version 10--out in Europe and coming to the U.S. in about three months--has no new features, only a bigger screen and a look Petrov tells me is going to be "a little more hypey," which may or may not be the word he intended to use.

It's an interesting strategy. Make a phone whose purpose is to function for people who don't know how modern phones work, and continue to come out with new and unimproved versions. It reminds me of that Steak & Shake ad: Unimproved since 1934.

To be fair, Just5 phones might be ideal for people with vision and hearing loss, or medical conditions that require constant and easy communication with health care providers. In this regard, Just5 has found a great niche market. (It's even won design and branding awards.)

But how big is this market, really? To say that it's for seniors and kids is frankly insulting to seniors and kids. My 82-year-old grandpa hosts his own podcast on robotics, and my 2-year-old nephew can navigate his way through an iPhone without yet being literate.

So proceed with caution if you're thinking of gifting one to grandma. It could be the equivalent of giving a Dummies Guide to someone who isn't a dummy at all.

via news.cnet.com

We are moving rapidly forward with iPhone 4, Android 2.x and Windows Phone 7, yet there is a class of users who need just basic phone capabilities and this fills that gap remarkably.

Posted via email from Thinking In Visuals

Brainstorming

2004-02-11T17:10:00.001+05:30

How little do I know and how little time to learn so many things? This is exactly what I thought when I realized that brainstorming is not a shouting match in a meeting where everyone yells their own ideas and shoots down other ideas. I was asked to host a "brainstorming" session for the marketing team which lead me to do some research on the subject.

Some of the areas which I had to consider for the brainstorming session were:
1. Manage egos of people.
2. Encourage people of junior rank to state their ideas in presence of their seniors.
3. Ensure people don't think that the idea they have in mind "rightfully belongs" to someone else and hence skips it.
4. Get everyone to contribute in a structured process.

With these goals in mind and the generally-accepted-rules of brainstorming:
1. Encourage wild ideas.
2. Don't shoot down and idea in the initial stage.
3. Generate as many ideas as possible.
4. Build on others idea.
5. Everyone is equal in terms of coming up with ideas.

There was still one issue to handle, how do I stop junior rank from getting intimidated by seniors and surrendering to their ideas? A lot of what goes on in human interaction is defined by power-equation between people. For example, in a classroom if a participant asks a question and get an answer in retort-style, he/she (most of the time) doesn't question back even if he/she doesn't agree with the answer. That is defined by the power-equation between participant-trainer. Same could apply in this scenario. So taking a leaf from my colleague's (Raj Dorwani) book, I settled on the Post-It notes.

First of all, to ensure that many ideas were generated, I asked everyone to jot down 10 ideas (not including what the marketing team is already doing). Believe me it sounded easy to begin with, but after 6-7 ideas people were struggling for fresh ideas. This eliminated the intimidation part. Next I put up these Post It notes on the white board and asked another person to accumulate them in Word and project it on the screen.

Next, we asked people to choose one BIG idea (which was big enough to generate the entire revenue of the company). But the constrain was - It HAD to be someone else's idea. This did the trick as most people are passionate about their own idea and hence tend to shoot down everyone else's idea. This forced them to not only think of others ideas, but actually adopt it and extend it. After everyone jotted down these extended ideas, I stuck up these post-its on the board under "THE BIG ONE". Then I asked the persons whose ideas these were to defend the idea while others attacked and criticised it. Eventually we rated the ideas on the probability of revenue-generation.

Next, I asked people to pick up 5 medium size ideas from the entire list which combined could give us the entire revenue. These could be anyone's ideas, including their own. When this list was read, we analysed the aggregation and picked up those ideas which were common in everyone's list. We got 3 out of 5 common ideas.

Finally I asked everyone to look at the list again and select 5 ideas (regardless of their revenue generation capabilities) which could give use maximum effort-to-result ratio. We collected all the results eliminating the duplicates and created a third list.

After this long drawn process we got 3 results:
1. ONE BIG IDEA, if implemented would get us the entire target revenue.
2. 5 Medium ideas, if implemented collectively would get us the entire target revenue.
3. A collection of ideas if implemented, would give us more profitability.

The end result was nothing but to get the marketing minds ticking in the right direction. Not all the ideas we came up with would be valid or get implemented, but the fact is some great ideas did come out of this process and now its upto the people to act upon it. But what was achieved was superlative idea generation with minimum of ego-crashes, intimidation, shouting matches. By the end of the session everyone was surprised about how different and yet effective this process had been.

All this coming from a non-marketing person was even more surprising. I am a pure techie and I was quite unsure if it would go thru successfully and would actually be beneficial to the marketing team. I will take their word :)