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• Change The Windows 7 Start Orb the Easy Way

  - by Matthew Guay

  Want to make your Windows 7 PC even more unique and personalized?  Then check out this easy guide on how to change your start orb in Windows 7. Getting Started First, download the free Windows 7 Start Button Changer (link below), and extract the contents of the folder.  It contains the app along with a selection of alternate start button orbs you can try out.   Before changing the start button, we advise creating a system restore point in case anything goes wrong.  Enter System Restore in your Start menu search, and select “Create a restore point”. Please note:  We tested this on both the 32 bit and 64 bit editions of Windows 7, and didn’t encounter any problems or stability issues.  That said, it is always prudent to make a restore point just in case a problem did happen. Click the Create button… Then enter a name for the restore point, and click Create. Changing the Start Orb. Once this is finished, run the Windows 7 Start Button Changer as administrator by right-clicking on it and selecting “Run as administrator”.  Accept the UAC prompt that will appear. If you don’t run it as an administrator, you may see the following warning.  Click Quit, and then run again as administrator. You should now see the Windows 7 Start Button Changer.  On the left it shows what your current (default) start orb looks like inactive, when hovered over, and when selected.  Click the orb on the right to select a new start button. Here we browsed to the sample orbs folder, and selected one of them.  Let’s give Windows the Media Center orb for a start orb.  Click the orb you want, and then select open. When you click Open, your screen will momentarily freeze and your taskbar will disappear.  When it reappears, your computer will have gone from having the old, default Start orb style… …to your new, exciting Start orb!  Here it is default, and glowing when hovered over. Now, the Windows 7 Start Orb Changer will change, and show your new Start orb on the left side.  If you would like to revert to the default orb, simply click the folder icon to restore it.  Or, if you would like to change the orb again, restore the original first and then select a new one. The orbs don’t have to be round; here’s a fancy Windows 7 logo as the start button. The start orb change will work in the Aero and Aero basic (which Windows 7 Start uses) themes, but will not show up in the classic, Windows 2000 style themes.  Here’s how the new start button looks with the Aero Classic theme: There are tons of orbs available, including this cute smiley, so choose one that you like to make your computer uniquely yours. Conclusion This is a cute way to make your desktop unique, and can be a great way to make a truly personalized theme.  Let us know your favorite Start orb! Link Download the Windows 7 Start Button Changer Find more Start orbs at deviantART Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Change the Windows 7 or Vista Power Buttons to Shut Down/Sleep/HibernateQuick Tip: Change the Registered Owner in WindowsSpeed up Windows Vista Start Menu Search By Limiting ResultsWhy Does My Password Expire in Windows?Change Your Computer Name in Windows 7 or Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Quickly Schedule Meetings With NeedtoMeet Share Flickr Photos On Facebook Automatically Are You Blocked On Gtalk? Find out Discover Latest Android Apps On AppBrain The Ultimate Guide For YouTube Lovers Will it Blend? iPad Edition

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• Enjoy How-To Geek User Style Script Goodness

  - by Asian Angel

  Most people may not be aware of it but there are two user style scripts that have been created just for use with the How-To Geek website. If you are curious then join us as we look at these two scripts at work. Note: User Style Scripts & User Scripts can be added to most browsers but we are using Firefox for our examples here. The How-to Geek Wide User Style Script The first of the two scripts affects the viewing width of the website’s news content. Here you can see everything set at the normal width. When you visit the UserStyles website you will be able to view basic information about the script and see the code itself if desired. On the right side of the page is the good part though. Since we are using Firefox with Greasemonkey installed we chose the the “install as a user script option”. Notice that the script is available for other browsers as well (very nice!) Within a few moments of clicking on the “install as a user script button” you will see the following window asking confirmation for installing the script. After installing the user style script and refreshing the page it has now stretched out to fill 90% of the browser window’s area. Definitely nice! The How-To Geek – News and Comments (600px) User Style Script The second script can be very useful for anyone with the limited screen real-estate of a netbook. You can see another of the articles from here at the site viewed in a  “normal mode”. Once again you can view basic information about this particular user style script and view the code if desired. As above we have the Firefox/Greasemonkey combination at work so we installed as a user script. This is one of the great things about using Greasemonkey…it always checks with you to make certain that no unauthorized scripts are added. Once the script was installed and we refreshed the page things looked very very different. All the focus has been placed on the article itself and any comments attached to the article. For those who may be curious this is what the homepage looks like using this script. Conclusion If you have been wanting to add a little bit of “viewing spice” to your browser for the How-To Geek website then definitely pop over to the User Styles website and give these two scripts a try. Using Opera Browser? See our how-to for adding user scripts to Opera here. Links Install the How-to Geek Wide User Style Script Install the How-To Geek – News and Comments (600px) User Style Script Download the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox (Mozilla Add-ons) Download the Stylish extension for Firefox (Mozilla Add-ons) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Set Up User Scripts in Opera BrowserSet Gmail as Default Mail Client in UbuntuHide Flash Animations in Google ChromeShell Script to Upload a File to the Same Subdirectory on a Remote ServerAutomate Adding Bookmarks to del.icio.us TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Quickly Schedule Meetings With NeedtoMeet Share Flickr Photos On Facebook Automatically Are You Blocked On Gtalk? Find out Discover Latest Android Apps On AppBrain The Ultimate Guide For YouTube Lovers Will it Blend? iPad Edition

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• Get Pop Up Notifications for Your RSS Feeds with Feed Notifier

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Are you looking for a way to get updates from your favorite websites right to your desktop?  If so, you’ll want to check out Feed Notifier. This free Windows application runs in the system tray and delivers pop-up notifications to your desktop when your subscribed RSS feeds are updated. Download and install Feed Notifier. (Download link below) When you are finished installing, the Feed Notifier Preferences window will open. Click on the Add… button to add an RSS feed. Copy and paste the Feed URL into the text box and click Next. Choose your polling interval. This is how often your feed will be checked for new items. You can set your polling interval for days, hours, minutes, or even seconds. Click FInish. At your configured interval, Feed Notifier will check your feeds for new items. If new items are present, they will pop up above your system tray.  You’ll get an intro portion of the article. Simply Click the headline in the feed pop up… …to open the full article in your default browser. Setting Preferences Open the preferences of Feed Notifier, by going to Start > All Programs > Feed Notifier, or right clicking on the system tray icon and selecting Preferences. On the Pop-ups tab you can configure the duration in seconds that each article stays displayed on your screen. The default is five seconds. You can also change the size of the display, the theme, and the amount of content displayed.   The Options tab offers additional configurations like article caching and using a proxy server. Filter tab allows you to filter in or out certain content. To add a filter click Add…   … then type in the filter rule. You can even choose to apply it to only certain feeds. Click OK. Feed Notifier will display on the filters tab the number of times the filter is applied. Click OK when finished.   You can scroll though the articles by using the forward and back buttons at the lower left, or use the play / pause buttons to move though the articles in a slideshow-type fashion.   Feed Notifier is nice way to get your updated feeds directly to your desktop in a timely fashion. It’s supports all RSS and Atom feeds and features a clean look and feel with plenty of customizable options. Download Feed Notifier Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Make Outlook Stop Using Internet Explorer’s RSS FeedsChange Default Feed Reader in FirefoxView Feedburner Subscriber Numbers Even if FeedCount is Not DisplayedSubscribe to RSS Feeds in Chrome with a Single ClickOrganize your RSS Feeds with FeedDemon TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Heaven & Hell Finder Icon Using TrueCrypt to Secure Your Data Quickly Schedule Meetings With NeedtoMeet Share Flickr Photos On Facebook Automatically Are You Blocked On Gtalk? Find out Discover Latest Android Apps On AppBrain

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• Taking a screenshot from within a Silverlight #WP7 application

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  Often times, you want to take a screenshot of an application’s page. There can be multiple reasons. For instance, you can use this to provide an easy feedback method to beta testers. I find this super invaluable when working on integration of design in an app, and the user can take quick screenshots, attach them to an email and send them to me directly from the Windows Phone device. However, the same mechanism can also be used to provide screenshots are a feature of the app, for example if the user wants to save the current status of his application, etc. Caveats Note the following: The code requires an XNA library to save the picture to the media library. To have this, follow the steps: In your application (or class library), add a reference to Microsoft.Xna.Framework. In your code, add a “using” statement to Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media. In the Properties folder, open WMAppManifest.xml and add the following capability: ID_CAP_MEDIALIB. The method call will fail with an exception if the device is connected to the Zune application on the PC. To avoid this, either disconnect the device when testing, or end the Zune application on the PC. While the method call will not fail on the emulator, there is no way to access the media library, so it is pretty much useless on this platform. This method only prints Silverlight elements to the output image. Other elements (such as a WebBrowser control’s content for instance) will output a black rectangle. The code public static void SaveToMediaLibrary( FrameworkElement element, string title) { try { var bmp = new WriteableBitmap(element, null); var ms = new MemoryStream(); bmp.SaveJpeg( ms, (int)element.ActualWidth, (int)element.ActualHeight, 0, 100); ms.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin); var lib = new MediaLibrary(); var filePath = string.Format(title + ".jpg"); lib.SavePicture(filePath, ms); MessageBox.Show( "Saved in your media library!", "Done", MessageBoxButton.OK); } catch { MessageBox.Show( "There was an error. Please disconnect your phone from the computer before saving.", "Cannot save", MessageBoxButton.OK); } } This method can save any FrameworkElement. Typically I use it to save a whole page, but you can pass any other element to it. On line 7, we create a new WriteableBitmap. This excellent class can render a visual tree into a bitmap. Note that for even more features, you can use the great WriteableBitmapEx class library (which is open source). On lines 9 to 16, we save the WriteableBitmap to a MemoryStream. The only format supported by default is JPEG, however it is possible to convert to other formats with the ImageTools library (also open source). Lines 18 to 20 save the picture to the Windows Phone device’s media library. Using the image To retrieve the image, simply launch the Pictures library on the phone. The image will be in Saved Pictures. From here, you can share the image (by email, for instance), or synchronize it with the PC using the Zune software. Saving to other platforms It is of course possible to save to other platforms than the media library. For example, you can send the image to a web service, or save it to the isolated storage on the device. To do this, instead of using a MemoryStream, you can use any other stream (such as a web request stream, or a file stream) and save to that instead. Hopefully this code will be helpful to you! Happy coding, Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• A story of Murphy&ndash;my technical issues at TechDays Switzerland #chtd

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  I had two sessions at the recent Swiss TechDays. While the first one (Advanced Development for Windows Phone 8) went extremely well (I think), I had a very annoying technical issue in the beginning of my second session. First let me add that I talked to Microsoft about that and I hope they will change a few things in the room assignment for next year. My two sessions were one right after the other, with only 15 minutes break to change room. I don’t mind having two sessions so close from each other, but I would really like them to be in the same room in order to avoid having to move my laptops (plural, that will become important later) and redoing the tech check. That being said, I am guilty of not checking where my talks would be before the day before the conference, and when I did notice, it was too late to change it. After my first session, I quickly moved to the other room and setup my main laptop, a Dell Precision. We tested the video output (VGA) and didn’t notice anything special. The projectors are using a fairly high resolution (kudos to the Basel conference center for not having old school 1024x768 projectors anymore, that makes Blend really hard to demo ;) but since everything went great during the first talk, I was not worried. In fact I even had some time to chat with some early attendees about my Microsoft Surface and the Samsung Slate 7, which I had carried with me in addition to the Precision. I just thought it would be nice to show the hardware that Windows 8 can run on, without thinking any further. When the session started, I immediately noticed that the main screen was not showing anything. I thought I had just forgotten to switch to “duplicate” for the video output, and did that with a quick Win-P. However it didn’t “hold”. After 2 seconds, it reverted back to a black display for my attendees. Then I started to really worry. We tried everything, switching from VGA to HDMI, changing the resolution, setting the projector as primary display, but nothing did the trick. The projector was just refusing to show my screen. Now, to show you how despaired I started to be, I even considered using the “extend” setting (which worked just fine), and to use one of the feedback monitors on the floor but really it was super cumbersome. Eventually, my last resort arrived: I started my Samsung Slate 7, which by chance has Visual Studio 12 and Blend 5 installed, plugged the HDMI projector in the dock (yes, I had the dock with me, which I usually don’t!), connected it to internet (had to enter a long password for that), loaded the source code from my main machine using a USB stick and…. finally started to give my presentation. All in all I think we lost about 10 minutes. Amongst the most horrible minutes of my whole life, truly (yes I am blessed, I didn’t have that many horrible minutes in my life ;) I really want to apologize to my attendees. We joked a bit during the attempts to resolve the issue, the reactions I had after the session were all very nice and sympathetic. Only a handful of people left my session while I was having the issues, and I really don’t blame them (who knew how long the problem would last!!). But still, I probably talked at more than 60 sessions over the years, and this was by far my most painful moment. What did I learn? So what did I learn from this? Well from now on I will always have my slate ready with the latest source code, internet connection and every tool I might need during the presentation. This way, if I detect even a hint that the Precision might not work, I will just switch to the Slate. The experience of presenting on the slate is actually not bad at all, it is just a bit slow for my taste, but it does work. By the way, I will be posting the code and slides for my sessions very soon, I just need to “clean it and zip it”. Stay tuned, and thanks again for your patience in that horrible circumstance. Cheers Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• Sunshine after the iCloud release?

  - by Laila

  "Why should I believe them? They're the ones that brought us MobileMe? It was not our finest hour, but we learned a lot." Steve Jobs June 6th 2011 Apple's new cloud service has been met with uncritical excitement by industry commentators.  It is wonderful what a rename can do.  Apple has had a 'cloud' offering for three years called MobileMe, successor to .MAC and  iTools, so iCloud is now the fourth internet service Apple have attempted. If this had been Microsoft, there would have been catcalls all around the blogosphere.  I'll admit that there is a lot more functionality announced for iCloud than MobileMe has ever managed to achieve, but then almost anything has more functionality than MobileMe.  It's an expensive service (£120 a year in the UK, $90 in the states), launched as far back as  June 9, 2008, that has delivered very little and suffered a string of technical problems; the documentation was mainly  a community effort, built up gradually by the frustrated and angry users. It was supposed to synchronise PC Outlook calendars but couldn't manage Microsoft Exchange (Google could, of course). It used WebDAV to allow Windows users to attach to the filestore, but didn't document how to do it. The method for downloading and uploading files to the cloud-based filestore was ridiculously clunky. It allowed you to post photos on a public site, but forgot to include a way of deleting photos. I could go on with the list, but you can explore the many sites that have flourished to inhabit the support-vacuum left by Apple. MobileMe should have had all the bright new clever things announced for iCloud. Apple dropped the ball, and allowed services such as Flickr to fill the void. However, their PR skills are such that, a name-change later (the .ME.com email address remains), it has turned a rout into a victory, and hundreds of earnest bloggers have been extolling Apple's expertise in cloud matters. This must be frustrating for the other cloud providers who have quietly got the technology working right. I wish iCloud well, even though I resent the expensive mess they made of MobileMe. Apple promise that iCloud will sync files, apps, app data, and media across all the different iOS5 devices, Macs, and PCs. It also hopes to sync music across devices, but not video content. They've offered existing MobileMe users free use of the MobileMe service for a year as the product is morphed, and they will be able to transfer to iCloud when it is launched in the autumn.  On June 30, 2012, MobileMe will die, and Apple's iWeb is also soon to join iTools and .MAC in the hereafter. So why get excited about iCloud? That all depends on the level of PC integration. Whereas iOS5 machines will be full participants in the new world of data-sharing (Sorry iPod Touch users) what about .NET libraries? There is talk of synchronising 'My Pictures' libraries with iOS5 and iMac machines, but little more detail as yet. Apple has a lot to prove with iCloud and anyone with actual experience of their past attempts to get into cloud services will be wary.

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• The gestures of Windows 8 (Consumer preview): part 2, More about Search

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  This is part 2 of a multipart blog post about the gestures and shortcuts in Windows 8 consumer preview. Part 1 can be found here! More about the Search charm In the first installment of this series, we talked about the charms and mentioned a few gestures to display the Search charm. Search is a very central and powerful feature in Windows 8, and allows you to search in Apps, Settings, Files and within Metro applications that support the Search contract. There are a few cool features around the Search, and especially the applications associated to it. I already mentioned the keyboard shortcuts you can use: Win-C shows the Charms bar (same as swiping from the right bevel towards the center of the screen). Win-Q open the Search fly out with Apps preselected. Win-W open the Search fly out with Settings preselected. Win-F open the Search fly out with Files preselected. Searching in Metro apps In addition to these three search domains, you can also search a Metro app, as long as it supports the Search contract (check this Build video to learn more about the Search contract). These apps show up in the Search flyout as shown here: Notice the list of apps below the Files button? That’s what we are talking about. First of all, the list order changes when you search in some applications. For instance, in the image above, I had used the Store with the Search charm. This is why the store shows up as the first app. I am not 100% what algorithm is used here (sorting according to number of searches is my guess), but try it out and try to figure it out Applications that have never been searched are sorted alphabetically. Does it mean we will see cool app names like ___AAA_MyCoolApp? I certainly hope not!! Pinning You can also pin often used apps to the Search flyout. To pin an app with the mouse, right click on it in the Search flyout and select Pin from the context menu. With the keyboard, use the arrow keys to go down to the selected app, and then open the context menu. With the finger, simply tap and hold until you see a semi transparent rectangle indicating that the context menu will be shown, then release. The context menu opens up and you can select Pin. Pin context menu Pinned apps Unpinning, Hiding Using the same technique as for pinning here above, you can also unpin a pinned application. Finally, you can also choose to hide an app from the Search flyout altogether. This is a convenient way to clean up and make it easy to find stuff. Note: At this point, I am not sure how to re-add a hidden app to the Search flyout. If anyone knows, please mention it in the comments, thanks! Reordering You can also reorder pinned apps. To do this, with the finger, tap, hold and pull the app to the side, then pull it vertically to reorder it. You can also reorder with the mouse, simply by clicking on an app and pulling it vertically to the place you want to put it. I don’t think there is a way to do that with the keyboard though. That’s it for now More gestures will follow in a next installment! Have fun with Windows 8   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• XNA Notes 006

  - by George Clingerman

  If you used to think the XNA community was small and inactive, hopefully these XNA Notes are opening your eyes. And I honestly feel like I’m still only catching the tail end of everything that’s going on. It’s a large and active community and you can be so mired down in one part of it you miss all sorts of cool stuff another part is doing. XNA is many things to a lot of people and that makes for a lot of really awesome things going on. So here’s what I saw going on this last week! Time Critical XNA New: XNA Team - Peer Review now closes for XNA 3.1 games http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/02/08/peer-review-pipeline-closed-for-new-xna-gs-3-1-games-or-updates-on-app-hub.aspx http://twitter.com/XNACommunity/statuses/34649816529256448 The XNA Team posts about a meet up with Microsoft for Creator’s going to be at GDC, March 3rd at the Lobby Bar http://on.fb.me/fZungJ XNA Team: @mklucher is busying playing the the bubblegum on WP7 made by a member of the XNA team (although reportedly made in Silverlight? Crazy! ;) ) http://twitter.com/mklucher/statuses/34645662737895426 http://bubblegum.me Shawn Hargreaves posts multiple posts (is this a sign that something new is coming from the XNA team? Usually when Shawn has time to post, something has just wrapped up…) Random Shuffle http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/02/09/random-shuffle.aspx Doing the right thing: resume, rewind or skip ahead http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/02/10/doing-the-right-thing-resume-rewind-or-skip-ahead.aspx XNA Developers: Andrew Russel was on .NET Rocks recently talking with Carl and Richard about developing games for Xbox, iPhone and Android http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?ShowNum=635 Eric W. releases the Fishing Girl source code into the wild http://ericw.ca/blog/posts/fishing-girl-now-open-source/ http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/74642/454512.aspx#454512 BinaryTweedDeej reminds that XNA community that Indie City wants you involved http://twitter.com/BinaryTweedDeej/statuses/34596114028044288 http://www.indiecity.com Mike McLaughlin (@mikebmcl) releases his first two XNA articles on the TechNet wiki http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/xna-framework-overview.aspx http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/content-pipeline-overview.aspx John Watte plays around with the Content Pipeline and Music Visualization exploring just what can be done. http://www.enchantedage.com/xna-content-pipeline-fft-song-analysis http://www.enchantedage.com/fft-in-xna-content-pipeline-for-beat-detection-for-the-win Simon Stevens writes up his talk on Vector Collision Physics http://www.simonpstevens.com/News/VectorCollisionPhysics @domipheus puts together an XNA Task Manager http://www.flickr.com/photos/domipheus/5405603197/ MadNinjaSkillz releases his fork of Nick's Easy Storage component on CodePlex http://twitter.com/MadNinjaSkillz/statuses/34739039068229634 http://ezstorage.codeplex.com @ActiveNick was interviewed by Rob Cameron and discusses Windows Phone 7, Bing Maps and XNA http://twitter.com/ActiveNick/statuses/35348548526546944 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/cc537546 Radiangames (Luke Schneider) posts about converting his games from XNA to Unity http://radiangames.com/?p=592 UberMonkey (@ElementCy) posts about a new project in the works, CubeTest a Minecraft style terrain http://www.ubergamermonkey.com/personal-projects/new-project-in-the-works/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Ubergamermonkey+%28UberGamerMonkey%29 Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): VideoGamer Rob review Bonded Realities http://videogamerrob.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/xblig-review-bonded-realities/ XBLIG Round Up on Gamergeddon http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/02/06/xbox-indie-game-round-up-february-6th/ Are gamers still rating Indie Games after the Xbox Dashboard update? http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/06/are-gamers-still-rating-indie-games-after-the-xbox-dashboard-update.aspx Joystiq - Xbox Live Indie Gems: Corrupted http://www.joystiq.com/2011/02/04/xbox-live-indie-gems-corrupted/ Raymond Matthews of DarkStarMatryx reviews (Almost) Total Mayhem and Aban Hawkins & the 1000 Spikes http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=225 http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=229 8 Bit Horse reviews Aban Hawkins & the 1000 spikes http://8bithorse.blogspot.com/2011/01/aban-hawkins-1000-spikes-xbl-indie.html 2010 wrap-up for FunInfused Games http://www.krissteele.net/blogdetails.aspx?id=245 NeoGaf roundup of January's XBLIGs http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=420528 Armless Ocotopus interviews Michael Ventnor creator of Bonded Realities http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/02/07/interview-michael-ventnor-of-red-crest-studios/ @recharge_media posts about the new city music for Woodvale in Sin Rising http://rechargemedia.com/2011/02/08/new-city-theme-woodvale/ @DrMisty posts some footage of YoYoYo in action http://www.mstargames.co.uk/mistryblogmain/54-yoyoyoblogs/184-video-update.html Xona Games - Decimation X3 on Reviews on the Run http://video.citytv.com/video/detail/782443063001.000000/reviews-on-the-run--february-8-2011/g4/ @benkane gives an early peek at his action RPG coming to XBLIG http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDF_PrvtwU8 Rock, Paper Shotgun talks to Zeboyd games about bringing Cthulhu Saves the World to PC http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/02/11/summoning-cthulhu-natter-with-zeboyd/ Xbox LIVE Indieverse interviews the creator of Bonded Realities http://xbl-indieverse.blogspot.com/2011/02/xbl-indieverse-interview-red-crest.html XNA Game Development: Dream-In-Code posts about an upcoming XNA Challenge/Coding contest http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/blog/1385/entry-3192-xna-challengecontest/ Sgt.Conker covers Fishing Girl and IndieFreaks Game Framework release http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/02/fishing-girl-did-not-sell-a-single-copy/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/02/indiefreaks-game-framework-v0-2-0-0/ @slyprid releases Transmute v0.40a with lots of new features and fixes http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/34125423067533312 http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/35326876243337216 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/ Jeff Brown writes an XNA 4.0 tutorial on Saving/Loading on the Xbox 360 http://www.robotfootgames.com/xna-tutorials/92-xna-tutorial-savingloading-on-xbox-360-40 XNA for Silverlight Developers: Part 3- Animation http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/XNA-for-Silverlight-developers-Part-3-Animation-transforms.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+xna-connection-twitter-specific-stream+%28XNA+Connection%27s+Twitter+specific+stream%29 The news from Nokia is definitely something XNA developers will want to keep their eye on http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/nokia-developer-news/2011/02/11/letter-to-developers?sf1066337=1

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• How to Use An Antivirus Boot Disc or USB Drive to Ensure Your Computer is Clean

  - by Chris Hoffman

  If your computer is infected with malware, running an antivirus within Windows may not be enough to remove it. If your computer has a rootkit, the malware may be able to hide itself from your antivirus software. This is where bootable antivirus solutions come in. They can clean malware from outside the infected Windows system, so the malware won’t be running and interfering with the clean-up process. The Problem With Cleaning Up Malware From Within Windows Standard antivirus software runs within Windows. If your computer is infected with malware, the antivirus software will have to do battle with the malware. Antivirus software will try to stop the malware and remove it, while the malware will attempt to defend itself and shut down the antivirus. For really nasty malware, your antivirus software may not be able to fully remove it from within Windows. Rootkits, a type of malware that hides itself, can be even trickier. A rootkit could load at boot time before other Windows components and prevent Windows from seeing it, hide its processes from the task manager, and even trick antivirus applications into believing that the rootkit isn’t running. The problem here is that the malware and antivirus are both running on the computer at the same time. The antivirus is attempting to fight the malware on its home turf — the malware can put up a fight. Why You Should Use an Antivirus Boot Disc Antivirus boot discs deal with this by approaching the malware from outside Windows. You boot your computer from a CD or USB drive containing the antivirus and it loads a specialized operating system from the disc. Even if your Windows installation is completely infected with malware, the special operating system won’t have any malware running within it. This means the antivirus program can work on the Windows installation from outside it. The malware won’t be running while the antivirus tries to remove it, so the antivirus can methodically locate and remove the harmful software without it interfering. Any rootkits won’t be able to set up the tricks they use at Windows boot time to hide themselves from the rest o the operating system. The antivirus will be able to see the rootkits and remove them. These tools are often referred to as “rescue disks.” They’re meant to be used when you need to rescue a hopelessly infected system. Bootable Antivirus Options As with any type of antivirus software, you have quite a few options. Many antivirus companies offer bootable antivirus systems based on their antivirus software. These tools are generally free, even when they’re offered by companies that specialized in paid antivirus solutions. Here are a few good options: avast! Rescue Disk – We like avast! for offering a capable free antivirus with good detection rates in independent tests. avast! now offers the ability to create an antivirus boot disc or USB drive. Just navigate to the Tools -> Rescue Disk option in the avast! desktop application to create bootable media. BitDefender Rescue CD – BitDefender always seems to receive good scores in independent tests, and the BitDefender Rescue CD offers the same antivirus engine in the form of a bootable disc. Kaspersky Rescue Disk – Kaspersky also receives good scores in independent tests and offers its own antivirus boot disc. These are just a handful of options. If you prefer another antivirus for some reason — Comodo, Norton, Avira, ESET, or almost any other antivirus product — you’ll probably find that it offers its own system rescue disk. How to Use an Antivirus Boot Disc Using an antivirus boot disc or USB drive is actually pretty simple. You’ll just need to find the antivirus boot disc you want to use and burn it to disc or install it on a USB drive. You can do this part on any computer, so you can create antivirus boot media on a clean computer and then take it to an infected computer. Insert the boot media into the infected computer and then reboot. The computer should boot from the removable media and load the secure antivirus environment. (If it doesn’t, you may need to change the boot order in your BIOS or UEFI firmware.) You can then follow the instructions on your screen to scan your Windows system for malware and remove it. No malware will be running in the background while you do this. Antivirus boot discs are useful because they allow you to detect and clean malware infections from outside an infected operating system. If the operating system is severely infected, it may not be possible to remove — or even detect — all the malware from within it. Image Credit: aussiegall on Flickr     

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• HTG Explains: Why is Printer Ink So Expensive?

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Printer ink is expensive, more expensive per drop than fine champagne or even human blood. If you haven’t gone paperless, you’ll notice that you’re paying a lot for new ink cartridges — more than seems reasonable. Purchasing the cheapest inkjet printer and buying official ink cartridge replacements is the most expensive thing you can do. There are ways to save money on ink if you must continue to print documents. Cheap Printers, Expensive Ink Ink jet printers are often very cheap. That’s because they’re sold at cost, or even at a loss — the manufacturer either makes no profit from the printer itself or loses money. The manufacturer will make most of its money from the printer cartridges you buy later. Even if the company does make a bit of money from each printer sold, it makes a much larger profit margin on ink. Rather than selling you a printer that may be rather expensive, they want to sell you a cheap printer and make money on an ongoing basis by providing expensive printer ink. It’s been compared to the razor model — sell a razor cheaply and mark up the razor blades. Rather than making a one-time profit on the razor, you’ll make continuing profit as the customer keeps buying razor blade replacements — or ink, in this case. Many printer manufacturers go out of their way to make it difficult for you to use unofficial ink cartridges, building microchips into their official ink cartridges. If you use an unofficial cartridge or refill an official cartridge, the printer may refuse to use it. Lexmark once argued in court that unofficial microchips that enable third-party ink cartridges would violate their copyright and Lexmark has argued that creating an unofficial microchip to bypass this restriction on third-party ink would violate Lexmark’s copyright and be illegal under the US DMCA. Luckily, they lost this argument. What Printer Companies Say Printer companies have put forth their own arguments in the past, attempting to justify the high cost of official ink cartridges and microchips that block any competition. In a Computer World story from 2010, HP argued that they spend a billion dollars each year on “ink research and development.” They point out that printer ink “must be formulated to withstand heating to 300 degrees, vaporization, and being squirted at 30 miles per hour, at a rate of 36,000 drops per second, through a nozzle one third the size of a human hair. After all that it must dry almost instantly on the paper.” They also argue that printers have become more efficient and use less ink to print, while third-party cartridges are less reliable. Companies that use microchips in their ink cartridges argue that only the microchip has the ability to enforce an expiration date, preventing consumers from using old ink cartridges. There’s something to all these arguments, sure — but they don’t seem to justify the sky-high cost of printer ink or the restriction on using third-party or refilled cartridges. Saving Money on Printing Ultimately, the price of something is what people are willing to pay and printer companies have found that most consumers are willing to pay this much for ink cartridge replacements. Try not to fall for it: Don’t buy the cheapest inkjet printer. Consider your needs when buying a printer and do some research. You’ll save more money in the long run. Consider these basic tips to save money on printing: Buy Refilled Cartridges: Refilled cartridges from third parties are generally much cheaper. Printer companies warn us away from these, but they often work very well. Refill Your Own Cartridges: You can get do-it-yourself kits for refilling your own printer ink cartridges, but this can be messy. Your printer may refuse to accept a refilled cartridge if the cartridge contains a microchip. Switch to a Laser Printer: Laser printers use toner, not ink cartridges. If you print a lot of black and white documents, a laser printer can be cheaper. Buy XL Cartridges: If you are buying official printer ink cartridges, spend more money each time. The cheapest ink cartridges won’t contain much ink at all, while larger “XL” ink cartridges will contain much more ink for only a bit more money. It’s often cheaper to buy in bulk. Avoid Printers With Tri-Color Ink Cartridges: If you’re printing color documents, you’ll want to get a printer that uses separate ink cartridges for all its colors. For example, let’s say your printer has a “Color” cartridge that contains blue, green, and red ink. If you print a lot of blue documents and use up all your blue ink, the Color cartridge will refuse to function — now all you can do is throw away your cartridge and buy a new one, even if the green and red ink chambers are full. If you had a printer with separate color cartridges, you’d just have to replace the blue cartridge. If you’ll be buying official ink cartridges, be sure to compare the cost of cartridges when buying a printer. The cheapest printer may be more expensive in the long run. Of course, you’ll save the most money if you stop printing entirely and go paperless, keeping digital copies of your documents instead of paper ones. Image Credit: Cliva Darra on Flickr     

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• Adding UCM as a search source in Windows Explorer

  - by kyle.hatlestad

  A customer recently pointed out to me that Windows 7 supports federated search within Windows Explorer. This means you can perform searches to external sources such as Google, Flickr, YouTube, etc right from within Explorer. While we do have the Desktop Integration Suite which offers searching within Explorer, I thought it would be interesting to look into this method which would not require any client software to implement. Basically, federated searching hooks up in Windows Explorer through the OpenSearch protocol. A Search Connector Descriptor file is run and it installs the search provider. The file is a .osdx file which is an OpenSearch Description document. It describes the search provider you are hooking up to along with the URL for the query. If those results can come back as an RSS or ATOM feed, then you're all set. So the first step is to install the RSS Feeds component from the UCM Samples page on OTN. If you're on 11g, I've found the RSS Feeds works just fine on that version too. Next, you want to perform a Quick Search with a particular search term and then copy the RSS link address for that search result. Here is what an example URL might looks like: http://server:16200/cs/idcplg?IdcService=GET_SCS_FEED&feedName=search_results&QueryText=%28+%3cqsch%3eoracle%3c%2fqsch %3e+%29&SortField=dInDate&SortOrder=Desc&ResultCount=20&SearchQueryFormat= Universal&SearchProviders=server& Now you want to create a new text file and start out with this information: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><OpenSearchDescription xmlns:ms-ose="http://schemas.microsoft.com/opensearchext/2009/"> <ShortName></ShortName> <Description></Description> <Url type="application/rss+xml" template=""/> <Url type="text/html" template=""/> </OpenSearchDescription> Enter a ShortName and Description. The ShortName will be the value used when displaying the search provider in Explorer. In the template attribute for the first Url element, enter the URL copied previously. You will then need to convert the ampersand symbols to '&' to make them XML compliant. Finally, you'll want to switch out the search term with '{searchTerms}'. For the second Url element, you can do the same thing except you want to copy the UCM search results URL from the page of results. That URL will look something like: http://server:16200/cs/idcplg?IdcService=GET_SEARCH_RESULTS&SortField=dInDate&SortOrder=Desc&ResultCount=20&QueryText=%3Cqsch%3Eoracle%3C%2Fqsch%3E&listTemplateId= &ftx=1&SearchQueryFormat=Universal&TargetedQuickSearchSelection= &MiniSearchText=oracle Again, convert the ampersand symbols and replace the search term with '{searchTerms}'. When complete, save the file with the .osdx extension. The completed file should look like: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/" xmlns:ms-ose="http://schemas.microsoft.com/opensearchext/2009/"> <ShortName>Universal Content Management</ShortName> <Description>OpenSearch for UCM via Windows 7 Search Federation.</Description> <Url type="application/rss+xml" template="http://server:16200/cs/idcplg?IdcService=GET_SCS_FEED&amp;feedName=search_results&amp;QueryText=%28+%3Cqsch%3E{searchTerms}%3C%2fqsch%3E+%29&amp;SortField=dInDate&amp;SortOrder=Desc&amp;ResultCount=200&amp;SearchQueryFormat=Universal"/> <Url type="text/html" template="http://server:16200/cs/idcplg?IdcService=GET_SEARCH_RESULTS&amp;SortField=dInDate&amp;SortOrder=Desc&amp;ResultCount=20&amp;QueryText=%3Cqsch%3E{searchTerms}%3C%2Fqsch%3E&amp;listTemplateId=&amp;ftx=1&amp;SearchQueryFormat=Universal&amp;TargetedQuickSearchSelection=&amp;MiniSearchText={searchTerms}"/> </OpenSearchDescription> After you save the file, simply double-click it to create the provider. It will ask if you want to add the search connector to Windows. Click Add and it will add it to the Searches folder in your user folder as well as your Favorites. Now just click on the search icon and in the upper right search box, enter your term. As you are typing, it begins executing searches and the results will come back in Explorer. Now when you double-click on an item, it will try and download the web viewable for viewing. You also have the ability to save the search, just as you would in UCM. And there is a link to Search On Website which will launch your browser and go directly to the search results page there. And with some tweaks to the RSS component, you can make the results a bit more interesting. It supports the Media RSS standard, so you can pass along the thumbnail of the documents in the results. To enable this, edit the rss_resources.htm file in the RSS Feeds component. In the std_rss_feed_begin resource include, add the namespace 'xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/' to the rss definition: <rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/"> Next, in the rss_channel_item_with_thumb include, below the closing image element, add this element: </images> <media:thumbnail url="<$if strIndexOf(thumbnailUrl, "@t") > 0 or strIndexOf(thumbnailUrl, "@g") > 0 or strIndexOf(thumbnailUrl, "@p") > 0$><$rssHttpHost$><$thumbnailUrl$><$elseif dGif$><$HttpWebRoot$>images/docgifs/<$dGif$><$endif$>" /> <description> This and lots of other tweaks can be done to the RSS component to help extend it for optimum use in Explorer. Hopefully this can get you started. *Note: This post also applies to Universal Records Management (URM).

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• doubleTwist is an iTunes Alternative that Supports Several Devices

  - by Mysticgeek

  There are a lot of iTunes users out there, but unfortunately you can’t use it with all of your portable devices. Today we take a look at doubleTwist, which allows you to sync your media with a multitude of portable devices and easily share it as well. Note: You can run doubleTwist on Windows or Mac, and here we take a look at the Windows version. Install & Setup doubleTwist Download and install doubleTwist using the defaults in the wizard… Installation takes several moments and you’ll see the progress while it finishes up. After installation is complete, sign up for an account if you don’t already have one. If you do have an account you can login right away. Enter in your username, email address, and password then click Sign Up.   You’ll get an confirmation email and need to activate the account before you can sign in. Once you’re all signed up, launch doubleTwist and you’ll be ready to start using it. doubleTwist Music The default music store is Amazon MP3 store which might appeal to those of you who are tired of the iTunes music store. A lot of times the music is cheaper and available at higher bit rates. You can start searching for music in the Amazon Music Store and previewing songs. To purchase anything though you will need to sign into your Amazon account.   Under Playlists it allows you to import your playlists from iTunes and Windows Media Player, which is a handy feature if you don’t want to set them up again. Of course you can play your songs through the music player on your desktop. Devices One of the coolest things about doubleTwist is that it supports a lot of different portable media devices including iPod, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android, PSP, Smartphones, and much more. Unfortunately for Zune users…there isn’t any support for the Zune of Zune HD yet. Here we have a Creative Zen attached and can sync songs, pictures, and podcasts. An HTC-S620 Smartphone running Windows Mobile… Even a simple USB drive will be recognized and you can transfer your media to it as well.   Podcasts Finding your favorite audio and video podcasts is easy with the search feature. You can easily manage and subscribe to podcasts in the subscriptions section.   You can watch the video podcasts directly in doubleTwist. Sharing Media Also you can share digital media with your friends or add it to Flickr and YouTube. You can send any pictures, videos, or music in your library to other people by dragging it over. You can email users individually… Or access contacts from your Gmail and Yahoo accounts. There is a limit to how much you can send of video podcasts… only the first 10 minutes. The person you send it to will get a link in their email that points to your My Feed page on the doubleTwist site.   There they can access the media you sent…in this example it’s a video podcast but you can share any media. Other Features Under My Profile you can change your avatar and personal information.   In Preferences you can choose where media is stored, its startup actions, podcast subscriptions, and manage device syncing. Conclusion It’s still in beta stage so expect some bugs, but overall doubleTwist is a solid media player that is easy to use with a clean interface. It’s simple and doesn’t try to do too much so is fairly easy on system resources. The main annoyance is it tries to catalog all of your media out of the box. Which may be alright for some users with smaller media collections, but very irritating to advanced users with large collections. Also there is currently no support for the Zune, but according to their forums, it’s on the way. At the time of this writing it’s in public beta and can be downloaded for XP, Vista, Windows 7 (32 & 64 bit), and Mac OSX. If you’re looking for an iTunes alternative that works with several different portable devices, you might want to give DoubleTwist a try. Download DoubleTwist Public Beta See If Your Media Device is Supported by doubleTwist Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips MusicBee is a Fast and Powerful Music ManagerAvoid the Apple QuickTime Bloat with QT LiteBeginner Geek: Set Default Programs in Windows 7 and VistaBeginner Geeks: OpenOffice is a Free Cross Platform Alternative to MS OfficeManage Devices the Easy Way with Device Stage in Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox) OldTvShows.org – Find episodes of Hitchcock, Soaps, Game Shows and more

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• MVVM Light V4 preview 2 (BL0015) #mvvmlight

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  Over the past few weeks, I have worked hard on a few new features for MVVM Light V4. Here is a second early preview (consider this pre-alpha if you wish). The features are unit-tested, but I am now looking for feedback and there might be bugs! Bug correction: Messenger.CleanupList is now thread safe This was an annoying bug that is now corrected: In some circumstances, an exception could be thrown when the Messenger’s recipients list was cleaned up (i.e. the “dead” instances were removed). The method is called now and then and the exception was thrown apparently at random. In fact it was really a multi-threading issue, which is now corrected. Bug correction: AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers prevents EventToCommand to work This is a particularly annoying regression bug that was introduced in BL0014. In order to allow MVVM Light to work in XBAPs too, I added the AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers attribute to the assemblies. However, we just found out that this causes issues when using EventToCommand. In order to allow EventToCommand to continue working, I reverted to the previous state by removing the AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers attribute for now. I will work with my friends at Microsoft to try and find a solution. Stay tuned. Bug correction: XML documentation file is now generated in Release configuration The XML documentation file was not generated for the Release configuration. This was a simple flag in the project file that I had forgotten to set. This is corrected now. Applying EventToCommand to non-FrameworkElements This feature has been requested in order to be able to execute a command when a Storyboard is completed. I implemented this, but unfortunately found out that EventToCommand can only be added to Storyboards in Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4, but not in WPF or in Windows Phone 7. This obviously limits the usefulness of this change, but I decided to publish it anyway, because it is pretty damn useful in Silverlight… Why not in WPF? In WPF, Storyboards added to a resource dictionary are frozen. This is a feature of WPF which allows to optimize certain objects for performance: By freezing them, it is a contract where we say “this object will not be modified anymore, so do your perf optimization on them without worrying too much”. Unfortunately, adding a Trigger (such as EventTrigger) to an object in resources does not work if this object is frozen… and unfortunately, there is no way to tell WPF not to freeze the Storyboard in the resources… so there is no way around that (at least none I can see. In Silverlight, objects are not frozen, so an EventTrigger can be added without problems. Why not in WP7? In Windows Phone 7, there is a totally different issue: Adding a Trigger can only be done to a FrameworkElement, which Storyboard is not. Here I think that we might see a change in a future version of the framework, so maybe this small trick will work in the future. Workaround? Since you cannot use the EventToCommand on a Storyboard in WPF and in WP7, the workaround is pretty obvious: Handle the Completed event in the code behind, and call the Command from there on the ViewModel. This object can be obtained by casting the DataContext to the ViewModel type. This means that the View needs to know about the ViewModel, but I never had issues with that anyway. New class: NotifyPropertyChanged Sometimes when you implement a model object (for example Customer), you would like to have it implement INotifyPropertyChanged, but without having all the frills of a ViewModelBase. A new class named NotifyPropertyChanged allows you to do that. This class is a simple implementation of INotifyPropertyChaned (with all the overloads of RaisePropertyChanged that were implemented in BL0014). In fact, ViewModelBase inherits NotifyPropertyChanged. ViewModelBase does not implement IDisposable anymore The IDisposable interface and the Dispose method had been marked obsolete in the ViewModelBase class already in V3. Now they have been removed. Note: By this, I do not mean that IDisposable is a bad interface, or that it shouldn’t be used on viewmodels. In the contrary, I know that this interface is very useful in certain circumstances. However, I think that having it by default on every instance of ViewModelBase was sending a wrong message. This interface has a strong meaning in .NET: After Dispose has been executed, the instance should not be used anymore, and should be ready for garbage collection. What I really wanted to have on ViewModelBase was rather a simple cleanup method, something that can be executed now and then during runtime. This is fulfilled by the ICleanup interface and its Cleanup method. If your ViewModels need IDisposable, you can still use it! You will just have to implement the interface on the class itself, because it is not available on ViewModelBase anymore. What’s next? I have a couple exciting new features implemented already but that need more testing before they go live… Just stay tuned and by MIX11 (12-14 April 2011), we should see at least a major addition to MVVM Light Toolkit, as well as another smaller feature which is pretty cool nonetheless More about this later! Happy Coding Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• Supporting users if they're not on your site

  - by Roger Hart

  Have a look at this Read Write Web article, specifically the paragraph in bold and the comments. Have a wry chuckle, or maybe weep for the future of humanity - your call. Then pause, and worry about information architecture. The short story: Read Write Web bumps up the Google rankings for "Facebook login" at the same time as Facebook makes UI changes, and a few hundred users get confused and leave comments on Read Write Web complaining about not being able to log in to their Facebook accounts.* Blindly clicking the first Google result is not a navigation behaviour I'd anticipated for folks visiting big names sites like Facebook. But then, I use Launchy and don't know where any of my files are, depend on Firefox auto-complete, view Facebook through my IM client, and don't need a map to find my backside with both hands. Not all our users behave in the same way, which means not all of our architecture is within our control, and people can get to your content in all sorts of ways. Even if the Read Write Web episode is a prank of some kind (there are, after all, plenty of folks who enjoy orchestrated trolling) it's still a useful reminder. Your users may take paths through and to your content you cannot control, and they are unlikely to deconstruct their assumptions along the way. I guess the meaningful question is: can you still support those users? If they get to you from Google instead of your front door, does what they find still make sense? Does your information architecture still work if your guests come in through the bathroom window? Ok, so here they broke into the house next door - you can't be expected to deal with that. But the rest is well worth thinking about. Other off-site interaction It's rarely going to be as funny as the comments at Read Write Web, but your users are going to do, say, and read things they think of as being about you and your products, in places you don't control. That's good. If you pay attention to it, you get data. Your users get a better experience. There are easy wins, too. Blogs, forums, social media &c. People may look for and find help with your product on blogs and forums, on Twitter, and what have you. They may learn about your brand in the same way. That's fine, it's an interaction you can be part of. It's time-consuming, certainly, but you have the option. You won't get a blogger to incorporate your site navigation just in case your users end up there, but you can be there when they do. Again, Anne Gentle, Gordon McLean and others have covered this in more depth than I could. Direct contact Sales people, customer care, support, they all talk to people. Are they sending links to your content? if so, which bits? Do they know about all of it? Do they have the content they need to support them - messaging that funnels sales, FAQ that are realistically frequent, detailed examples of things people want to do, that kind of thing. Are they sending links because users can't find the good stuff? Are they sending précis of your content, or re-writes, or brand new stuff? If so, does that mean your content isn't up to scratch, or that you've got content missing? Direct sales/care/support interactions are enormously valuable, and can help you know what content your users find useful. You can't have a table of contents or a "See also" in a phonecall, but your content strategy can support more interactions than browsing. *Passing observation about Facebook. For plenty if folks, it is  the internet. Its services are simple versions of what a lot of people use the internet for, and they're aggregated into one stop. Flickr, Vimeo, Wordpress, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all sorts of games, have Facebook doppelgangers that are not only friendlier to entry-level users, they're right there, behind only one layer of authentication. As such, it could own a lot of interaction convention. Heavy users may well not be tech-savvy, and be quite change averse. That doesn't make this episode not dumb, but I'm happy to go easy on 'em.

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• Design a T-shirt for .NET Reflector Pro

  - by Laila

  Win a .NET Reflector Pro license, a box of Red Gate goodies, and a t-shirt printed with your design! Red Gate likes t-shirts. Each of our teams has one. In fact, each individual person has one, numbered according to when they joined the company: Red Gate's 1st, 2nd, and so on right up to Red Gate's 170th, with the slogan "More than just a number". Those t-shirts are important, chiefly because they remind the people wearing them that they are important. But that isn't enough. What really makes us great are the people who choose to use our tools. So we'd like to extend our tradition of t-shirts to include you and put the design of our next shirt entirely in your hands. We'd like you to come up with a witty slogan or create an inventive or simply beautiful t-shirt design for .NET Reflector Pro, our add-in for Visual Studio, which allows you to step into decompiled assemblies whilst debugging in Visual Studio. When you're done, post your masterpiece to Twitter with the hash tag #reflectortees, and @redgate will take a look! We'll pick the best design, and the winner will get a licensed copy of .NET Reflector Pro and a box of Red Gate goodies - not to mention a copy of their t-shirt. The winning design will go into production and be worn and given out at tradeshows, conferences, and user group events across the world, proudly bearing the name of their designer. We'll also pick three runners-up who will receive licenses for .NET Reflector Pro. Red Gate goodie box Interested? If you're up for the challenge, then we've got some resources to get you started. Inside the .zip file you'll find high-quality versions of the following: T-shirt templates: don't forget to design the front and the back! Different versions of the .NET Reflector Pro logo and Red Gate logo. Colour sheets to give you an easy reference to the Red Gate colours, including hex and RGB values. You can create and send us as many designs as you like, and each of them will be considered for the prize. To submit your designs, simply tweet including the competition hash tag, #reflectortees, and a link to somewhere we can see your design: either an image hosting site such as Twitpic, Flickr or Picasa, or a personal blog. You will need to create a Twitter account (which is free), if you don't already have one. You only have three limits: The background colour of the t-shirt should be one of our brand colours (red, light/dark grey or black), though you're welcome to use other colours in the rest of the design. You need to make use of either the .NET Reflector Pro logo OR the Red Gate logo (please keep them as they are) If you include any text or slogan, stick with just one or two colors for it. Apart from that, go wild. Go and do whatever it is you do when you get creative: whether you walk barefoot on the grass with a pencil and paper, sit cross-legged on a pile of cushions with a laptop, or simply close your eyes and float through a mist of ideas, now is your chance. Make sure you enjoy it. We're looking forward to seeing your creations. Terms and conditions 1. The closing date for entries is June 11th, 2010 (4 p.m. UK time). Red Gate Software Ltd reserves the right to extend the competition deadline at its discretion. If there is a revision, the revised date will be published on this blog and the date for announcing the results will be postponed accordingly. 2. The winning designer will be notified on June 14th, 2010 through Twitter. The winner must claim his/her prize by sending us a high-resolution image of their design via email (i.e. Illustrator EPS files or appropriate format, ideally at 300dpi). If the winner does not come forward within 3 days of the announcement, they will forfeit their prize and another winner will be selected from the runners-up. The names of the winner and runners-up will be posted on this blog by June 18th.  3. Entry is completed on the designer posting a link to their entry in a tweet with the correct hash tag, #reflectortees. 4. Red Gate Software needs to hold the rights to using the winning design in order to put the t-shirt into production. We will make sure that this is fine with the winner before we do so, but if you do not want us holding the rights to your design, please do not submit your designs. We reserve the right to slightly alter or adjust any artwork we decide to use (mainly to make it easier to print), but we will make sure we contact the winner for approval first. The winner will also need to allow us the use of his/her name for purposes of promoting your design. 5. Entries must be entirely your own original work and must not breach any copyright or third party rights. Red Gate Software Ltd will not be made partially or fully liable for any non-original work submitted by you. 6. This competition is free: you do not need to buy anything or be an existing customer to enter. 7. This competition is not open to employees of Red Gate Software Ltd, their families, or any other company directly connected with the administration of this promotion.

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• 3 Ways to Make Steam Even Faster

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Have you ever noticed how slow Steam’s built-in web browser can be? Do you struggle with slow download speeds? Or is Steam just slow in general? These tips will help you speed it up. Steam isn’t a game itself, so there are no 3D settings to change to achieve maximum performance. But there are some things you can do to speed it up dramatically. Speed Up the Steam Web Browser Steam’s built-in web browser — used in both the Steam store and in Steam’s in-game overlay to provide a web browser you can quickly use within games – can be frustratingly slow on many systems. Rather than the typical speed we’ve come to expect from Chrome, Firefox, or even Internet Explorer, Steam seems to struggle. When you click a link or go to a new page, there’s a noticeable delay before the new page appears — something that doesn’t happen in desktop browsers. Many people seem to have made peace with this slowness, accepting that Steam’s built-in browser is just bad. However, there’s a trick that will eliminate this delay on many systems and make the Steam web browser fast. This problem seems to arise from an incompatibility with the Automatically Detect Proxy Settings option, which is enabled by default on Windows. This is a compatibility option that very few people should actually need, so it’s safe to disable it. To disable this option, open the Internet Options dialog — press the Windows key to access the Start menu or Start screen, type Internet Options, and click the Internet Options shortcut. Select the Connections tab in the Internet Options window and click the LAN settings button. Uncheck the Automatically detect settings option here, then click OK to save your settings. If you experienced a significant delay every time a web page loaded in Steam’s web browser, it should now be gone. In the unlikely event that you encounter some sort of problem with your network connection, you could always re-enable this option. Increase Steam’s Game Download Speed Steam attempts to automatically select the nearest download server to your location. However, it may not always select the ideal download server. Or, in the case of high-traffic events like big seasonal sales and huge game launches, you may benefit from selecting a less-congested server. To do this, open Steam’s settings by clicking the Steam menu in Steam and selecting Settings. Click over to the Downloads tab and select the closest download server from the Download Region box. You should also ensure that Steam’s download bandwidth isn’t limited from here. You may want to restart Steam and see if your download speeds improve after changing this setting. In some cases, the closest server might not be the fastest. One a bit farther away could be faster if your local server is more congested, for example. Steam once provided information about content server load, which allowed you to select a regional server that wasn’t under high-load, but this information no longer seems to be available. Steam still provides a page that shows you the amount of download activity happening in different regions, including statistics about the difference in download speeds in different US states, but this information isn’t as useful. Accelerate Steam and Your Games One way to speed up all your games — and Steam itself —  is by getting a solid-state drive and installing Steam to it. Steam allows you to easily move your Steam folder — at C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam by default — to another hard drive. Just move it like you would any other folder. You can then launch the Steam.exe program as if you had never moved Steam’s files. Steam also allows you to configure multiple game library folders. This means that you can set up a Steam library folder on a solid-state drive and one on your larger magnetic hard drive. Install your most frequently played games to the solid-state drive for maximum speed and your less frequently played ones to the slower magnetic hard drive to save SSD space. To set up additional library folders, open Steam’s Settings window and click the Downloads tab. You’ll find the Steam Library Folders option here. Click the Add Library Folder button and create a new game library on another hard drive. When you install a game in Steam, you’ll be asked which library folder you want to install it to. With the proxy compatibility option disabled, the correct download server chosen, and Steam installed to a fast SSD, it should be a speed demon. There’s not much more you can do to speed up Steam, short of upgrading other hardware like your computer’s CPU. Image Credit: Andrew Nash on Flickr     

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• How to Force Graphics Options in PC Games with NVIDIA, AMD, or Intel Graphics

  - by Chris Hoffman

  PC games usually have built-in graphics options you can change. But you’re not limited to the options built into games — the graphics control panels bundled with graphics drivers allow you to tweak options from outside PC games. For example, these tools allow you to force-enabling antialiasing to make old games look better, even if they don’t normally support it. You can also reduce graphics quality to get more performance on slow hardware. If You Don’t See These Options If you don’t have the NVIDIA Control Panel, AMD Catalyst Control Center, or Intel Graphics and Media Control Panel installed, you may need to install the appropriate graphics driver package for your hardware from the hardware manufacturer’s website. The drivers provided via Windows Update don’t include additional software like the NVIDIA Control Panel or AMD Catalyst Control Center. Drivers provided via Windows Update are also more out of date. If you’re playing PC games, you’ll want to have the latest graphics drivers installed on your system. NVIDIA Control Panel The NVIDIA Control Panel allows you to change these options if your computer has NVIDIA graphics hardware. To launch it, right-click your desktop background and select NVIDIA Control Panel. You can also find this tool by performing a Start menu (or Start screen) search for NVIDIA Control Panel or by right-clicking the NVIDIA icon in your system tray and selecting Open NVIDIA Control Panel. To quickly set a system-wide preference, you could use the Adjust image settings with preview option. For example, if you have old hardware that struggles to play the games you want to play, you may want to select “Use my preference emphasizing” and move the slider all the way to “Performance.” This trades graphics quality for an increased frame rate. By default, the “Use the advanced 3D image settings” option is selected. You can select Manage 3D settings and change advanced settings for all programs on your computer or just for specific games. NVIDIA keeps a database of the optimal settings for various games, but you’re free to tweak individual settings here. Just mouse-over an option for an explanation of what it does. If you have a laptop with NVIDIA Optimus technology — that is, both NVIDIA and Intel graphics — this is the same place you can choose which applications will use the NVIDIA hardware and which will use the Intel hardware. AMD Catalyst Control Center AMD’s Catalyst Control Center allows you to change these options on AMD graphics hardware. To open it, right-click your desktop background and select Catalyst Control Center. You can also right-click the Catalyst icon in your system tray and select Catalyst Control Center or perform a Start menu (or Start screen) search for Catalyst Control Center. Click the Gaming category at the left side of the Catalyst Control Center window and select 3D Application Settings to access the graphics settings you can change. The System Settings tab allows you to configure these options globally, for all games. Mouse over any option to see an explanation of what it does. You can also set per-application 3D settings and tweak your settings on a per-game basis. Click the Add option and browse to a game’s .exe file to change its options. Intel Graphics and Media Control Panel Intel integrated graphics is nowhere near as powerful as dedicated graphics hardware from NVIDIA and AMD, but it’s improving and comes included with most computers. Intel doesn’t provide anywhere near as many options in its graphics control panel, but you can still tweak some common settings. To open the Intel graphics control panel, locate the Intel graphics icon in your system tray, right-click it, and select Graphics Properties. You can also right-click the desktop and select Graphics Properties. Select either Basic Mode or Advanced Mode. When the Intel Graphics and Media Control Panel appears, select the 3D option. You’ll be able to set your Performance or Quality setting by moving the slider around or click the Custom Settings check box and customize your Anisotropic Filtering and Vertical Sync preference. Different Intel graphics hardware may have different options here. We also wouldn’t be surprised to see more advanced options appear in the future if Intel is serious about competing in the PC graphics market, as they say they are. These options are primarily useful to PC gamers, so don’t worry about them — or bother downloading updated graphics drivers — if you’re not a PC gamer and don’t use any intensive 3D applications on your computer. Image Credit: Dave Dugdale on Flickr     

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• Adventures in Windows 8: Understanding and debugging design time data in Expression Blend

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  One of my favorite features in Expression Blend is the ability to attach a Visual Studio debugger to Blend. First let’s start by answering the question: why exactly do you want to do that? Note: If you are familiar with the creation and usage of design time data, feel free to scroll down to the paragraph titled “When design time data fails”. Creating design time data for your app When a designer works on an app, he needs to see something to design. For “static” UI such as buttons, backgrounds, etc, the user interface elements are going to show up in Blend just fine. If however the data is fetched dynamically from a service (web, database, etc) or created dynamically, most probably Blend is going to show just an empty element. The classical way to design at that stage is to run the application, navigate to the screen that is under construction (which can involve delays, need to log in, etc…), to measure what is on the screen (colors, margins, width and height, etc) using various tools, going back to Blend, editing the properties of the elements, running again, etc. Obviously this is not ideal. The solution is to create design time data. For more information about the creation of design time data by mocking services, you can refer to two talks of mine “Deep dive MVVM” and “MVVM Applied From Silverlight to Windows Phone to Windows 8”. The source code for these talks is here and here. Design time data in MVVM Light One of the main reasons why I developed MVVM Light is to facilitate the creation of design time data. To illustrate this, let’s create a new MVVM Light application in Visual Studio. Install MVVM Light from here: http://mvvmlight.codeplex.com (use the MSI in the Download section). After installing, make sure to read the Readme that opens up in your favorite browser, you will need one more step to install the Project Templates. Start Visual Studio 2012. Create a new MvvmLight (Win8) app. Run the application. You will see a string showing “Welcome to MVVM Light”. In the Solution explorer, right click on MainPage.xaml and select Open in Blend. Now you should see “Welcome to MVVM Light [Design]” What happens here is that Expression Blend runs different code at design time than the application runs at runtime. To do this, we use design-time detection (as explained in a previous article) and use that information to initialize a different data service at design time. To understand this better, open the ViewModelLocator.cs file in the ViewModel folder and see how the DesignDataService is used at design time, while the DataService is used at runtime. In a real-life applicationm, DataService would be used to connect to a web service, for instance. When design time data fails Sometimes however, the creation of design time data fails. It can be very difficult to understand exactly what is happening. Expression Blend is not giving a lot of information about what happened. Thankfully, we can use a trick: Attaching a debugger to Expression Blend and debug the design time code. In WPF and Silverlight (including Windows Phone 7), you could simply attach the debugger to Blend.exe (using the “Managed (v4.5, v4.0) code” option even for Silverlight!!) In Windows 8 however, things are just a bit different. This is because the designer that renders the actual representation of the Windows 8 app runs in its own process. Let’s illustrate that: Open the file DesignDataService in the Design folder. Modify the GetData method to look like this: public void GetData(Action<DataItem, Exception> callback) { throw new Exception(); // Use this to create design time data var item = new DataItem("Welcome to MVVM Light [design]"); callback(item, null); } Go to Blend and build the application. The build succeeds, but now the page is empty. The creation of the design time data failed, but we don’t get a warning message. We need to investigate what’s wrong. Close MainPage.xaml Go to Visual Studio and select the menu Debug, Attach to Process. Update: Make sure that you select “Managed (v4.5, v4.0) code” in the “Attach to” field. Find the process named XDesProc.exe. You should have at least two, one for the Visual Studio 2012 designer surface, and one for Expression Blend. Unfortunately in this screen it is not obvious which is which. Let’s find out in the Task Manager. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del and select Task Manager Go to the Details tab and sort the processes by name. Find the one that says “Blend for Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 XAML UI Designer” and write down the process ID. Go back to the Attach to Process dialog in Visual Studio. sort the processes by ID and attach the debugger to the correct instance of XDesProc.exe. Open the MainViewModel (in the ViewModel folder) Place a breakpoint on the first line of the MainViewModel constructor. Go to Blend and open the MainPage.xaml again. At this point, the debugger breaks in Visual Studio and you can execute your code step by step. Simply step inside the dataservice call, and find the exception that you had placed there. Visual Studio gives you additional information which helps you to solve the issue. More info and Conclusion I want to thank the amazing people on the Expression Blend team for being very fast in guiding me in that matter and encouraging me to blog about it. More information about the XDesProc.exe process can be found here. I had to work on a Windows 8 app for a few days without design time data because of an Exception thrown somewhere in the code, and it was really painful. With the debugger, finding the issue was a simple matter of stepping into the code until it threw the exception.   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• How to Tell If Your Computer is Overheating and What to Do About It

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Heat is a computer’s enemy. Computers are designed with heat dispersion and ventilation in mind so they don’t overheat. If too much heat builds up, your computer may become unstable or suddenly shut down. The CPU and graphics card produce much more heat when running demanding applications. If there’s a problem with your computer’s cooling system, an excess of heat could even physically damage its components. Is Your Computer Overheating? When using a typical computer in a typical way, you shouldn’t have to worry about overheating at all. However, if you’re encountering system instability issues like abrupt shut downs, blue screens, and freezes — especially while doing something demanding like playing PC games or encoding video — your computer may be overheating. This can happen for several reasons. Your computer’s case may be full of dust, a fan may have failed, something may be blocking your computer’s vents, or you may have a compact laptop that was never designed to run at maximum performance for hours on end. Monitoring Your Computer’s Temperature First, bear in mind that different CPUs and GPUs (graphics cards) have different optimal temperature ranges. Before getting too worried about a temperature, be sure to check your computer’s documentation — or its CPU or graphics card specifications — and ensure you know the temperature ranges your hardware can handle. You can monitor your computer’s temperatures in a variety of different ways. First, you may have a way to monitor temperature that is already built into your system. You can often view temperature values in your computer’s BIOS or UEFI settings screen. This allows you to quickly see your computer’s temperature if Windows freezes or blue screens on you — just boot the computer, enter the BIOS or UEFI screen, and check the temperatures displayed there. Note that not all BIOSes or UEFI screens will display this information, but it is very common. There are also programs that will display your computer’s temperature. Such programs just read the sensors inside your computer and show you the temperature value they report, so there are a wide variety of tools you can use for this, from the simple Speccy system information utility to an advanced tool like SpeedFan. HWMonitor also offer this feature, displaying a wide variety of sensor information. Be sure to look at your CPU and graphics card temperatures. You can also find other temperatures, such as the temperature of your hard drive, but these components will generally only overheat if it becomes extremely hot in the computer’s case. They shouldn’t generate too much heat on their own. If you think your computer may be overheating, don’t just glance as these sensors once and ignore them. Do something demanding with your computer, such as running a CPU burn-in test with Prime 95, playing a PC game, or running a graphical benchmark. Monitor the computer’s temperature while you do this, even checking a few hours later — does any component overheat after you push it hard for a while? Preventing Your Computer From Overheating If your computer is overheating, here are some things you can do about it: Dust Out Your Computer’s Case: Dust accumulates in desktop PC cases and even laptops over time, clogging fans and blocking air flow. This dust can cause ventilation problems, trapping heat and preventing your PC from cooling itself properly. Be sure to clean your computer’s case occasionally to prevent dust build-up. Unfortunately, it’s often more difficult to dust out overheating laptops. Ensure Proper Ventilation: Put the computer in a location where it can properly ventilate itself. If it’s a desktop, don’t push the case up against a wall so that the computer’s vents become blocked or leave it near a radiator or heating vent. If it’s a laptop, be careful to not block its air vents, particularly when doing something demanding. For example, putting a laptop down on a mattress, allowing it to sink in, and leaving it there can lead to overheating — especially if the laptop is doing something demanding and generating heat it can’t get rid of. Check if Fans Are Running: If you’re not sure why your computer started overheating, open its case and check that all the fans are running. It’s possible that a CPU, graphics card, or case fan failed or became unplugged, reducing air flow. Tune Up Heat Sinks: If your CPU is overheating, its heat sink may not be seated correctly or its thermal paste may be old. You may need to remove the heat sink and re-apply new thermal paste before reseating the heat sink properly. This tip applies more to tweakers, overclockers, and people who build their own PCs, especially if they may have made a mistake when originally applying the thermal paste. This is often much more difficult when it comes to laptops, which generally aren’t designed to be user-serviceable. That can lead to trouble if the laptop becomes filled with dust and needs to be cleaned out, especially if the laptop was never designed to be opened by users at all. Consult our guide to diagnosing and fixing an overheating laptop for help with cooling down a hot laptop. Overheating is a definite danger when overclocking your CPU or graphics card. Overclocking will cause your components to run hotter, and the additional heat will cause problems unless you can properly cool your components. If you’ve overclocked your hardware and it has started to overheat — well, throttle back the overclock! Image Credit: Vinni Malek on Flickr     

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• 5 Android Keyboard Replacements to Help You Type Faster

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Android allows developers to replace its keyboard with their own keyboard apps. This has led to experimentation and great new features, like the gesture-typing feature that’s made its way into Android’s official keyboard after proving itself in third-party keyboards. This sort of customization isn’t possible on Apple’s iOS or even Microsoft’s modern Windows environments. Installing a third-party keyboard is easy — install it from Google Play, launch it like another app, and it will explain how to enable it. Google Keyboard Google Keyboard is Android’s official keyboard, as seen on Google’s Nexus devices. However, there’s a good chance your Android smartphone or tablet comes with a keyboard designed by its manufacturer instead. You can install the Google Keyboard from Google Play, even if your device doesn’t come with it. This keyboard offers a wide variety of features, including a built-in gesture-typing feature, as popularized by Swype. It also offers prediction, including full next-word prediction based on your previous word, and includes voice recognition that works offline on modern versions of Android. Google’s keyboard may not offer the most accurate swiping feature or the best autocorrection, but it’s a great keyboard that feels like it belongs in Android. SwiftKey SwiftKey costs $4, although you can try it free for one month. In spite of its price, many people who rarely buy apps have been sold on SwiftKey. It offers amazing auto-correction and word-prediction features. Just mash away on your touch-screen keyboard, typing as fast as possible, and SwiftKey will notice your mistakes and type what you actually meant to type. SwiftKey also now has built-in support for gesture-typing via SwiftKey Flow, so you get a lot of flexibility. At $4, SwiftKey may seem a bit pricey, but give the month-long trial a try. A great keyboard makes all the typing you do everywhere on your phone better. SwiftKey is an amazing keyboard if you tap-to-type rather than swipe-to-type. Swype While other keyboards have copied Swype’s swipe-to-type feature, none have completely matched its accuracy. Swype has been designing a gesture-typing keyboard for longer than anyone else and its gesture feature still seems more accurate than its competitors’ gesture support. If you use gesture-typing all the time, you’ll probably want to use Swype. Swype can now be installed directly from Google Play without the old, tedious process of registering a beta account and sideloading the Swype app. Swype offers a month-long free trial and the full version is available for $1 afterwards. Minuum Minuum is a crowdfunded keyboard that is currently still in beta and only supports English. We include it here because it’s so interesting — it’s a great example of the kind of creativity and experimentation that happens when you allow developers to experiment with their own forms of keyboard. Minuum uses a tiny, minimum keyboard that frees up your screen space, so your touch-screen keyboard doesn’t hog your device’s screen. Rather than displaying a full keyboard on your screen, Minuum displays a single row of letters.  Each letter is small and may be difficult to hit, but that doesn’t matter — Minuum’s smart autocorrection algorithms interpret what you intended to type rather than typing the exact letters you press. Just swipe to the right to type a space and accept Minuum’s suggestion. At $4 for a beta version with no trial, Minuum may seem a bit pricy. But it’s a great example of the flexibility Android allows. If there’s a problem with this keyboard, it’s that it’s a bit late — in an age of 5″ smartphones with 1080p screens, full-size keyboards no longer feel as cramped. MessagEase MessagEase is another example of a new take on text input. Thankfully, this keyboard is available for free. MessagEase presents all letters in a nine-button grid. To type a common letter, you’d tap the button. To type an uncommon letter, you’d tap the button, hold down, and swipe in the appropriate direction. This gives you large buttons that can work well as touch targets, especially when typing with one hand. Like any other unique twist on a traditional keyboard, you’d have to give it a few minutes to get used to where the letters are and the new way it works. After giving it some practice, you may find this is a faster way to type on a touch-screen — especially with one hand, as the targets are so large. Google Play is full of replacement keyboards for Android phones and tablets. Keyboards are just another type of app that you can swap in. Leave a comment if you’ve found another great keyboard that you prefer using. Image Credit: Cheon Fong Liew on Flickr     

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• Navigation in a #WP7 application with MVVM Light

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  In MVVM applications, it can be a bit of a challenge to send instructions to the view (for example a page) from a viewmodel. Thankfully, we have good tools at our disposal to help with that. In his excellent series “MVVM Light Toolkit soup to nuts”, Jesse Liberty proposes one approach using the MVVM Light messaging infrastructure. While this works fine, I would like to show here another approach using what I call a “view service”, i.e. an abstracted service that is invoked from the viewmodel, and implemented on the view. Multiple kinds of view services In fact, I use view services quite often, and even started standardizing them for the Windows Phone 7 applications I work on. If there is interest, I will be happy to show other such view services, for example Animation services, responsible to start/stop animations on the view. Dialog service, in charge of displaying messages to the user and gathering feedback. Navigation service, in charge of navigating to a given page directly from the viewmodel. In this article, I will concentrate on the navigation service. The INavigationService interface In most WP7 apps, the navigation service is used in quite a straightforward way. We want to: Navigate to a given URI. Go back. Be notified when a navigation is taking place, and be able to cancel. The INavigationService interface is quite simple indeed: public interface INavigationService { event NavigatingCancelEventHandler Navigating; void NavigateTo(Uri pageUri); void GoBack(); } Obviously, this interface can be extended if necessary, but in most of the apps I worked on, I found that this covers my needs. The NavigationService class It is possible to nicely pack the navigation service into its own class. To do this, we need to remember that all the PhoneApplicationPage instances use the same instance of the navigation service, exposed through their NavigationService property. In fact, in a WP7 application, it is the main frame (RootFrame, of type PhoneApplicationFrame) that is responsible for this task. So, our implementation of the NavigationService class can leverage this. First the class will grab the PhoneApplicationFrame and store a reference to it. Also, it registers a handler for the Navigating event, and forwards the event to the listening viewmodels (if any). Then, the NavigateTo and the GoBack methods are implemented. They are quite simple, because they are in fact just a gateway to the PhoneApplicationFrame. The whole class is as follows: public class NavigationService : INavigationService { private PhoneApplicationFrame _mainFrame; public event NavigatingCancelEventHandler Navigating; public void NavigateTo(Uri pageUri) { if (EnsureMainFrame()) { _mainFrame.Navigate(pageUri); } } public void GoBack() { if (EnsureMainFrame() && _mainFrame.CanGoBack) { _mainFrame.GoBack(); } } private bool EnsureMainFrame() { if (_mainFrame != null) { return true; } _mainFrame = Application.Current.RootVisual as PhoneApplicationFrame; if (_mainFrame != null) { // Could be null if the app runs inside a design tool _mainFrame.Navigating += (s, e) => { if (Navigating != null) { Navigating(s, e); } }; return true; } return false; } } Exposing URIs I find that it is a good practice to expose each page’s URI as a constant. In MVVM Light applications, a good place to do that is the ViewModelLocator, which already acts like a central point of setup for the views and their viewmodels. Note that in some cases, it is necessary to expose the URL as a string, for instance when a query string needs to be passed to the view. So for example we could have: public static readonly Uri MainPageUri = new Uri("/MainPage.xaml", UriKind.Relative); public const string AnotherPageUrl = "/AnotherPage.xaml?param1={0}&param2={1}"; Creating and using the NavigationService Normally, we only need one instance of the NavigationService class. In cases where you use an IOC container, it is easy to simply register a singleton instance. For example, I am using a modified version of a super simple IOC container, and so I can register the navigation service as follows: SimpleIoc.Register<INavigationService, NavigationService>(); Then, it can be resolved where needed with: SimpleIoc.Resolve<INavigationService>(); Or (more frequently), I simply declare a parameter on the viewmodel constructor of type INavigationService and let the IOC container do its magic and inject the instance of the NavigationService when the viewmodel is created. On supported platforms (for example Silverlight 4), it is also possible to use MEF. Or, of course, we can simply instantiate the NavigationService in the ViewModelLocator, and pass this instance as a parameter of the viewmodels’ constructor, injected as a property, etc… Once the instance has been passed to the viewmodel, it can be used, for example with: NavigationService.NavigateTo(ViewModelLocator.ComparisonPageUri); Testing Thanks to the INavigationService interface, navigation can be mocked and tested when the viewmodel is put under unit test. Simply implement and inject a mock class, and assert that the methods are called as they should by the viewmodel. Conclusion As usual, there are multiple ways to code a solution answering your needs. I find that view services are a really neat way to delegate view-specific responsibilities such as animation, dialogs and of course navigation to other classes through an abstracted interface. In some cases, such as the NavigationService class exposed here, it is even possible to standardize the implementation and pack it in a class library for reuse. I hope that this sample is useful! Happy coding. Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• Adventures in Windows 8: Solving activation errors

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  Note: I tagged this article with “MVVM” because I got a few support requests for MVVM Light regarding this exact issue. In fact it is a Windows 8 issue and has nothing to do with MVVM Light per se… Sometimes when you work on a Windows 8 app, you will get a very annoying issue when starting the app. In that case, the app doesn’t not even start past the Splash screen. Putting a breakpoint in App.xaml.cs doesn’t help because the app doesn’t even reach that point! So what exactly is happening? Well when a Windows 8 app starts, the system is performing a few check first. One of the checks, for instance, is to see if an app with the same package ID is already available. The package ID is a unique value set in the package manifest. In the Solution Explorer, double click on Package.appxmanifest. This opens the manifest in a special editor Click on the Packaging tab See the GUID under Package Name. This is the unique ID I am talking about. If there is a conflict (i.e. if an app is already installed with the exact same ID), Windows will warm the user that the app is already installed. However when you are in the process of developing an app, you install and uninstall the same app many many times (every time that you start in Visual Studio), and sometimes some issues arise, for instance failing to uninstall the app before starting the new instance of the same app. First step if you get such an error When the application fails to start past the splash screen, the first step is to identify what kind of error happened. In my experience the “already installed” is by far the most frequent (in fact I never had another such error), but it can be something else. An annoying thing is that the popup that shows the error is usually started below the Windows 8 app, and so you don’t even see it! This is especially true if you run this in the Simulator. In that case, do the following: Press on the Simulator’s home button, then press on the Desktop tile on the Start menu. The error popup should be shown on the desktop. If your applications runs on the Local machine, you also do the same and press the Windows button, and then from the Start menu press the Desktop tile. Deployment error in Studio Sometimes the same error causes Visual Studio to fail launching the application at all with a deployment error. This is a better case, because at least it is clear that there is an issue. In that case, write down the code that is shown in the Error window (for instance 0x80073D05 in the example below). Once you have the error code, go to the “Troubleshooting packaging, deployment, and query of Windows Store apps” page and look up the code in question. In my case, the error was “ERROR_DELETING_EXISTING_APPLICATIONDATA_STORE_FAILED”, “An error occurred while deleting the package's previously existing application data.” Solving the “ERROR_DELETING_EXISTING_APPLICATIONDATA_STORE_FAILED” issue Update: Before trying the below, you can also try the simple steps: Exit Visual Studio Go to the Start menu Locate your app’s tile. It should be visible in the Start menu directly, towards the far end on the right. Right click the tile and select Uninstall from the App Bar. Restart Visual Studio and try again. Sometimes it helps. If it doesn’t, then try the following: In order to solve the case where Windows, for any reason, fails to delete the existing application before starting the new instance, follow the steps: Open the Package.appxmanifest in Visual Studio Open the Packaging tab. Change the Package name. For tests you can just try to change the last character of the GUID, though I would recommend creating a brand new GUID. Press Start Type GUID Start the GUID Generator application Select Registry Format Press Copy. Paste the new GUID in place of the Package Name in Visual Studio Important: don’t forget to remove the curly brackets at the beginning and at the end of the newly pasted GUID. Then you just have to cross your fingers and start the application again… If it works, celebrate. if it doesn’t work… well at this point I am not sure so good luck with that ;) Happy coding, Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• Strange Play Framework 2.2 exceptions after trying to add MySQL / slick

  - by Mike Cialowicz

  I'm working on a Play 2.2 application, and things have gone a bit south on me since I've tried adding my DB layer. Below are my build.sbt dependencies. As you can see I use mysql-connector-java and play-slick: libraryDependencies ++= Seq( jdbc, anorm, cache, "joda-time" % "joda-time" % "2.3", "mysql" % "mysql-connector-java" % "5.1.26", "com.typesafe.play" %% "play-slick" % "0.5.0.8", "com.aetrion.flickr" % "flickrapi" % "1.1" ) My application.conf has some similarly simple DB stuff in it: db.default.url="jdbc:mysql://localhost/myDb" db.default.driver="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver" db.default.user="root" db.default.pass="" This is what it looks like when my Play server starts: [info] play - Listening for HTTP on /0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:9000 (Server started, use Ctrl+D to stop and go back to the console...) [info] Compiling 1 Scala source to C:\bbq\cats\in\space [info] play - database [default] connected at jdbc:mysql://localhost/myDb [info] play - Application started (Dev) So, it appears that Play can connect to the MySQL DB just fine (I think). However, I get this exception when I make any request to my server: [error] p.nettyException - Exception caught in Netty java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: akka.actor.ActorSystem.dispatcher()Lscala/concurren t/ExecutionContext; at play.core.Invoker$.<init>(Invoker.scala:24) ~[play_2.10.jar:2.2.0] at play.core.Invoker$.<clinit>(Invoker.scala) ~[play_2.10.jar:2.2.0] at play.api.libs.concurrent.Execution$Implicits$.defaultContext$lzycompu te(Execution.scala:7) ~[play_2.10.jar:2.2.0] at play.api.libs.concurrent.Execution$Implicits$.defaultContext(Executio n.scala:6) ~[play_2.10.jar:2.2.0] at play.api.libs.concurrent.Execution$.<init>(Execution.scala:10) ~[play _2.10.jar:2.2.0] at play.api.libs.concurrent.Execution$.<clinit>(Execution.scala) ~[play_ 2.10.jar:2.2.0] The odd thing is that the 2nd request (to the exact same URL, same controller, no changes) comes back with a different error: [error] p.nettyException - Exception caught in Netty java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class play.api.libs.concurr ent.Execution$ at play.core.server.netty.PlayDefaultUpstreamHandler.handleAction$1(Play DefaultUpstreamHandler.scala:194) ~[play_2.10.jar:2.2.0] at play.core.server.netty.PlayDefaultUpstreamHandler.messageReceived(Pla yDefaultUpstreamHandler.scala:169) ~[play_2.10.jar:2.2.0] at com.typesafe.netty.http.pipelining.HttpPipeliningHandler.messageRecei ved(HttpPipeliningHandler.java:62) ~[netty-http-pipelining.jar:na] at org.jboss.netty.handler.codec.http.HttpContentDecoder.messageReceived (HttpContentDecoder.java:108) ~[netty-3.6.5.Final.jar:na] at org.jboss.netty.channel.Channels.fireMessageReceived(Channels.java:29 6) ~[netty-3.6.5.Final.jar:na] at org.jboss.netty.handler.codec.frame.FrameDecoder.unfoldAndFireMessage Received(FrameDecoder.java:459) ~[netty-3.6.5.Final.jar:na] The URL / controller that I'm requesting just renders a static web page and doesn't do anything of any significance. It was working just fine before I started adding my DB layer. I'm rather stuck. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks. I'm using Scala 2.10.2, Play 2.2.0, and MySQL Server 5.6.14.0 (community edition).

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• What would I use to remove escaped html from large sets of data.

  - by Elizabeth Buckwalter

  Our database is filled with articles retrieved from RSS feeds. I was unsure of what data I would be getting, and how much filtering was already setup (WP-O-Matic Wordpress plugin using the SimplePie library). This plugin does some basic encoding before insertion using Wordpress's built in post insert function which also does some filtering. I've figured out most of the filters before insertion, but now I have whacko data that I need to remove. This is an example of whacko data that I have data in one field which the content I want in the front, but this part removed which is at the end: <img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/SoundOnTheSound?i=xFxEpT2Add0:xFbIkwGc-fk:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"></img> <img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/SoundOnTheSound?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"></img> &lt;img src=&quot;http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/SoundOnTheSound?i=xFxEpT2Add0:xFbIkwGc-fk:D7DqB2pKExk&quot; Notice how some of the images are escape and some aren't. I believe this has to do with the last part being cut off so as to be unrecognizable as an html tag, which then caused it to be html endcoded. Another field has only this which is now filtered before insertion, but I have to get rid of the others: &lt;img src=&quot;http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2183/2289902369_1d95bcdb85.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;post_img&quot; width=&quot;80&quot; (all examples are on one line, but broken up for readability) Question: What is the best way to work with the above escaped html (or portion of an html tag)? I can do it in Perl, PHP, SQL, Ruby, and even Python. I believe Perl to be the best at text parsing, so that's why I used the Perl tag. And PHP times out on large database operations, so that's pretty much out unless I wanted to do batch processing and what not. PS One of the nice things about using Wordpress's insert post function, is that if you use php's strip_tags function to strip out all html, insert post function will insert <p> at the paragraph points. Let me know if there's anything more that I can answer. Some article that didn't quite answer my questions. (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2016751/remove-text-from-within-a-database-text-field) (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/462831/regular-expression-to-escape-html-ampersands-while-respecting-cdata)

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• iPhone Gps logging inaccurate

  - by Martijn

  I'm logging gps points during a walk. Below it shows the function that the coordinates are saved each 5 seconds. i Did several tests but i cannot get the right accuracy i want. (When testing the sky is clear also tests in google maps shows me that the gps signal is good). here is the code: -(void)viewDidAppear:(BOOL)animated{ if (self.locationManager == nil){ self.locationManager = [[[CLLocationManager alloc] init] autorelease]; locationManager.delegate = self; // only notify under 100 m accuracy locationManager.distanceFilter = 100.0f; locationManager.desiredAccuracy= kCLLocationAccuracyBest; [locationManager startUpdatingLocation]; } } - start logging [NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:5 target:self selector:@selector(getData) userInfo:nil repeats:YES]; </code> <code> -(void)getData{ int distance; // re-use location. if ([ [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%1.2f",previousLat] isEqualToString:@"0.00"]){ // if previous location is not available, do nothing distance = 0; }else{ CLLocation *loc1 = [[CLLocation alloc] initWithLatitude:previousLat longitude:previousLong]; CLLocation *loc2 = [[CLLocation alloc] initWithLatitude:latGlobal longitude:longGlobal]; distance = [loc1 getDistanceFrom: loc2]; } // overwrite latGlobal with new variable previousLat = latGlobal; previousLong = longGlobal; // store location and save data to database // this part goes ok } - (void)locationManager:(CLLocationManager *)manager didUpdateToLocation:(CLLocation *)newLocation fromLocation:(CLLocation *)oldLocation { // track the time to get a new gps result (for gps indicator orb) lastPointTimestamp = [newLocation.timestamp copy]; // test that the horizontal accuracy does not indicate an invalid measurement if (newLocation.horizontalAccuracy < 0) return; // test the age of the location measurement to determine if the measurement is cached // don't rely on cached measurements NSTimeInterval locationAge = -[newLocation.timestamp timeIntervalSinceNow]; if (locationAge > 5.0) return; latGlobal = fabs(newLocation.coordinate.latitude); longGlobal= fabs(newLocation.coordinate.longitude); } I have taken a screenshot of the plot results (the walk takes 30 minutes) and an example of what i'am trying to acomplish: http://www.flickr.com/photos/21258341@N07/4623969014/ i really hope someone can put me in the right direction.

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