It’s been a while since I have published software, but here is my latest project.
http://www.slideToUnlock.me
SlideToUnlock.me is a touch/mouse screensaver for Windows Vista and Windows 7 that shows photos from Flickr or your Harddisk. And yes, it is free.
I love my media center, even more since I found the awesome (free) plugin MyMovies, which allows you to add meta information to your movies. Besides covers of dvds they provide a platform to add movie description, artist details and more. One additional field which is available for every movie is the “Rating” field.
Unfortunately, this field is not set for most of the movies (at least for most of the movies I have, and I have a lot). That’s the reason why I developed an application called RatingUpdater which grabs the information of all my movies (mymovies) and grabs the related IMDB rating value.
RatingUpdater for MyMovies - available for free NOW
RatingUpdater is available for free H E R E. Let me know if you problems or questions.
Right now there is (to my knowledge) no version of Daemon Tools compatible with the official public Beta of Win7 Build 7000 and it seems that they don’t even think about doing anything for win7 before the public release.
But there is help! The free software from Slysoft “Virtual CloneDrive” maps your images as virtual drives for your harddisk. Slysoft does not yet officially support Win7, however the software works as expected (almost). The only thing you need to make sure is that you umount all drives before shutdown of Win7, because Virtual CloneDrive seems to prevent the system from shutting down.
However, this was the solution that helped me install all my archived images. Thanks Slysoft.
A while ago I heard people talking about crowd animation all the time. So I decided to do my own first crowd animation. Well, I must have mixed up Crowd and Kraut, whatever…
That’s the result of hard work. I have to give credit to A.K. who did the actual post production of this amazing piece of artwork / animation.
With some tweaks you can run Ultramon 3.0.4 (beta), which is actually still the Vista beta (for whatever reason there was never a release), on Windows 7.
In order to get it to run in Win7 you need tobring up the registry (Start -> type “regedit -> Enter), find the following path:
and change Move Window Button and Maximize to Desktop Button to 0.
After this change ultramon works, but the taskbars on the non-main monitors show weired rendering:
Rendering issues with version 3.0.4 beta
One other workaround is to use Version 2.7.1, which renders a little bit better, however, it is still not perfekt. Deactivating transparency makes it a little better.
It took me a while to actually find out how to use my live.com email in Outlook 2007. And since I saw many frustrated users having the same problem, here is how you do it:
After installation you have to restart Outlook and you will be asked for the live.com email address, password and the name that should be shown with your emails. It’s that simple.
A few weeks ago I ran into a huge remote control in a local mall at Brookstone. It did not even take me a minute to decide that this awesome piece of hardware needs to be mine. Not too long after buying this remote control, I had a phone conversation with a friend. Together we agreed on the saying: “the bigger, the better” and brainstormed about how to develop an even bigger remote control.
Brookstone Remote Control
After looking through the web, I ordered two of those well known Dance Dance Revolution mats for the PlayStation 2 (because those were the cheapest ones). In order to be able to connect those devices to my PC, I also ordered a converter box which allows to connect two Playstation 2 controller devices to the PC.
Dance Dance Revolution mat
Those devices are internally mapped as HIDs / joysticks, and therefore easily programmable. Therefore I developed a small C# .net library to get a simple interface for future applications. The library and its entire source code is availble for download here. For the library I used and modified a DirectInput example from Mark Harris
Once I had that, it was easy to handle the different “StepDown” events and implement a simple remote control.
WindowInteropHelper windowInteropHelper = new WindowInteropHelper(this);
DanceDanceRevolutionMatManager ddrMat = new DanceDanceRevolutionMatManager(windowInteropHelper.Handle);
ddrMat.KeyDown += new DanceDanceRevolutionMatManager.DdrEventHandler(ddrMat_KeyDown);
ddrMat.KeyUp += new DanceDanceRevolutionMatManager.DdrEventHandler(ddrMat_KeyUp);
This piece of code shows how to us the Dance Dance Revolution Library.
I wanted my remote control to work with the Microsoft Windows Media Center, so I decided to use P/Invoke with some functions from user32.dll to send different key strokes for the different events. The implementation for the RemoteEventSender class can be downloaded here.
This is the final result, a simple, but working prototype of a lifesize, universal remote control for Microsoft’s Media Center:
Feel free to use the source code for your projects, if it is helpful at all, but drop me a line if you do so. The sourcecode for the entire project can be found here.
Please leave a comment if you know / have / have seen / have heard of a bigger one.
What comes after multi-touch? - User Experience perspective:
Why not multi-step? Let’s see if this is the first STEP towards an incredible UX-paradigm-shift.
