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.

Download install and have fun, but don’t forget to become a fan on Facebook

SlideToUnlock

Just in case you are courious: it was developed with C# and WPF. No, there are no plans to EVER create a Mac version of this screensaver. EVER.

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.

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For Windows Vista the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5 is required. It is available for free here:
This is already integrated in Windows 7.
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RatingUpdater 1.0

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.

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.

In order to get it to run in Win7 you need tobring up the registry  (Start -> type “regedit -> Enter), find the following path:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Realtime Soft\UltraMon\3.0.4\Window Buttons

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.

More information can be found on Christian Studers website www.realtimesoft.com, especially in this forum - thread.

This works fine with the official Win7 Beta build 7000.

Download Microsoft Office Outlook Connector, install it. Done.

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.

The most exiting news is definitly the announcement and public availability of WIN7 (1/6/2009 for MSDN subscribers, 1/9/2009 public).

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.

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.

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.

you should check out http://www.bugattack.net

It’s a great online stratgie game, where you can play against your friends, fighting their bugs. You ll get addicted, thats for sure.