Start++ 0.4 released
I just uploaded Start++ 0.4. The music gadget that I showed before isn’t in there yet, but the picture gadget is. The focus of this release is to get some testing on the new start menu hooking mechanism – so I’d appreciate your feedback on how that works!
What’s new in 0.4
- Start++ now runs in the system tray to provide better Start Menu hooking, including custom Start Menu UI (“Start Gadgets”).
- Picture Gadget is the first built-in Start Gadget. Eventually this will be extensible.
- New Options tab with three options
- Disable running in the background (provides the same functionality as previous versions).
- Disable command line integration (feature request)
- Disable Start Menu commands for when Start++ isn’t running
- Bug fixes, including a fix for users with spaces in their user names.
Yesterday
Yesterday was easily the most beautiful day of 2007 so far. It felt (and looked) quite a bit like summer. Eager to not let it go to waste, a few of us slipped out in the afternoon to make a quick flight around the east side, the falls, and some mountains near the pass.
That’s the path we took.
Audi S5 – I think I’m in love
Wow.
If anything makes me trade in my A3 in the next year or two, this would probably be it:
New Start++ feature
Here’s another feature coming in the next Start++ update that I just finished working some kinks out of:
Quick picture finding!
Sony on crack?
I take it back, forget the whole voodoo doll thing. Sony is just on crack.
Now they’re promising to alleviate “shortages” of the PS3 by May. Apparently their plan involves going back in time to early January and delivering more PS3s than stores can sell. Holy crap, that means it must have worked! I’m blown away. Who knew those crafty japanese had mastered time travel?
Seriously… how stupid are these guys? And what is their goal? Do they hope that by pretending there’s a struggle to alleviate “shortages” that some people are going to see a stack of 50 PS3s at Fry’s and think they’ve struck gold? Despite the signs of retailer desperation that abound?
Sony PR screw-up #463
Something’s happened to Sony. It’s like one of their competitors got a Sony voodoo doll and is using it to make them kick themselves in the head repeatedly. Earlier today popular gaming news outlet Kotaku reported on a rumor as gaming magazines and websites frequently do.
At this point, most companies would completely ignore the rumor, and maybe give an ironic public comment that they don’t comment on rumors or speculation. It’s generally the best response for many reasons, including the fact that in most cases it does absolutely nothing to give away the veracity of the rumor.
Instead, Sony decided to confirm the rumor by blackballing Kotaku, disinviting them from their upcoming press events and cutting them off from Sony completely.
If you didn’t have enough reasons to hate Sony before today, rest assured that they’re working hard to earn your scorn.
Thanks to commentor Justin, I finally found a solution to the frequent hanging my Macbook had started to encounter when going into sleep mode.
Turns out the problem is the Atheros wireless driver included in Apple’s Boot Camp release. If you replace it with one that was released for the Thinkpad, it works flawlessly.
No longer necessary, just install BootCamp 1.2
Upcoming Start++ update
Over the last few days I’ve been amazed at the reception Start++ has been receiving from the Windows enthusiast community. Today it was even picked up on LifeHacker as download of the day! All the encouragement motivated me to begin looking at what more I could do to extend the Start++ experience. The current releases so far have used a pretty limited mechanism to “hook” into the Start menu on Vista. In fact, it’s not really a “hook” at all but rather taking advantage of the Start Menu’s built-in Run functionality through some clever use of shortcuts and pathing.
For the upcoming Start++ 0.5 release, I’ve gone back and built a much more sophisticated Start hook, that will allow for some much more robust functionality and eliminate the few edge cases where the current shortcuts can conflict (ie. not be the default action) with other shortcuts in your Start menu. It’s entirely done out-of-process, in .NET using a combination of standard windowing and automation APIs.
Truthfully, though, I think a picture is worth a lot more than words… Keep in mind this isn’t exactly how it will look or work when I’m done, it’s just an idea of where I think I’m going with it. And yes, this is an early build running on my desktop system.
Start++ 0.3 released!
Hot on the heels of yesterday’s release, there’s already a new beta build for you to play with!
What’s new?
- Command arguments can now be specified seperately
- Aliases can now be exported as “Startlets”
- Share your favorite “Startlets” with other users!
- Bug fixes
Current users can safely upgrade without losing their current setups.
Update: Fixed two small installer bugs. New version is 0.3.2.
Upcoming Start++ changes for 0.3
Upcoming Bug Fixes
- Commentor Daniel pointed out a problem with program arguments for apps launched via the Simple Commands type of alias.
- Fix: Seperate the command to execute and the parameters to pass to it in the Simple Commands dialog. Currently, all but the first parameter to your alias are passed as program arguments. This is obviously not ideal, and was mostly something I through in to make the “sudo” command work properly, and I had planned to go back and fix it. So I will.
- Commentor Unq suggested a better Wikipedia query string.
- Fix: “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/%*”
Upcoming features
- Better parameter substitution mechanism
- Simple mechanism for sharing aliases with other users
After 0.3:
- Easy method for importing IE 7 search providers
- Switchable “profiles”
- Better extensibility for “search actions”
- Commentor P Cause noticed that Search Actions don’t work for Outlook items (like opening contacts).
- Fix: Implement support for Outlook / MAPI items. Might take a while, unfortunately.