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As well as general rantings, one of the main purposes of this site was for me to blog about the ins and outs of working on software. It hasn’t quite worked out like that, has it? The main reason is the speed at which my development goes; two to three hundred projects (in Visual Studio alone) can make someone a bit quick at getting something designed and developed. Because of this, blogging would just slow things right down.

The only real good shot I’d have at blogging the development of an application would be to work on something using a new technology (eurgh – I don’t like applying the technology term to software) that I would have to learn as I go.

Here enters WPF. Despite messing about with it and getting three or four apps at a good stage using it, I’m still not completely sure on quite a few things, such as best design practices. Besides, the app-to-blogged-about has already been to an advanced state-of-being in Windows Forms, but the direction of both the application and the source wasn’t quite where I wanted them to be. These two reasons, among the “new tech” reason and possibly others, are why I will artificially slow down its development to a degree that I can make blog posts about what I’ve done that session/day/period.

It’s FluidBar that I will be working on in .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate RC. At the time of this post, that link reflects the WinForms version (take a look at its Requires field).

The next blog post should be about FluidBar and Visual Studio 2010, so stay tuned if that kinda thing does it for you, I guess.

We have new releases! Rejoice, and such.

The first one is Profile Relocator. This allows all newly-created Windows profiles to be created in a user-specified location. This is great if you’re not a nutter and want all of your profile data (including application data, desktop, favourites, etc) in a safe place in case you want to re-install Windows (not really required any more since Vista) or it somehow gets wanked and jizzes over everything.

The second is Wake On LAN Ex 2. Added some feature requests and squashed an exception on start-up.

Finally, the original Wake On LAN Ex was seemingly not providing the latest v0.96 release, but instead v0.95. No idea what the hell happened there, but it’s sorted now. You should be using WoLEX2 anyway.

But you’d know all this if you were following my lame Twitter crap.

Thank you, and good night.

Bit quiet around here, innit?

It may be here, but it isn’t so quiet on Twitter. I’ve been posting there about my latest projects, such as Glassix (the 4th rewrite) and audioFlow (a rewrite of Hydrogen), along with work-in-progress screenshots. Along with occasional rants, because that’s what I do.

A quick summary of the current in-development application:

audioFlow is a suite requiring no third-party software that turns a PC into a web-enabled jukebox and streaming media centre. This is a rewrite of Hydrogen which I started almost a decade ago. For live updates on its progress, see Twitter here.

Oh, and you may get glimpses of my Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3t antics. Which I haven’t bought yet. But will do. Why the hell are the buying options for it so limited on the UK Lenovo store? Grr.

Alright, here’s my review of Windows 7.

Fast boot is good. Systray not saving icon information is shit. Fast shut-down is good. Still no way to fully relocate user profile is shit. Taskbar is good. Taskbar is shit. Swishy effects is good. MSI Media Live fucking up and repeatedly resetting its graphics adapter is shit. Fast in general is good. File associations not saving is shit. ClickOnce apps not working is shit. VERY SHIT. Stop using ClickOnce, you dopey fucks. Users don’t like it, and I can’t even use it now.

Review complete.

Alright. Due to changes YouTube made to how their guff works, YouChoob stopped working. Thanks to Avoidz for letting me know about this problem; I’ve now released an updated version that gets everything working again. Plus, the video quality detection is much better, too!

I’m thinking of adding a video quality selection dialog in the next version that’ll allow you to choose which version of the video you want to do download. Or not. Dunno yet.

View: YouChoob

Hmm, no updates for almost a month. That probably isn’t good. I probably say that all the time and do nothing about it.

So, a new release of Comical. In fact, I think there has been two releases since I lost wrote about it. The previous version added support for archiving and browsing said archives and various other things. This release is mainly a maintenance that fixes a few things.

One problem was a (handled!) crash when moving through a comic archive after renaming a comic – I forgot to update the state of some variable, so easy enough to fix. Another one wasn’t my fault, but the fault of Awkward Zombie’s web-server being incorrectly configured and probably lending itself to a security issue by using a space in its HTTP Name/Value pair headers.

View: Comical

Come and git yer new releases…

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Here we go, another version.

Due to the feature requests I was getting and the fact that Stream Keeper (temporary title) could be quite a while away, I finally went and added configurable settings. I regarded YouChoob as more of a tool than an application, so I wanted to keep it minimal. Not any more, it seems.

More importantly, I figured out a way of getting batch downloading working in a good way despite the app’s one-at-a-time download design. The batch window also features monitoring functionality in that it’ll keep an eye on the clipboard and add any new YouTube.com links it finds; this allows you to use your browser to Copy Shortcut/Link/Whatever to quickly queue a lot of links with minimal effort.

Check out YouChoob below for more information, specifically its change log.

View: YouChoob

Here we go, another version.

Due to the feature requests I was getting and the fact that Stream Keeper (temporary title) could be quite a while away, I finally went and added configurable settings. I regarded YouChoob as more of a tool than an application, so I wanted to keep it minimal. Not any more, it seems.

More importantly, I figured out a way of getting batch downloading working in a good way despite the app’s one-at-a-time download design. The batch window also features monitoring functionality in that it’ll keep an eye on the clipboard and add any new YouTube.com links it finds; this allows you to use your browser to Copy Shortcut/Link/Whatever to quickly queue a lot of links with minimal effort.

Check out YouChoob below for more information, specifically its change log.

View: YouChoob

Today I noticed while I was messing about with YouChoob downloading some videos, that the thumbnail preview for the currently downloading video wasn’t appearing. After mooching through the code I found out why: any URLs that have the &feature or &related components in them causes the video image generator code to generate a wrong link to that video’s thumbnail image.

Now all extraneous information in URLs are stripped away when Download is clicked. I’m not really sure, but I think this might also fix a problem – as reported in the forum – where YouChoob says a URL is invalid. I say not sure because I personally can’t re-produce the problem.

Speaking of the forum: I set it up some time last year but it wasn’t actually officially open to the public. Because of this, I sort of forgot all about it and only recently noticed that some postings had been made in there. Oops. I’ve replied to a couple of posts as a starter, but it’ll officially open once I’ve finished setting it up.

View: YouChoob : StreamKeeper

Taking my sweet, sweet time with updates, it seems. Raiding in WoW is picking up pace and it’s goooood stuff.

But anyway! YouChoob! A new version, no less. Not that there are many changes, or anything. A few months ago I put in support for batch downloading videos (using its very own window) but I ran into a slight problem in that I couldn’t think of a good way of integrating it with the main download window. In fact, whenever I loaded the source into Visual Studio to continue it, I just groaned and worked on another application instead.

Rather than just indefinitely delaying the next release, I disabled the batch stuff and added support for downloading high quality versions of videos. In fact, there are three quality tiers, which are…

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