Over the last weeks I’ve become a huge fan of Snarl, which is a Growl-like notfication system for Windows. With the appropriate plugin, applications like Firefox or Miranda can display user messages through Snarl, which only opens small “bubble” message boxes that close itself after a certain period of time. This way the desktop isn’t cluttered with message windows that the user has to close by hand.

So far, the number of extensions/plugins that are available for Snarl is still small, but with the software below I’m doing my part to increase it

development | 6 Comments »

Already a little while ago Robert postet some example code on how add meta data to images using the relatively new WPF.

After playing around with the code for a while, I got some weird exceptions thrown at me, e.g. “A first chance exception of type ‘System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException’ occurred in PresentationCore.dll“. Now, the only thing I had changed was letting the tagging routine run in a seperate thread:

[STAThread]
static void Main()
{
Thread t = new Thread(writeMetadata);
t.Start();
Application.Run(new Form1());
}
static void writeMetadata()
{
// write the metadata to the image here
}


development | No Comments »

What if you’re implementing an application in .NET (C#) that is supposed to automatically update itself once a new version comes out? Well, you have multiple options, some of which cost a lot of money, while others are free but come with certain restrictions, like being only compatible with an ISS or solely running in user space like ClickOnce apps.

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Today I released an updated version of my Skype plugin “Contact Alarm“. It introduces a new setting, which will let you replace the default alarm sound with one of your own .wav files. In addition, the license bug was (hopefully and finally) resolved.

So if you experience any problems, or if you have any questions or suggestions for the next release, feel free to let me know in the comments or drop me an e-mail.

Get it from Skype Extras

If you consider a donation (which would make me happy:-)), you can do so with the button below.

development | 13 Comments »

Update: In the meantime beta version 0.2 of this plugin has been published. Go here.

As already noted in one of my previous posts, I have been looking for a Skype plugin that will let me set individual status notifications for my contacts. Although Skype has a build-in option for notifying you, when your contacts’ status changes (by little fade-in windows), this option affects ALL of your contacts. This can get quite annoying, especially if you have more than 10 buddys.

development | 4 Comments »

This was going to be a whole post about the advantages and disadvantages of both (or the four), but luckily someone already summed it up and included a whole bunch of valuable sources in his post. However, most of them are more than one year old, which is why I’d like to have your comments and of course your vote below. What do you use to develop your GUIs?

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development | 1 Comment »

Since I may have to do some PHP programming in the near future, I have been looking for a nice IDE over the last week. For syntax highlighting and simple editing, Notepad++ has been doing the job so far, but I’m getting sick and tired of having to use the print() command to output variables I need to check. Thus, code debugging was one of the mandatory features I was aiming for in my conquest for an IDE. As of yet, I have been using Eclipse for my Java programming, being very satisfied with its feature list as well as its GUI and the fact that it’s supported by a huge community. Furthermore, it’s open-source (therefore freely available) and easily extensible through hundrets of plugins, available via the Eclipse-internal software update mechanism.

development | 1 Comment »

I got tired of browsing to the eBay website every hour to check my current auction. As I am using Yahoo Widgets I searched their website for a widget that would show me the current status of my auction. What I found was a widget called “eBay Watcher” by Michael Gaines. Unfortunately, it was pretty outdated and didn’t support auctions from Europe (those in €). So I fiddled a little with the code, et voilà “eBay Watcher Euro“.

So far it’s (still) pretty basic and only supports one auction at a time. Once loaded, you need to put in the auction ID found in the right upper corner of the eBay auction’s page. Try it out!

development | 1 Comment »

Here is a list of software I intend to implement, once I can spare the extra time. Please let me know if you already know any freeware (under Windows) that does any of the following:

• Flickr Tag Synchronizer: The idea is to have a program that will synchronize the additional photo data (tags, geo-tags, comments), which was associated with your pictures when they were uploaded to or edited in Flickr with the source pictures on your computer. I would like to have all the meta data in the pictures file-header and to be honest, I’m not too keen to do the tagging all over again.

development | 3 Comments »