The Codecruncher

Yeah, if you look closely to the right bar you’ll see a new section: Software. On it I’ll make avaliable (as soon as they’re finished and tested) those little programs made by me which could be of some use. Sometimes they’ll come with source code. Sometimes they won’t. Nevertheless, I hope they’ll always be for free.

First on the list is Peeker; a shell extension for image previewing made thanks to the EZShellExtensions component I’ve reviewed on the previous post.

I hope you like it.

Update 03/29.- Mike Gunderloy has kindly noticed Peeker!! Thanks, Mike!!

Via the really amazing Mike Gunderloy and his The Daily Grind, I’ve learnt of a really cool promotional initiative.

Sky Software is currently promoting their products in a quite original manner: they promise a free licensed copy of the desired component to each blogger or technical writer who writes about them on his/her blog or technical magazine. More about it.

One of their controls, EzShellExtensions .Net could be really useful for a pair of projects that I have in mind, so I happily join the program.

EzShellExtensions .Net is a set of components for developing Windows shell extensions. Although there’s quite some literature on the matter in the Net (for example, this article by Dino Esposito), developing such extensions is never a trivial task.

EzShellExtensions .Net (which, by the way, is in dire need of a more commercial name) promises to be a solution to that problem: compatible with all Visual Studio versions, hence with all .NET frameworks, this set of components adds a new project type to the New Project Wizard. If we choose as new project a shell extension, EzShellExtensions will create a new project with the basic code skeleton pre-made. As you can see, the pre-made code creates automatically a GUID, makes the code COM visible, and you can even specify that the shell extension could work with some file extensions.

Taking into account that I’ve been wanting to make a Picaview clone, since ACD not only has discontinued it, it’s also incompatible with ACDSee’s newer versions, so EZShellExtensions .Net can come really handy.

More about it when I can finally test it.

I really believe this: sometimes Microsoft seems unable to get the clue. It really looks like they do it on purpose. Marketing seems to be unknown to them, despite claims (and OK, proof) to the contrary. At this stage in the game they should know that 21st century users are convinced by design rather than functionality or features. Something has to be pretty, sleek, to be self-selling; that way we can scam a lot of consumers asking overprices for gadgets that other companies make better and more functional, but not prettier; such as Apple and their iPod. The Creative Zen line is much, much better; but more people find them uglier. Hence, less Creative units sold and iPod’s domain.

And there’s a great part of something’s design, a property that helps the selling incredibly, by generating expectation and word to mouth: the name of the gadget. I believe that bloggers wouldn’t be that excited if forced to talk about Apple Portable Music Player instead of iPod.

Well, Microsoft hasn’t learned this simple lesson and they’re still on the wrong path. The worst of all this, for me, is that the technical people invent cool names for the design and implementation phases of the gadgets or technology and then along comes the marketing people, the ones that supposedly should come by with the even cooler names, and whammo!, there goes the initial name, replaced with an acronym. And this trend just seems to be getting worse recently. With the only exception of the new Windows: Vista is a much more commercial name than Longhorn.

The two most publicited technologies of the new Windows Vista were called Avalon and Indigo. Short, pretty, sexy. Now, Avalon is called Windows Presentation Foundation and Indigo is called Windows Communication Foundation. Ugh.

And the last example of this downhill trend has to deal with Origami. Origami is Microsoft’s new gadget, something like a handheld PC, recently presented and not yet avaliable. And that’s another one, when the hell they’ll adopt the Avalaible today! advertising trick that brought so good results to Apple? I don’t want to discuss the gadget’s possibilities or if what the market needs is another one of this mini-good-for-nothing-quasi-computers; but the boys and girls at marketing have gone and did it again. From beautiful, exotic and evocative Origami we are now stuck with the dull, grey and boring-to-bitter-tears acronym UMPC, or Ultra-Mobile PC, which is the final name the thingy is going commercial with.

Completely lame. If anyone of you wants to know more about Origami, click here. Anyone of you knows of the real reason for the name change, please let me a comment and let me know, so I can quit doing voodoo mojo on Microsoft marketing department.

Are we sure they’re not paid for by Apple?

… and more work.

37 signals, the people guilty for the most talked about framework in recent history, Ruby on Rails, have published an online PDF book that sells itself. Or at least with me , judging by the sample chapters online, they have scored: a book containing a chapter called Meetings are toxic can’t be a bad reading. Some wisdom:

There’s nothing more toxic to productivity than a meeting. Here’s a few reasons why:

They break your work day into small, incoherent pieces that disrupt your natural workflow

They’re usually about words and abstract concepts, not real things (like a piece of code or some interface design)

They usually convey an abysmally small amount of information per minute

They often contain at least one moron that inevitably get his turn to waste everyone’s time with nonsense

They drift off-subject easier than a Chicago cab in heavy snow

They frequently have agendas so vague nobody is really sure what they are about

They require thorough preparation that people rarely do anyway

I, having lost many, many, really many productivity hours in my current project because of meetings, couldn’t agree more with all of that. Above all when you have the bad luck of getting as a project manager a utter (über)incompetent, a guy who couldn’t find his own ass with his own two hands, a flaslight and a map. A guy who is completely unable to improvise, to adapt: the guy prepares his scripts for the meetings and whenever the meeting deviates itself from the expected planning the guy is more lost than Kunta Kinte at a Merle Haggard concert. You have to either baby-walk him back to the point, or bend the meeting to conformity with his script. And that last option is not the really complicated step, the worst comes when the guy weants to bend reality because it doesn’t conform to plan. And reality tends to be difficult to bend.

But I digress… about the book, you have some more samples on its web, Getting Real, which is the book’s title. Just for $19, I think I’m going to download it this very afternoon and at least laugh a while… or get green with envy seeing how in other places they do things.