Category Archives: General

Mars Edit – Blogging tool

January 2, 2010General, toolsblogging toolsMarc

This post is brought to you by the pretty nifty Mars Edit by Red Sweater.

I’ve been looking for an OSX blogging client, and over the Christmas period I discovered Mars Edit. It’s pretty similar to Windows Live Writer in a lot of ways – it allows you to write, modify and remove posts from your blog. The interface, as you’d pretty much expect from a Mac app, is intuitive and gives you just about everything you need for basic blogging. There’s even a 30 day free trial (which I’m using now, just until I get around to buying a licence on Monday.

If you’re in the market for a Mac blogging tool, I’d recommend checking this out.

Google Custom Searches.

October 24, 2006Generalhistorical

Google have just launched the Google Co-op Custom Search Engine into the wild.

I’ve just knocked up a small example of a possible application – just search for C# related information. Minimal testing so far suggests that it might be quite useful…

Nintendo Web Browser on the DS Lite

October 20, 2006Generalhistorical

I recently bought a Nintendo DS Lite to keep me occupied in one of the many hotels I have to stay in. I was swayed toward the DS by the promise of the Nintendo Browser, and now that my new cartridge has arrived, I’m more than pleased with the browser’s capabilities.

The main use for the unit at home will be as a controller for the SlimServer software that runs my music collection, and it works really well. It takes just a few seconds to boot into the browser, connects wirelessly to my network, and shows me the page I need – all in the time it would take to power up the laptop.

As you may be able to see from the screenshots below, the rendering is not perfect, but it is a handheld device, and most pages aren’t desgined to cope too well with such little real estate, but the unit copes very well. I’m glad I bought it.

Nintendo DS Lite and Browser

SongBird media player / browser

October 3, 2006General, Softwarehistorical

This seem slike a really cool idea – a media play (looks vaguely familiar) with browser support, and remote mp3 playback.

I’ve just downloaded it for a look-see, and I’ll let you know how it goes.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

October 3, 2006Generalhistorical

I want one of these.

That Star Trek bloke

September 9, 2006Generalhistorical

LiveWriter Bug

September 5, 2006Generalhistorical

There’s a small bug in the LiveWriter preferences pages.

On the “plugins” tab, the user can enable / disable plugins using a couple of radio buttons. Unfortunately, it appears that there is flawed logic to read the current setting of a plugin. As a result, each time you select a plugin from the list, it’s status is set back to whatever it was when the preferences page was opened. Not a major problem, I don’t suppose, but irritating enough to make me post about it.

**UPDATE** how come MS make submitting a bug report such a pain in the @$$? I have to subscribe to a group, so I can post a message that may not even be picked up by the developers? To add insult to injusry, I can’t even join the group because of a problem wth Passport today. Not happy.

Iterate through enum values

August 30, 2006.NET, C# Snippets, General, Softwarehistorical

A quick example of how to iterate through the values in an enum…

enum myEnum { one, two, three, four, five, }; foreach (int i in Enum.GetValues(typeof(myEnum ))) { myEnum myItem = (myEnum )Enum.ToObject(typeof(myEnum ), i); System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(myItem.ToString()); }

An update to the EmbedVideo Plugin

August 23, 2006Generalhistorical

A minor modification, but I have added a “Preview” button to the chooser form. It should make it easier for you to double check that the video you specified is the one you want. This button will open up a new browser window to display the appropriate page from whichever provider’s website. I’ve also decided to take it to release version 1.0 because this is about as far as I’m going to take development (unless someone wants a really cool feature adding – leave a comment if that’s you!).

I have also tidied up the source code for the plugin, thus making it possible for me to release that without being too ashamed of my coding. I’m not normally as sloppy as when I coded the first pass of the plugin, but I was in kind of a hurry. It’s all sorted out now, though, and you should be able to get the source from here, or the pre-compiled goodness from here.

IMPORTANT NOTE : If you are going to use the new version and have an older version installed, I advise you to delete the old plugin assembly, called “LiveWriterPlugins.dll”, from the Plugins folder. If you don’t, there won’t be any major problems, but you will have two copies of the plugin – the old one, and the updated one. It’s my fault, I know. I should have given the thing a more meaningful name in the first place, but like I said above, I was rushing.

A List of LiveWriter Plugins

August 18, 2006.NET, General, LiveWriter Pluginshistorical

As well as my own humble effort, there are quite a few others out there writing LiveWriter plugins. A good place to start looking would be here or here.