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Comical

This was released a few days ago, but I’ve just updated it as I made a bit of a whoopsie. Comical is a web-comic viewer that supports a database of configurable comics.

My Blockbox HTPC software had a plugin that supported the viewing of comics but testing was time-consuming as it required Blockbox to be restarted and such. So I moved the code into a separate application to facilitate development – except getting the updated code back into the plugin required copy and pasting. Bleh, I refuse to do that. This was quite a while back, and in-case I decide to finally give WPF another chance, I’ve rewritten the code and placed it into a class library so it can just be referenced just like a standard DLL.

It now uses an XML file to define comics which means anyone can just edit the file to include new ones. Because it’s an external file, Comical supports automatic updating of the file with a click of a button.

Another new version of Comical will be released in a couple of days when I’ve further fleshed out the XML elements.

View: Comical

FileOps

This was originally released back in 2004 and then updated last year, and now finally there’s a new release. The main reason why I updated it – and fixed a couple of things – was because I made a little change to the way the Join feature works. When joining multiple files, it now pre-allocates the disk space the combined file will take before it starts joining; this had led to an insane speed increase in joins.

Ideally, I’d like to rewrite FileOps from scratch as I’ve long since changed my coding style and the source is actually using .NET 1.1 structuring that I don’t particularly like. But I’m not going to as I don’t know if enough people use it to warrant such a task. I’ll just continue modifying the current code base incrementally; there are definitely little bugs and a weird work-flow present.

View: FileOps