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To Vista or not to Vista that is the ?

I was never able to find the time, nor the motivation to try the Vista Beta releases, so it wasn’t until the real release before I laid my hands and eyes upon it. I’ve been using Windows and developing software for it since Version 3.0. In fact I’m in the midst of a big cleanup at present and stumbled across the Windows 3.0 Floppy Disks this past weekend. Oh the memories.

Back to the hear and now and I have to say I was really impressed with Vista. It was without doubt the quickest and easiest install of any Windows version that I’ve ever done. What impressed me the most was it was able to install and work with a range of nVidia Video and nForce LAN drivers without me lifting a finger. On Windows XP on the same hardware I need to manually install these drivers from the CD that comes with the Motherboard. Installation of RAID drivers has also greatly improved and you no longer need to create and use a Floppy Disk during the initial Window install. The motherboard on this PC has Dual Video (monitor) support which I was never able to get working properly with Windows XP. Again Vista had this working from the get go.

Vista itself felt really nice to use. There are a variety of subtle improvements like the “Back” button which makes it easy to backtrack through Control Panel screens. And far more comprehensive Hardware and Software monitoring capabilities. Also things seemed smoother and seemed to work better. For example  I always seem to have problems getting Networking to work, but on Vista it just worked.

You’ll hear and read a lot about UAC or User Access Control. These are windows that pop up and require confirmation before you are able to do most any Administrative task. They clearly can be annoying, however UAC along with the new Protected Mode in IE7 should go a long way towards stopping Malware, Trojans and other undesirable software from infecting your PC and making your computing life a misery.

Vista has a very attractive new User Interface called Aero which I think looks great. You also get a neat 3D Task switching display, with the window for each running application stacked in a 3D space. Each small window shows what each application is doing in real time. So if you are watching a movie for example, you’ll see that in its stacked window.

Back to my opening question: To Vista or not? My plan was to run Vista on the new PC I built for Cherryl,  however after a few days of futility I succumb and installed Windows XP. What was the problem? It was simply that I wasn’t able to get several of her mainstream, can’t live without, applications running. Now take note that I’m not putting Vista at fault, nor these applications, as they weren’t Vista versions. The problem was there weren’t Vista versions of these programs available at that time. A Vista version of one has just been announced, but not the others.

Now you may be lucky and your Non-Vista programs will work or more likely appear to work on Vista, however from what I now know after doing the work to updating our software products for Vista, is that there are some quite fundamental areas which must be addressed for software to work correctly on Vista. For example programs can no longer write to any files in the “Program Files” folder or any of its sub-folders. Vista gives installation programs special permissions to store files on these folders, however when applications try to write to them, Vista makes mirrored copies of the files in the “Application Data” folder and writes to these instead. This can quickly get very confusing with multiple ‘different’ copies of the same files in different locations.

These changes aren’t in fact entirely new. Programs that are designed correctly for Windows XP and therefore run properly in Limited User (Non-Admin) accounts, should also work properly in Vista or at worst may need only minor updates.

So my advice is, if you want to run Vista, only do so once you have Vista compatible versions of all of your mainstream (can’t live without) applications. Anything less isn’t going to give you that WOW experience and will likely cause you some degree of grief.

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New Surfulater release, V2.00.10.0 ready and waiting

A slower than I’d like start, release wise for the year, but there is lots happening behind the scenes. As I mentioned in my last blog post one of the most requested Surfulater capabilities has been the ability to select multiple articles in the Knowledge Tree. Well as they say, the wait is now over.

Multiple articles can now be selected and managed in the Knowledge Tree. This enables you to Copy/Cut and Paste multiple articles at once, Drag & drop them, Remove them, Add reciprocal ‘See Also’ references and use ‘Send To’ with them. This works both within and across Knowledge Bases making it easy to move or copy a selection of articles from one KB to another.

Harold Hauer has just posted on our Forums:

I couldn’t wait to try this feature –FANTASTIC!

And Perry Mowbray writes:

Hey 2.00.10 looks great!

Another common request has been to provide folks with a Free Surfulater Reader that anyone could use to view Surfulater Knowledge Bases. Well the good news is we’ve now delivered this with V2.00.10.0.

The plan was to actually create a new product which was just a Reader, much how Adobe Reader works. Ideally this would be a single .EXE file with no installation required. I’d still like to do this, down the track, but for now I’ve opted for a simpler solution. And that is folks download and install the Surfulater Free Trial, which reverts to a Free Reader at the end of the trial period. This gives them the extra benefit of being able to fully evaluate Surfulater, should they want to.

Another related and important change in this release is the ability open and view any Knowledge Base whilst Surfulater is in free trial mode, and not be restricted to just opening the MyKnowledge.Surfulater KB. This enables Surfulater to be used as Free Reader from day one, not just when the trial period is over. It also enables our users to get view access to their content on any PC they want to install Surfulater on, not just their licensed PC’s.

You can see the full release notes for V2.00.10.0 here.

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Surfulater, the next release …

One of the most requested Surfulater capabilities is the ability to select multiple articles in the Knowledge Tree. In hindsight it is clear that omitting this in the original design was a mistake. When you develop any type of product you have to work through an array of trade-offs, otherwise the product may never reach the market and will likely be cost to much. Opting not to include multiple selection was such a trade-off.

Leaving this out was a mistake for two reasons. First I didn’t realize how much our users would want to work with multiple articles and second it has turned out to be quite a chore to rework the code to implement multiple selection. It sounds simple enough on the surface, but it is quite complex once you dig down a bit.

Selecting multiple items is reasonably straightforward, apart from Ctrl+click which toggles the selected item. However the user interaction that follows is complex and tends to vary for each type of action. For example if you select three articles, right click on one and choose Copy then right click on a Folder and choose Paste what should happen with the selection. In the version of Surfulater you have now the selection moves to the pasted article. In the next version it keeps the selection on the original three articles. This brings it in line with how other Windows programs, such as Explorer, behave. But what happens when the original three articles are no longer selected when Paste is used – does the newly pasted article get selected or does the selection stay wherever it was?  And Paste is just one of a range of actions and associated outcomes that can be performed on a multiply selected set of articles.

Working though the possible permutations for each command is tedious and deciding on what is the most desirable outcome isn’t necessarily straightforward. And what I think is desirable you may not!

I’ve also changed the behaviour of Right mouse click for the next release so that it no longer changes the current selection. These and other changes make it easier and more intuitive when working with selected items in the Knowledge Tree.

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Get up and running with TortoiseSVN and Subversion in 15 minutes.

Subversion is the most popular free, cross platform Version Control Systems (VCS) available today. It also happens to be open source, is being actively developed and has a strong community behind it.

To quote from the Subversion Web site:

“The goal of the Subversion project is to build a version control system that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community. The software is released under an Apache/BSD- style open source license.”

Version Control gives you a time machine for your files, enabling you to go back in time to any earlier version, see what changes have been made over time, and revert your work to an earlier version if need be. It also gives you an audit trail of changes and a commented history of those changes, amongst other capabilities.

The easiest way to use Subversion in Microsoft Windows is to use TortoiseSVN  To quote from the TortoiseSVN site:

“TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows. Since it’s not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like.”

TortoiseSVN  is a GUI client shell around Subversion and most anything that can be done on Subversion can be done in TortoiseSVN. TortoiseSVN (TSVN) includes Subversion (SVN), so you don’t necessarily need to download and install it.  I’m very pleased to say that both SVN and TSVN are very well documented, which is atypical in the open source world. As much documentation as there is, I still found it difficult to both comprehend how SVN works and to start using it. Continue reading “Get up and running with TortoiseSVN and Subversion in 15 minutes.”

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Write Ruby code faster with ED for Windows

Ruby is the most expressive and interesting language I’ve come across in all these years of developing our programmer’s editor/ide ED for Windows. It takes Object Oriented programming and Dynamic language support to new levels, at least in my eyes.

Ruby enables you to do more than other languages in less lines of code and still be reasonably readable, and important asset for any language. The library that is included with Ruby is the most comprehensive I’ve seen, which means there is less searching out other libraries or having to write your own code. The bottom line is simply that you should be more productive writing in Ruby than other languages, which is pretty important in todays fast paced world. And if you can do more with less code, there should be fewer bugs, right! Continue reading “Write Ruby code faster with ED for Windows”

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A Great Surfulater Review

Just after Christmas Ercan Cem contacted me about reviewing Surfulater on his blog Digital World, which was most welcome, and is in fact something we’d like to see more of. We’ve had some good coverage recently, which I’ve been meaning to blog about, but there always seems to be more pressing things occupying my time.

James Fallows mentioned Surfulater in The Atlantic in Nov 2006 in his article Making Haystacks, Finding Needles.

A relatively new entry, Surfulater, created by a veteran developer in Australia, differs from most of the others in the elaborate ways it allows you to comment on, classify, and even edit the material you have collected. For instance, if you’ve copied and stored a blog entry or a passage from a Web site, you can enter notes of your own—“There he goes again!” “This detail is interesting—right alongside the clip, and search for those comments later on. It also has a variety of special categorization tools.

A few weeks back a new customer mentioned he heard about Surfulater in the Washington Post, but I’ve yet to find out any details. Library Clips wrote an article Surfulater for PIM back in August 2006. Bob Stumbel’s EVERYTHING 2.0 list includes Surfulater in his OS 2.0 – Update section, which doesn’t seem the right spot to me.

Back to Ercan’s review which you can find at Great Information Manager: Surfulater. Ercan does a very good job of explaining the need people have for Surfulater and how it fulfills this need. Best if you go and read it for yourself.

If you write a blog or a newsletter or know someone that does and would like to help more people find out about Surfulater, please do get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.

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XEN and the art of Virtualization

I endeavour to spend a bit of time over the Christmas/New Year break trying out and learning about new things as these opportunities don’t present themselves much through the year. On Friday night over dinner, a good friend Russell Robinson mentioned a virtualization product XEN, which was being put to very good use where he does some contracting work. I’d heard of XEN but didn’t know anything about it. I still have Cherryl’s new PC that I can play around with, so this seemed like a good time to check XEN out. Continue reading “XEN and the art of Virtualization”

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Web Operating Systems versus Remote Desktop

I’m trying to keep abreast of what is happening in the world of Web Applications (vs. Desktop) and this includes Ajax, Web Application Frameworks and Web Languages, Web Operating Systems and all things Web 2.0. My main interest here is to have Surfulater or a subset thereof, running over the Net in your Web Browser, one day.

Stan Schroeder has recently put together a very good overview of 10 on-line operating systems which is well worth a read, if you are interested in Web applications. The articles comments provide very good feedback and mention a number of Web OS’s that Stan hadn’t included. Continue reading “Web Operating Systems versus Remote Desktop”

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Building a new PC for Xmas because I want a NAS – Part 1

In what seems like a previous life I was heavily into electronics, in fact it was my career for quite some time. I used to love building electronic gadgets, predominantly digital, which progressed naturally into micro-computers. The first computer I built had 4K ROM, 16K RAM and used a cassette tape to load and save software. As anyone who was around back then will tell you, “those were the days”. The next step was, of course, dabbling in writing programs. With such limited memory available you had little choice but to write in assembler language, so you could squeeze as much as possible into the tiny space available. This was a truly amazing learning experience, where one’s ingenuity and perseverance were critical to success. Continue reading “Building a new PC for Xmas because I want a NAS – Part 1”

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Surfulater V2.00 Released. The 11th and final release for 2006.

Ok the dust has settled, and there have been no real problems to speak of, with the Surfulater V2.00 release, I’m very pleased to say. I want to briefly run through some of the new features in this release, so go and grab a cup of tea or coffee and read on.

Our first stop is the Knowledge Base (KB) Tab Bar which enables you to quickly switch from one knowledge base (database) to another.

Knowledge Base Tab Bar

This has been enhanced to include the drop down KB selection menu, shown above, a new IE7 style Close button on the active tab, the ability to rearrange tabs in whatever order you want by dragging them to the desired location, and a new right click context menu that lets you Close, Open and Create KBs, as shown below. The KB selection menu is handy when you have lots of KBs open, as it saves having to scroll the tabs to locate the KB you want.

Tab Bar Context Menu

If you haven’t ventured as far as using multiple knowledge base files, you should give it some thought. Don’t go overboard creating lots of KBs though. I’ve got 24 at last count, with a number past their use by date. For example I used three KBs when planning a trip to Europe last year, but these are of little use right now. They may be in the future though.

See the Help topic: Power Features|Knowledge Base Tab Bar for more information on the Tab Bar and The Basics|Working with Files (new/open/close) about creating new KBs etc. 

Next up is the new Add Links to Files… capability. Surfulater has had the ability to attach and permanently store external files in its knowledge bases for some time, but sometimes you simply want to store a link to a file and not store the file itself. You were able to do this, but it was cumbersome to say the least.

Add Links to Files works like adding Attachments with the only difference being the end result. You can select and add links to multiple files using a standard Windows File|Open style dialog. 

Another new way to add links as well as attachments is to drag files from Windows Explorer and drop them on the Attachments field of an Article or Folder.

 

Attachments & Links

 

When you drop the files (release the left mouse button) a menu lets you choose whether to add links to the files or attach them to the article. Also new in this release are the images shown in the screen shot above, which indicate whether a file is a link or an attachment. New CSS styles have also been added, so the mouse over hover color is different for links and attachments.

See the Help topics: Power Features|Attaching & Linking Files to Articles and the Release Notes for more on this.

Next is a most welcome new and quick way of appending content to existing articles without having to switch to Surfulater. For example let’s say you’ve just added a new article from your Web Browser and then want to add more content from the same web page or even a different page. To do this select the content you want to capture, copy it to the Windows Clipboard and then press the new Append Clipboard to Article Hotkey (Ctrl+Alt+. by default). Surfulater can then either stay hidden in the Windows System Tray or come to the foreground. You can of course append new content from any program, for example MS Word, Adobe Acrobat etc.

For more on the Append Clipboard to Article Hotkey see the Help topic: Power Features|Appending content to Articles.

Ok sit tight, just two more new features to go for this wrap up.

It has been brought to our attention that not everyone wants to use My Documents\My Surfulater as the default Surfulater data files folder, so we’ve added a new item to the Preferences dialog that lets you set the Data Folder as you desire.

 

Updated Preferences Dialog

 

See the Data Folder field at the bottom of the screen shot, well that’s where you set it. I personally use the Shared Documents folder, as you can see above (indicated by “All Users”). This screen shot also shows the new Append Clipboard to Article Hotkey setting.

For more on Data Folders see the Help topic, Power Features|Preferences.

And to conclude there are six new UI (User Interface) Themes, which include various Office 2007 themes and a new UI Theme Toolbar.

Surfulater Screen Shot with new Office 2007 Theme

This screen shot shows the Office 2007 Obsidian Theme, along with the new UI Theme Toolbar.

And for anyone interested that’s the mATX Case I’ve just bought for a new mini PC I’m going to build over Christmas. I’ve never built modern day PC before and am looking forward to this, albeit with some trepidation.

There are a more things in this release, including all important bug fixes, which you need to go and read about in the Release Notes in the Help or on our Support Forums.

It has been a great year, made all the more so by your support, feedback and words of encouragement. There is still plenty of important and interesting work yet to be done and I look forward to watching this unfold in 2007, as no doubt you do. I also look forward to continued growth of our customer base in the year ahead.

If I don’t post again before Christmas thanks again to everyone, have a great Xmas and a very Happy New Year.

Neville FranksÂ