Product Review

Meet My New Favorite Text Editor

Ryan Farley — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 16:26:00 GMT

I've been a long time fan of TextPad. I live by my text editor. My text editor is probably one of the most highly used applications on my pc. Seriously. TextPad has been great and I've always loved it. I decided on TextPad years ago after I grew dissatisfied with UltraEdit, I've tried a few others along the way, such as Notepad2, but none would compare to my favorite TextPad. Funny thing is, I wasn't looking for a new text editor, but I came across a new one today that I had not heard of before and I decided to give it a try.

Enter Twistpad

View more Twistpad screenshots

Twistpad is an awesome text editor. It would have to be to get me to decide to move away from TextPad. Complete with syntax highlighting, plugin support, collapsable text blocks ala Visual Studio regions, code snippets & template support, a built in clipboard ring, and a whole lot more.

So what made me decide to switch? Well, one thing for sure, Twistpad is a really great looking app. It has a very Visual Studio looking UI, and I do like that. A lot. However, some of my favorite features are:

Collapsable sections (outline blocks)
The way it handles searches
Auto-complete
Color syntax-highlighting printing
File compares
Word-style spell checking
Very well thought-out and designed. It makes sense and it's layout is how you would expect a text editor to be
Did I mention how great it looks. I am just loving the VS look and feel

Visit the Twistpad site

All in all, I am loving my new text editor. I have to say I didn't think the day would ever come that I would move away from TextPad. So far I love what I see. Sure there are some things that are missing, such as unicode support (coming in the next version) and maybe a shell extension to get better context menu support in Windows, but all in all I am happy.

Awesome Command-Prompt Replacement

Ryan Farley — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 21:13:00 GMT

I was catching up on some Scott Hanselman posts today after going through Scott's new Utilmate Tools list (which is a great list) and came accross Scott's post on Console. Wow. I am in love. I've always been a big command-prompt junkie and this app is the cat's meow. A tabbed console windows app with better support for copy/paste and so much more.

How is it that Scott always find out about these kinds of awesome apps. This one is worth using for sure. I'm on the 2.0 beta build 125. I have mine with tabs for loading the VS 2005 & VS 2003 environment vars on separate tabs and a few other custom ones for setting environment vars as well.

Visit the Source Forge Console home to download

Colibri - My New Favorite Toy

Ryan Farley — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 14:42:00 GMT

I have a new favorite toy. Scott Hanselman mentioned Colibri on his blog so I thought I would give it a try. I can't tell you how much I am loving this cool tool. Colibri Type Ahead (which is free) is a combination of a quick start/launch and search program you use to quickly start up applications installed on your pc.

Check out Colibri

Hit a predefined hot-key and then just start typing the name of the application you want to launch. You'll be presented with a list of matches that narrow as you type. The best part is that you don't have to type the whole name, or even a part of it. You can type an abbreviation if you want. If I want to start PowerPoint, for example, I can just type “popnt” and it will match to PowerPoint. If more then one application match that name then I'll be presented with the choices. The coolest thing about Colibri is how it learns from you. If I type “vis” to start Visual Studio, and Visual Studio isn't the top of the list so I arrow down to select it. It knows that next time I type “vis” I probably mean Visual Studio so it will list it first.

Also, Colibri has integration with other various things, such as Google. I can hit the hot key to bring up Colibri, type “goo” then tab and enter my search term to perform a quick search. I can type “vol” and then up or down arrow to turn my pc's volume up or down quickly. It can launch control panel applets, and even has some integration coming for iTunes, Winamp, Firefox, etc.

I always seem to have a billion things installed on my pc at any given moment. While I do try to keep my start menu organized, it feels like such a chore sometimes to dig through the start menu looking for some app I hardly use (and can't remember where it is). Colibri sure makes that all easier. Not to mention Michael, the man behind Colibri, was totally willing to make a change that prevented it from working on my machine. That was just cool.

EZShellExtensions.Net Awesome Library for Easy Shell Extensions

Ryan Farley — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 14:41:00 GMT

I came across Sky Software's EZShellExtensions.Net via The Daily Grind and decided to check it out. Wow. I have to say I just love this library. There are so many different kinds of shell extensions you can easily do with hardly any effort at all. Take a look at a few tests I threw together:

There is so much more that you can do this this library for shell extensions (see the link below for a full list of extensions you can do). Support for both VS 2003 and VS 2005, .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0. Definitely worth checking out!

Check out EZShellExtensions.Net

And no, I am not only posting this to get my free developer license ;-)

New RSS Reader - Hello GreatNews

Ryan Farley — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 14:04:00 GMT

I've always been public about my descisions with which RSS reader to use. Last time I posted about this, I was using Sauce Reader and had found that it was bowing out from aggregator-land. Since then, I've used FeedDemon and have been a pleased, but not really that thrilled. I started using GreatNews and I've found that I like it (even though it's current version is missing a few things).

Since Sauce Reader went belly-up I've went back to trying RSS Bandit, SharpReader, and FeedDemon, but I just couldn't really get into any of them. RSS Bandit is a great one and it just keeps getting better and better. But I am just not that excited about it. I just don't know why. I came across GreatNews when I wasn't even looking for a new reader and gave it a try. There are some things I really like about it but it's missing a few things too.

There's a few things that GreatNews has that really appeal to me. It seems that lately I've been so busy that I start to fall behind on reading content that I'd like to keep up on (can't you tell? I've been slacking on updating my blog). GreatNews has some cool, yet very simple features that make it easy to find content that I don't want to miss. Watches, like search folders, let you pull in posts from other sources that you don't even subscribe to. I can built a watch that allows me to see google results of anyone that links to my blog, or see all feedster (or flickr) results that match some certain criteria. I can have GreatNews highlight certain posts based on keywords I've defined so they stand out from the other posts rolling in. I think that is cool. Not to mention that I really like the UI. It is clean, simple, and just looks nice.

I've spent some time in the GreatNews forums, the developer is easy to work with and makes his nightly builds available for public consumption. Things like support for favicons were suggested in the forums and within a few days I had a new build with the support built in.

What I like about GreatNews:

Simple and clean UI
Has the features I want (almost) and not a ton of extras I don't care about
Free
Fast/Performs well
Easy to organize with folders, labels, and watches (search folders)
Channel Statistics. You can easily see what you look at the most and what subscribed feeds keep most up to date so you're able to fine tune what you spend time reading.
Automatic post highlighting based on certain keywords or text so have special content stand out.

What I don't like about GreatNews:

No support for comments! This one is huge, but the developer has committed to adding this. This is really the only thing I wish it had, but hasn't really bothered me too bad so far - I've been using FeedDemon for a bit now which is also missing this so I guess I am used to it.

I'm not saying it's better than the others I've been using. Feature-to-feature RSS Bandit wins there, but I am really liking GreatNews for now and I plan to stick with it for a while.

Take a look at some GreatNews features

MaxiVista v2

Ryan Farley — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 15:12:00 GMT

I posted a long time ago about MaxiVista and how I use it to extend my desktop onto my laptop. I've been using version 2 for a month or two now, and found that I like it even more than before.

Here's a recap on MaxiVista (Read my post from Jan04 for more details). MaxiVista is software that allows you to add the monitor of another machine (could be another computer, or laptop, or tablet) as an additional monitor on your computer. This isn't something like desktop sharing or VNC, it actually adds the display of the other computer as an additional display adapter on your computer. It connects to the other display via an WLAN, Ethernet, Firewire or USB connection. I just connect to it over my network. That's just awesome, but nothing new there from version 1. Now here's where things get really useful with version 2. In addition to using my laptop as an additional (third) monitor on my pc, I can use MaxiVista as a KVM (sort of - more like just the KM part). As an additional monitor, I can drag windows from my pc to my laptop's display. While that is cool, I find that I use MaxiVista now more as a KVM, so I see my normal laptop desktop, but I can drag my mouse over to it's display and now my mouse and keyboard are controlling the laptop.

When I go out of town and have to prep my laptop to take with me, this is really useful. I don't like small laptop keyboards, sure I could use my docking station, but then I need another keyboard & mouse on my desk. I could use remote desktop, but that takes the display of my pc. This way, I can get my laptop ready to go using my pc's keyboard & mouse, and all I have to do is move my mouse to the laptop screen to control it, and then back to my desktop screen to control it again. Not only that, but with a press of a single key it becomes an additional monitor and I can use it to drag an application over to it. Not bad at all.

A Saucy Switch

Ryan Farley — Thu, 12 May 2005 12:34:00 GMT

Well, it is done. I've made a switch to a new RSS reader. I've used RSS Bandit for quite a while now. I tried many different readers and ended up quite satisfied with RSS Bandit. But it just didn't excite me any more. I had tried Sauce Reader in the past, although to be honest, I was so in to RSS Bandit at the time that I'm not sure I really gave it a fair shake, but I have now and I am really liking it so far.

I'm not going to compare RSS Bandit with Sauce Reader too much here (although the things I like or dislike about Sauce Reader are from the perspective of an RSS Bandit user), but I will share a few things that I really like (and don't like) about Sauce Reader. I am a big believer in Josh Ledgard's philosophy of “Living in your world and listening to theirs” and hope the same of the makers of all software that I use. So, if I have something to say about software that I like (or that I really want to like but just can't because of some lack of features or limitations it might have) then I will say so in the hopes that it might help improve the software - or just to warn others about software I didn't like ;-)

Things I really like about Sauce Reader

UI is very clean, really great looking, and easy to find your way around. [View]
Very easy to see which feeds & posts have new comments on it. The icon for a post or feed changes to indicate that new comments have been made.
The comments are seen below the actual post - in the same page/layout. No need to expand comments and click through them one at a time, you can see them all under the post (like you do normally when viewing a blog post webpage). This one is awesome and allows me to quickly scan through comments on a post to find any comments of interest without needing to click through each one. [View]
Outlook 2003 style grouping of posts for a feed to make it easy to locate posts made today/yesterday/lastweek/etc.
Built in tool for posting to your own blog. The tool is pretty good (well, downgrade that to “OK“), but just the basic formatting kinds of stuff built in. No ability for formatting code or anything, but still, it does make it quick and easy for posting to your blog from your reader. [View]
You have a “Weblog This“ option available so you can quickly and easily post about some other post you read (it's will add in a blockquote of the text from the original post for you).
IE integration. It adds a tool bar in IE that will allow you to post about a page your on (using a “Weblog This“ button) and also a Subscribe button which automatically becomes enabled if it detects an RSS feed on the page (It doesn't really “detect“ an RSS feed but just looks for the RSSLink link tag in the page).
Sauce Reader is very simple, not overly-done or anything. Just a simple, but nice looking reader. The same reasons that I like TextPad, it just gives me what I need and doesn't over-complicate with too many bells and whistles.
Quick to navigate around.
Search folders (RSS Bandit had this too, but I still wanted to mention it)
No more goofy smiley-face icon with an eye-patch ;-)

Things I don't like about Sauce Reader:

The headers in Sauce Reader don't change with the current theme in XP/2003. They are always blue (assuming you are using the blue luna theme). Not a big deal, but it bugs me.
Although I do love the way it displays comments (under the post) I hate (and yes, that was bolded) that trackbacks are not clickable. You can see trackbacks listed under a post, but you can't click the trackback to get to it. That is so frustrating.
I can't seem to find any way to flag a post that I want to read in more detail later (other than leaving it as unread, but that's not the same). Well, I can flag it (by clicking the flag for the entry in the list, but I can't seem to be able to find my flagged items easily (I'd like to have a folder that shows all flagged items like RSS Bandit does).
I can't find any way to post comments from Sauce Reader. This sucks and would have been a deal breaker for me when I was evaluating RSS readers a year ago, but I guess I don't post as many comments now as I did before because it doesn't seem to bug me as much (but it does still bug me). With so much comment spam out there it seems that there are not as many blogs out there that allow that anyway. (Oops, see edit below)
There just has to be a way to do this, but for the life of me I cannot find how to sort the feeds in the list alphabetically. They are all in random order (I imported them from an OPML file). I could drag them all to the where I want them in the list, but I have a lot of subscribed feeds and it would be too much of a pain to do it manually.
I have the option set to minimize to the tray. That only works if I click the actual minimize button for some reason. If I click the in on the windows task bar along the bottom to minimize it then it does not go to the tray. Weird and a bug, so not necessarily fair to list here...

All in all, Sauce Reader and RSS Bandit stack up well against each other. RSS Bandit has more features, but I never used most of them. I seem to be able to get through my hundreds of unread posts faster using Sauce Reader so they have gotten something right. The newest version of Sauce Reader was a complete rewrtite. The Synop developers dropped .NET completely and went to Delphi. They claim to have had performance issues with .NET. I guess it is all with how you write your code. I have some .NET apps that are resource hogs and slow, but I have others that are quick snappy with small footprints. You really could say that about anything, but I'm sticking with .NET.

Sauce Reader is well worth a try. They do say it is free for personal use, but I get the feeling that they could be gearing up for charging for it at some point (that's just my perception). I'd have to re-evaluate it again at that point. I do like it, and have switched to using it as my default aggregator, but not sure it excites me enough to pay for it over other free ones out there and I don't think it is there yet. Not that I'm cheap (well, maybe) but it better be a lot better than other free ones to ask money for it. The Synop guys did a great job and deserve something for their efforts, but for now it is free for personal use and will likely stay that way, who knows. The software has only what I consider somewhat minor things that I don't like so it has some real potential to grow into something awesome.

Download Sauce Reader

Edit: OK. I did find a way to comment on a post from Sauce Reader. You can right-click the post entry in the list and then there is a “New Comment” option. Works just fine although I don't like having to right-click there. I'd prefer a button next to the ones in the top right corner of the post HTML pane or something. But a big step forward none the less for me to like the app even more.

Cool (and Free) Tools and Services

Ryan Farley — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 14:06:00 GMT

I thought it was time for a bit of miscellaneous linkage to some cool tools and services I've come accross and started using lately (Well some not so lately, but I've too been busy to post about).

C# Open Source - http://csharp-source.net/

This is awesome. A directory listing all known C# open source projects. A great place to look before you start building something yourself. CMS, portals, libraries, IDEs, frameworks, etc, etc, etc. There's an ok list there already, and I'm sure it will grow. The only thing I wish the site had was a place for reviews from people who have tried or are using each of the projects. I don't have time to go try them out all on my own. It would be a nice addition to be able to read & submit reviews. (Via The Daily Grind)

Free Conference - http://www.freeconference.com/

A *free* telephone conference center. Yes free. I use telephone conferencing for calls often to collaborate with other parties on projects. Usually with pay/commercial services. This service is identical. You can either create a new conference on the fly, or schedule a new conference and send out invites with on their website. Not a bad deal. There's a pay service available if you wish to use an 800 number for the conference. To use the service, you just call one of their numbers, and enter the conference code to either create the conference or join one. You can have up to 100 participants and the conference can last up to 3 hours (more for the pay service).

SqlBuddy - http://sqlbuddy.sourceforge.net/

An open source SQL Query tool written in C#. Great for MSDE users. Features include VS.NET style interface, color syntax highlighting, intellisense to suggest table/field/other object names while typing, printable table & schema reports, and more. It has a really nice look and feel although still a work in progress. It has some awesome potential.

NSurvey - http://www.nsurvey.org/

An open source ASP.NET survey framework written in C#. Easy to use web-based administration and very flexible. Easy setup with an MSI installer and a separate DotNetNuke module is available too. It has a feature list too long to mention here (Take a look at it's feature list). They have their own forums for support and getting custom extensions written by others. I started playing with this one recently and really love it so far. I'll be quickly ditching my own survey framework to use this one from now on.

Orthogonal Toolbox - http://www.orthogonalsoftware.com/products.html

It just occured to me that I never linked to this one before, although I've been using it for quite a while. The Orthogonal Toolbox is an addon for Visio that will export an ORM source diagram to XML and can bulk import fact types into the model. If you work with ORM (that's Object-Role Modeling, not Object-Relation Mapping) in Visio then this is a must have tool. It also includes sample XSLT for generating XSD schema from a database model diagram or for displaying an exported ORM diagram as an HTML report.

Google Desktop Search - Reloaded

Ryan Farley — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 10:18:00 GMT

Last week I joined the masses who apparently blogged about the Google Desktop search. Everywhere you look there's all kinds of praise and buzz about the Google Desktop search. I've been using it and it's saved me some time looking for old e-mails in Outlook and newsgroup posts I made using Outlook Express. Cool. However, I seem to read a lot of posts about people wanting to use it to search for only specific types of files. So, here is the (un)official Google Desktop Search tip #1:

Limiting the Google Desktop Search to specific types of files

You can use the Google “filetype” parameter to limit the Google Desktop Search to specific file types. Simply add the “filetype” parameter with the appropriate extension to the search and you're set.

The file types that I've found work with Google Desktop searches are:

email - Outlook & Outlook Express items
doc or word - Word files
txt or text - Text files
xls or excel - Excel files
ppt or powerpoint - Powerpoint files
chat - AIM chat logs
html/htm or web - Web history
pdf - PDF files - Note, Google does not index PDFs, so you're not searching content, but the file names and paths seems to be included in the search.
Just as with PDFs you can add any file type (bmp, mp3, wmv, avi...etc). Keep in mind your searching for those files with the search term in the name or path, not in the file's content.

So if you wanted to search for “Ryan“ and only include Word documents in the search you would enter the following into the search box:

Ryan filetype:doc

Or if you wanted to search for any e-mails that contained “Farley” you would enter:

Farley filetype:email

This would search both Outlook and Outlook Express items. I can't seem to find a way to search only Outlook without searching Outlook Express too unless I change the settings for that - which I don't want to do. If you use Outlook for mail and Outlook Express for news it would be nice to be able to search one without the other.

So that is cool and all, but I have to say. I am still a little leary about a local web service running on my pc that exposes the content of my hard drive - even though it only accepts requests from the local pc. Scott Hanselman took a deeper look at some of the inner workings of the Google Desktop Search and I agree it is an impressive peice of work. I love how it is done. However, a simple Google exploit, such as the script injection exploit using the 'cof' parameter (outlined here by Jim Ley) could allow for some malicious use of the desktop search by searching your hard drive for files containing the work “password” sending the results back to somewhere else. Scary stuff. Don't get me wrong, I'm not of the camp that's worried about Google using data from my files somehow (except for some inevitable use of Adwords at some point), but anything that potentially opens things up for someone else causes me to worry.

On a related note, AddressOf.com posted about some problems with the file size of the Google indexes. Someone seeing 2.3GB indexes for only about ~216 items. Not sure what that is all about. Last I checked mine had indexed about ~50K items and looking at about ~240MB for the indexes.

In Search of the Perfect RSS Reader

Ryan Farley — Fri, 14 May 2004 11:58:00 GMT

For the last year or two, I've been switching from reader to reader. While each one had features that I loved, they all seemed to fall short on one thing or another and I was never really 100% pleased with any of them. I went from SharpReader, to RSSBandit, to NewsGator, to SharpReader again, to FeedDemon, back to SharpReader, to Gush, back again to NewsGator, and then Sauce Reader. Just as I was about to start building my own aggregator, I decided to give RSSBandit another try (after reading how Josh Ledgard always has such good things to say about it). Well, I've found my winner.

I don't know what specifically changed in RSSBandit since I last tried it, but it's gone through significant changes. The last time I used it was back around the time Dare wrote his article for MSDN about it. So it's a whole different app from back then. Anyway, I decided to post a quick, top of the head rundown of what I liked and didn't like about the aggregators I've tried over the last year+.

Note: I've tried to base all this on the current versions of these applications. Please let me know if I've misrepresented any of these.

RSSBandit
RSSBandit has the best of everything. One of the things that I was wanting in an aggregator was support for the CommentAPI so I could read and post comments from it. RSSBandit has a nice interface and has a really clean and professional look to it. I like nice looking software. For me, that was one of the biggest things in the favor of RSSBandit. I love the “auto-discover” feeds, where you can scan a given URI for feeds. Search folders and some cool searching features. Written in .NET (I love to support the cause). Also, when a post is updated, it just updates the content of the post (seems to pull it each time you view it instead of caching it?). I like that it does not pull down a second copy of the post, however I do wish it would somehow indicate that the contents of the post has changed. The only gripes I had about RSSBandit are very small (and they're not really gripes, just small things I'd change if it were mine). I hate the splash screen. It is ugly and does not match the rest of the clean and XP/Office/VS/etc look of the application. Also, I don't like the icon. The smiley-face with the eye-patch. Give me a break. I don't really care for silly looking software (at least since it is open source I can change that myself if I really want to). But overall, a completly awesome job Dare (and other sourceforge team members)

SharpReader
SharpReader is a great aggregator - functionally. It is a really popular one in the circles I am in so obviously it got a lot of things right. It supports the CommentAPI, which is cool and a huge plus IMO. Also written in .NET. It does everything an aggregator needs to do. But that is it. Nothing more. Nothing exciting and I think the UI leaves a lot to be desired. Drab Windows98 looking 256-color icons and an overall boring look to it (Sorry Luke). I also did not like the tray popups. I know you can turn them off - but I do want tray notifications, just not a separate one for every feed. But as I said, functionally, it gives you everything you need in an aggregator - so I am not saying that Luke didn't do an awesome job or anything. It's just not all that good on the eyes IMO.

NewsGator
NewsGator was awesome for the fact that it was just a freakin cool idea. Seemed to make so much sense to me that it was one of those things I was kicking myself about for not thinking of it first. Another great .NET app. One of my favorite features of NewsGator was that it added some browser integration so you could right-click on a RSS link in your browser and select “subscribe in NewsGator”. That is just cool. Since NewsGator exists inside of Outlooks let's you take advantage of everything that Outlook offers as far as search folders and more. A huge plus for NewsGator and a reason why I kept going back to it. But, as much as I thought it was a great idea to have an RSS reader integrated into Outlook, I got to the point where I really wanted it separate. I get enough stuff coming into my inbox. Those items are either work related or spam. Either way they are items that have different priorities than feeds I subscribe to. Work related e-mail is something I need to react to immediately in most cases. That's not the case with my subscribed feeds. Also, it does not support the CommentAPI which was a big deal to me. When a post changes you get a second (or third, forth, fifth, etc) item in the subscription folder. I didn't care for that.

FeedDemon
I really liked FeedDemon at first. I loved the way it worked and looked. But that started to change the more I used it. Here's what I liked. Watches, like search folders, allows you to make custom feeds more or less based on certain keywords from your other subscribed feeds. The News Bin let's you sort of tag posts that are important to you so you can come back to them later. Sort of like your favorite posts or saved ones. But, there seems to be just so much that is missing. It does not support the CommentAPI and that started to really bug me. Also, it does not update the post or let you know in anyway that a post has been updated. Even if you know that a post was updated, I could not find anyway to have it redownload the text of the post - even if I deleted the cached post. That drove me nuts. I don't like having links open inside my RSS reader, but if you choose to have links open in the default browser it will hijack any open browser to do so instead of opening a new one. I hate that (and will be posting about that next). This one, although it reallt started off strong with me, just seemed to fall short (sorry Nick).

Sauce Reader
I really had very little complaints with Sauce Reader. I thought it was great. I loved the way it looked. I liked how you use it. Overall I thought it was great. Problem was that it did not support the CommentAPI and at the point when I started using Sauce Reader I had already decided that I won't settle for a reader without it. Granted I did use it for a very short time - but my impressions were all good (except for the missing CommentAPI support).

Gush
Gush was weird (how did this one get in here anyway?!). I am not sure what I really think of it, but decided to include it here anyway because it does have some strong parts to it. Gush is a Flash application believe it or not. It has RSS, IM, and more all built into one app. It did a lot of things, but I just couldn't get used to the non-standard UI - even though it looked really nice.

It's been a good ride, but I am very happy now with RSSBandit. Complete and looks nice too (other than that silly icon and splash screen). Great stuff Dare. But, whether you use RSSBandit or something else, do make sure you use an RSS reader. Reading blogs with a browser looses all the benfits that syndicated content brings.

Hopefully the authors of some of the other aggregators mentioned are following Josh's advice of living in their world and listening to mine.