The Chief Developer for TimeSnapper, Atli, just sent me through this photo of the original prototype of TimeSnapper.
We've sure come a long way since those crazy days.
(Sorry I can't track down the original copyright holder of this image. Suffice to say it isn't me or Atli)
'Blind Carbon Copy' (BCC) is the most politically charged firecracker ever dropped into a technological device. And email is the powder keg of the computing world.
So I urge you, politely, but very definitely:
And you know that everythig I'm about to say is just hypthetical. Right?
So let's says, hypothetically, you send an email like this:
secretGeek.net
from: <help-desk-manager@company-abc.fictional>
To: <jack@customer.fictional>
bcc: "chief support" <fred@company-abc.fictional>
Dear Jack
We really appreciate the feedback you've provided to us about the error messages presented by our product.
It is feedback like yours that helps us move forward, so please do not hesitate to contact us again about any matter involving [product name], at any time of day or night.
After extensive consultation with your personal assistant, and your personal assistant's secretary, and after two site visits from our support personnel, we are now quite certain that the initial cause of your printing problem relates to the absence of paper from your printer.
Please be assured that we have taken every possible step to remedy this situation, and any future attempt to use our application to print to an empty printer will result in a far clearer message that will avoid any possible loss of the valuable time of one of our clients, such as yourself.
I sincerely apologise for any confusion or anger that the ambiguous message ('Please check your printer') may have caused. Due to your company's long standing custom of our product we will be more than happy to reimburse you for the time that was lost due to this confusing message.
Thank you once again for your feedback. Keep up the diligent work!
Kind regards
[name of help-desk-manager]
Reply, within a minute:
from: "chief support" <fred@company-abc.fictional>
to: <help-desk-manager@company-abc.fictional>, <jack@customer.fictional>
Just hope the dumb c*nt learnt a f*cken lesson.
I think that any email client worth its salt would warn the user before letting them hit reply-all on a message that includes BCC's.
This is a step or two beyond your average Jakobi Nielsen 'use-ability'. This is 'welcome-to-unemployment-for-you-and-your-boss-ability'
TimeSnapper has been getting a lot of downloads from Japanese websites.
see:
Seems there are thriving communities of GTD followers all over the world. Some good traffic from lifehacker.com as well.
We've also had Italian (+), German and even Russian interest lately, plus way too much traffic from Digg.
I like digg and visit it occasionally (not as much as del.icio.us) -- but boy do their commenters jump to conclusions all too quickly. It's worse than the most trollish members of the slashdot crowd.
Still, it's good to get such candid feedback. It's helped us to make some things clearer on our website (such as the fact that no images are taken when the computer is idle).
We're moving toward releasing a version 2.0, which will include a "Professional" edition, which has a modest price tag.
Version 2 will have features that let you automatically receive new releases. I'm a little worried that some people will be freaked out that software designed for monitoring is *also* connecting to the internet automatically. We'll let you disable the feature of course. I just hope that paranoics don't assume we're gathering statistics and selling them to microsoft or ebay or anything. As if they could afford us!
Meanwhile, here's a (link to a) list of links about TimeSnapper, or about similar tools.
Jason Looney, or J-Loo as he is known to his inner circle, is one of the funniest bloggers alive today.
His work is reminiscent of some of the great comedy bloggers of yesteryear.
He also writes part-time for Futurama and used to help David Letterman with his "Top Ten" countdowns. Jason's specialties were numbers three and six. No one can do numbers three and six like J-Loo.
His first job as a comedy writer was on The Simpsons. Every week when Bart had to write something different on the blackboard, it was Jason's job to check the punctuation.
I introduced Jason to his lovely wife, and not six weeks later they celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary.
I first met J-Loo when we were both working as head chef's at Maxim's. Neither us knew how to fry an egg but we covered for each other: one of us would make a lot of bork-bork noises in the kitchen while the other ran next door and bought the meals. Just before the meal left the kitchen, J-Loo would always throw on a sprig of italian parsley, smack his lips and exclaim "Bon-Appetit!" It became his trademark and he has sued for it many times. He is now so rich that he only blogs for fun, not money. Imagine that.
I could write a million stories about Jason, like the time we were reincarnated as a coyote and a roadrunner and i was fired out of a sling shot, trying to catch him and eat him; all good times.
Also of note is his friend, and former siamese-twin-sister, Alan Dotson, a gifted word-smith who can evoke the full spectrum of emotions from chuckles to giggles.
But for now, just read J-Loo's blog, be good to each other, and give one to your wife from me. ;-)
Okay, there's a lot of apps out there that will give you 'always on top' functionality for windows.
Most of them hardly rate, for a few reasons. Either they're time-limited-trials, or they include nag screens.
A lot of them work by adding extra buttons to the top right of every window. This is clever, but is overkill *big time*. (Screenshot of 'Actual Title Bars' trial apps, from 'Actual Tools'. (This tool lets you specify different buttons for every app on your system. Really impressive stuff, but too much hard work this little geek)
My favourite tool in this arena is also the simplest.
'OnTop.Exe' from 'PlanetScott'.
Rather than clutter up a window with extra buttons, it adds an item to the context menu (right click on the title bar, and you'll see an 'Always on top' option). This is less intrusive than the others, and a pretty decent solution.
It's four years old (100 in internet years), but still popular because of its simple approach.
Here's a different approach.
Most businesses choose not to depict their customers as bearded ladies.
But Elementool are not most businesses. At right is a screen grab from one of their pages
Good for you, Elementool. I hope that this helps you corner the 'bearded-lady market'.
One tip, if you don't mind? Try a touch of complementary selling. For example: Buy a helpdesk account, get a half-price chin wax. Buy two and we'll throw in an electric nose-trimmer. Recommended a bearded-lady-friend, and get three months of helpdesk free. This could be a winner.
This is an exercise in 'thinking small'.
Take the following as your premise:
Replacing it with "Paint.Net" is to overlook the Zen of Paint.
Paint is not a rival to big image editors. It doesn't want to rival them. Paint is quick. Paint is easy.
But if Paint were to be improved, what would it take?
I've written a list of features I'd genuinely like to see in Paint.
But first, here's the type of features I don't want to see in MSPaint:
Here's my top ten really simple fixes or improvements for MS Paint.
The 'font' tool doesn't work while you are zoomed in. This is annoying and makes it hard to place your text exactly where you want it.
'Page Setup' (currently only available from the File menu) includes excellent features such as choosing to scale the image to fill the page, or switch between landscape and portrait. Because of their placement, these options are largely ignored. Make them available while viewing a print preview. You listenin baby?
The line-thickness panel is relevant while using these tools: Line, Curve, Rectangle, Polygon, Ellipse, Rounded Rectangle. Yet it is only visible (and configurable) while using the line and curve tools.
Thanks to digital cameras, everyone knows the importance of cropping (or trimming) an image to improve the message. But in MSPaint, Cropping takes a lot of pointing and clicking. It should be as simple as selecting an area and pressing a "Crop" item on the Edit menu.
The 'Zoom' menu (under 'View') has options for 'Normal Size' and 'Large Size', which are actually 100% and 400%. Instead I'd like to see 'Larger' and 'Smaller', allowing you to move right up through the available sizes, without having to choose the 'Custom...' menu. In addition, the mouse scroll wheel should perform zooming (perhaps when 'ctrl' is held down).
Both 'Ellipse' and 'Rounded rectangles' suffer from a bug where the shapes created are not symmetrical. This only seems to occur when thicker line styles are used.
This is a curious oversight in the Paint experience. You can stretch to a target size in Percent, but not in Pixels. So if you want to resize your image to 32x32, say, you need to reach for your Calc.exe.
They allow you to save in these formats, so i think they should allow you some degree of control over how the image is compressed.
The 'undo' stack is only three levels deep. I don't need infinite undo (i'm not quite that messy) but at least twenty levels would be good. Unless this slows down the load up time, in which case i think i could, begrudgingly, accept just seven.
Okay -- this one is way out there, and might involve someone writing some actual code... In addition to rectangles and ellipses, it would be handy to have squares and circles.
Microsoft offers: a FREE Second Chance to Pass Your Microsoft Certification Exam
Somehow this is just a crooked idea. All the developers I know take exams very seriously. They study very hard before exams (using cheats... admittedly...) and only go into the exam when they're 100% sure of success. It's a pride thing. Intellectual snobbery -- that thing that most developers suffer from.
The fact that you have to register for the offer before you go into the exam... it's just very wrong, like:
(* Must register for divorce before marriage)
Thanks to the Daily Grind, from Larkware, which Mike Gunderloy has now been publishing for three years.
If computer hardware stopped getting better today, then what would software be like in one hundred years?
To give IE 7 a hand at finding my feed, I added the following line to the home page:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title=".: secretGeek.net :." href="https://secretgeek.net/rss.asp">
Apparently this will let IE 7 know that the site has a feed.
Because of the dodgy MeWare I use as a CMS, i can't inject this onto every page.
I'd like to know why MS don't use the Ultra Liberal RSS Locator technique, described by Mark Pilgrim and used by many an aggregator. A case of Not Invented Here Syndrome?. (Or maybe it would lead to serious DDoS type problems if every browser in the world followed it?)