# Tuesday, 10 February 2009

There's been a reasonable amount of blog talk about the removal of the "quick launch" area from the Windows 7 taskbar. What isn't coming across in the blogs I read is how there is an across-the-board attempt to make the taskbar more useful. Sure, making it easy to flip focus to a background window to see how it's doing is a good idea. But saving you from having to flip focus is a better idea, right? Take a look at this:

It's a piece of my taskbar, and the icon with the green on it is an Internet Explorer download dialog. That's a green overlay progress bar going across it. Here's another a few minutes later:

This is really, genuinely useful. And if you're thinking that getting your own applications to take advantage of this will require you to learn a bunch of API calls and the like - think again! If you have a progress bar control on screen, the overlaying in the taskbar will be done for you automatically on Windows 7. How's that for fun?

Kate

Tuesday, 10 February 2009 18:27:42 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Monday, 09 February 2009

We all face times when we have a picture and we want the text. Maybe we have a printout we can scan, but we don't have one of those cool photocopiers that scans to a true text format like PDF or XPS. Maybe we took a screenshot during a web cast and don't want to retype all the code. That sort of thing. There used to be OCR in Word, but in Word 2007 it seems to have disappeared. No worries though, it resurfaced in One Note.

Here's a screenshot from a private web cast last summer (the actual content is in a recent Visual C++ team blog, so no worries about revealing super secret info):

Now, I open a new One Note document, paste this jpg into it, then right-click:

 

You can hit paste right in One Note if you like, but it tries to capture formatting etc. I pasted into Notepad and got this:

Some samples
structXfl;
void meow(constX&)cout<<”meowconstX&):Copying.”<<endI;}
void meow(X&&) cout << “meow(X&&): Moving.’ <<endl;}
XfooOIreturn XO;}
const X bar() return X(); }
mt main()
Xa;
constXb;
meow(a); I/Copying
meow(b); I/Copying
meow(fooO); ii Moving
meow(barO); II Copying
}

OK, it needs some spaces, and it's not too smart about {} or //, but it's quicker than typing it all yourself. And if you have a boatload of ordinary typed text (say a paragraph from a printed RFP that you want to quote in an email to various folks, or a powerpoint presentation) then it's even more accurate. And it's probably on your machine already!

Kate

Monday, 09 February 2009 17:58:44 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Sunday, 08 February 2009

I had read that Windows 7 did the perf calculations differently than Vista, so I thought I would compare them. I took a picture of my settings as part of the whole "back up everything three different ways" process before the upgrade (me? burned before? ya think?) and here's what it said:

After the upgrade, it said:

So the same conclusion, but drawn from different numbers. Bottom line is I could mess around with this laptop and it would be faster, but it works for my day to day use. And things feel zippier on Windows 7. Sleeping and waking up, for sure. And finding the files I want ... but that's about jump lists and previews.

Kate

Sunday, 08 February 2009 16:53:28 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Saturday, 07 February 2009

Well, I did it. I put the Windows 7 beta on the laptop I use day in and day out. This machine had Vista on it, and the upgrade was utterly painless. All my software was still there and still working fine when the install was complete. The only glitch was that my built-in touchpad has become invisible in some way. This means I can't configure it to be less sensitive, which in turn means I was "clicking" a lot when I didn't mean to. I disabled it completely (using the 1980s-style UI of the edit-your-settings-on-boot experience) and other than having to carry a mouse with me when I take the laptop somewhere, there's been no other impact.

First impressions: I use jump lists a lot. Enough for a separate blog post. I like everything I noticed, except the default large-icons, no-text, group-everything setting on the taskbar. I fixed that:

(I've cropped it so it doesn't stretch the page)

I've said it before and I've said it again ... you can't really learn a product if you kick up a VPC once in a while but live your life in a different product. Windows 7 is stable enough to live in, and living in it will show what it's really like soon enough. I'm liking what I'm living.

Kate

Saturday, 07 February 2009 16:43:31 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Friday, 06 February 2009

I've been saying for a while that the Vista Bridge is now a living project that gets updated. And here we have our second Code Gallery release already. I think it's worth saying again what I said when 1.3 was released:

Here you can download the latest version, join discussions, and report issues including native APIs you wish were wrapped. Remember, this is a sample library, not a product, so don't expect the kind of support, internationalization, or full coverage a product would have. Do expect useful code for reading (if you care about how to do interop well) or just using (if you want to light up your application with Vista features without knowing about interop.)

I've been doing quite a lot of speaking on this wrapper library and it really makes all the difference in the world if you'd like to adopt the latest OS functionality from your managed (C# or VB.NET) application.

I did a quick search to see who had been writing about our library and was a little surprised to find a Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vista_Bridge. But it turns out that's about an actual bridge, that cars drive on, on Vista Avenue in Portland Oregon. Ah well.

Kate

Friday, 06 February 2009 16:19:58 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Thursday, 05 February 2009

Should I be interested in a top 100 list I'm not on? Of course I should. Here's a list of developer blogs, painstakingly gathered by Jurgen Appelo. He looked at Google PageRank, Alexa traffic rankings, Technorati authority ratings, how many people link to the blog, commenting rate, and the RSSMicro FeedRank. In other words, an objective gathering of our collective subjective opinions of each other. While I have no clue how to measure any of those things, I can tell you I read 4 of his top ten and 11 of the top 100 at least once a week. If I were looking for more blogs to read, this list would include plenty of excellent candidates. Check it out!

Kate

Thursday, 05 February 2009 16:11:06 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Wednesday, 04 February 2009

I like Scott Berkun's blog a lot. He often shares insightful glimpses of what it takes to achieve. In this entry, he talks about how ratsen fratsen hard it is to write a book. This reminds me that I don't want to write any more books (in case watching Julie finish hers wasn't reminder enough) and also connects to the trouble I sometimes have with other long term unstructured projects. Deciding to work on what needs to be worked on is how you show your character. Day in, day out. Don't like the character you're showing? Decide differently, starting today.

Kate

Wednesday, 04 February 2009 16:03:27 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Tuesday, 03 February 2009

Let me share with you something I heard on the TV the other night that really clicked with me. "As I get older," the man said, "I find that I ask myself questions more. You know, why am I here?". He paused, and I nodded. The older we get the more life we have to ponder the meaning of. Then continued. "It's not exactly philosophy though. It's more ... why am I here... in the basement? What the heck did I come down here for? "

Oh yeah. That I do even more than the pondering.

Kate

Tuesday, 03 February 2009 13:11:42 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #