With MS Office 2007, we have Ribbons where the menu of the application is drastically different than what we find in a traditional application. My first impression of Ribbons was "Sucks!". Its been more than a year when I felt that.

Technically, Ribbons are the modern way to help users find, understand, and use commands efficiently and directly—with a minimum number of clicks, with less need to resort to trial-and-error, and without having to refer to Help.




They have now become a UI components in Windows Forms. So far the handful of people I have meet haven't given me a good feedback about using Ribbons. But I somehow believe that it will soon become very popular. Remember how we hated the "Start" button on Windows XP and loved the start button of Windows 2000?

BTW, here is a good MS resource for designing UI components using Ribbons :
MSDN - Ribbons

On April 5th, 2008 I wrote the following comment at Aminus3 forum:
I used to be using DVDs but soon found that I was not able to keep in sync. What if I edit one of my old pictures from RAW to PSD which I often do. DVD did not work out for me. I thought of having an external USB HDD which I would synchronize often, but for some reason I wanted something more automatic. Nero does a fair good job of backing up to external devices. But I wanted something more automatic. Though not the best solution what I have is a RAID disk -- two 250GB HDD which are mirrored. My main fear was a hard disk failure. Now I have two HDDs which are mirrored -- meaning the OS is responsible to make sure that one is the mirror of the other. What if I loose both HDDs at the same time? I guess the chances are very less and I am banking that in case of a high power surge, my PC's UPS or the fuse would save the disks. But yes, since the two disks are local, there is a certain risk. I have Windows XP and it does not support disk mirroring by default. I wrote a blog article titled Hack : RAID-0 (Mirroring) support on your Windows XP Box . These days however I am spending some time evaluating online backup solutions. There are a bunch of them and they come at around $5 per month. I have been evaluating Mozy which comes with a 2GB free account. This is good for evaluating. I think I will go to online backup sometime this year. Ease of restoration, pricing, ability to provide patterns for files to be backup-ed automatically are my top evaluating criteria.

On Oct 2 2008, I have finally got myself a Mozy Home Unlimited account for backup up my hard-disk. So gone are my days when I used to have a RAID drive or a DVD backup regularly. Its been around a week and the system has so far uploaded around 6GB thanks to my slow internet connection (averaging 250kpbs). But then I am happy that now I can sleep peacefully without having to worry about losing my precious 10000+ photographs and 200+ videos of my kid. With the kind of user-friendly features that it comes with, $54.45 a year is very good value for money.

I also have a slight bit of inclination towards Mozy as its an EMC company, for which I work for. Having said that, I have evaluated other popular backup solutions too and Mozy seemed to meet all my needs more than the others. Usability in restoring, automatic backup, selective file matching, cost and space were the most important evaluation criteria in the order.

You can get a free 2GB free Mozy account for evaluation which was the best part. Play with it for months and see if it makes sense to really go for a paid membership.

Happy Backingup.//

Just downloaded Google Chrome, the new web browser from Google. The name itself carries so much trust and weight and this browser gives you such a light feeling. I am writing this after using it for 10 minutes and these are my first impressions.

Plus:
1. Very lightweight user feeling as you browse. Fast and responsive.

2. When you open a new TAB using Ctrl-T it shows you a list of the most visited sites with thumbnails. Most often you will click one of them.

3. Smart text formatting of the address in the URL box. The site URL is highlighted and the remaining query string grayed out making it more readable. If you are visiting a site with https which has a wrong certificate, the word https is crossed with red font.

4. Most distinguishing feature is that it uses more space by getting rid of the window borders at the top and the bottom. The top window border is used by browser tabs and the status bar only show up when there is something to show.

5. It can get and import your Firefox bookmarks.

6. All common controls like Alt + <- , Ctrl+, Ctrl-T, F5 implemented properly.

7. One text entry box for everything. The URL entry box also serves to be your search box too.


Minus:
1. It creates a new process for every tab you open. So if you have 7 tabs, you would have 8 chrome.exe running, with one being the parent process. For me, the parent process occupied around 50+ MB of memory and each tab, occupies around 10 to 30 MB. So its kind of a memory hogger. With Firefox I have around 80MB usage with 7tabs and many plugns installed. With separate process, one important thing they achieved is that if there is a crash on one site only that tab gets crashed and not the entire browser like Firefox or IE.

2. Saved password not controlled by master password. Atleast I could not find it in my 10-minute review. If I cant find it or it does not come in a Google update, I will definitely not be using this browser. I cant remember all my passwords and I want my browser to save it but protect it by a master password.

3.Ctrl+ only does a text zoom, unlike in Firefox 3 where it does image zoom too. Not a big deal, but just a thing to note.

4. No third party plugin integration. One big factor why people like Firefox.

5. No built it spell check when you type in text in forms' text area.

6. Could not post this blog entry using Chrome as some of the review and edit buttons were not working :-(

Interesting link:
1. Chrome's lead engineer was Firefox's lead engineer once and how Google abandoned Firefox

2. A simple way to make Chrome crash.
Happy Chroming.//

A must use tool for every high-productivity desktop users and a great relief for people coming from Linux or Hummingbird interface which always supported multiple desktop sessions.

Download the recently published, small (62KB) tool called Desktop v1.0 from Microsoft Sysinternals and try it out. You have multiple options to toggle between desktops including the linux conventional Alt-F1,F2,F3,F4 keystrokes. I just installed a few minutes back and I am loving it.

As a side note, it allows you to create up to 4 desktops but I get an error saying that enough space is available to create the 4th desktop.

Happy Desktopping.//

__LPREFIX is actually not a pre-processor macro though it is used like a macro. It is the MS VC++ compiler and not the pre-processpor which actually handles this. This can be used to add the L-prefix to a string thereby making it a wide string (wchar_t).

Example: The following two lines are the same.

wchar_t* msg = L"Hello World!";
wchar_t* msg = __LPREFIX("Hello World!");

This however does not explain the need to use this prefix. Where would it be useful?

If you have something like

#define MSG "Hello World!"

You cant do

wchar_t* msg = L MSG;  //error

The only way to get around this is either to call the Narrow to Wide conversion routines or just say

wchar_t* msg = __LPREFIX( MSG );

If you are using only wchar_t in your code and you want the wide version of macros like __DATE__, __LINE__, __FUNCTION__, etc then this could be helpful.

#define __WDATE__ __LPREFIX( __DATE__ )
#define __WTIME__ __LPREFIX( __TIME__ )
#define __WFUNCTION__ __LPREFIX( __FUNCTION__ )

As a side note, a cross platform (and the correct) way to get the wide version of a predefined macro like __FILE__ is :

#define WIDEN2(x) L ## x
#define WIDEN(x) WIDEN2(x)
#define __WFILE__ WIDEN(__FILE__)

Another undocumented VC++ related string "macro" is __SPREFIX which is used to create a managed string object(.Net) from a string.
Example:

System::String^ date = __SPREFIX( __DATE__ )

Fun: The MS VC++ 2005, VC++ 2008 compiler crashes if you try to compile the following program:

#include <windows.h>
#define DATA __SPREFIX( __DATE__ )
int main() {
	DATA;
	return 0;
}

Well, they never documented it anyways.

Related link: Go get Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition. Its free.

Happy Prefixing.//