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 »

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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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 »