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Posts Tagged windows

GroupPhoto – a photo grouping tool

Nov 1

Posted by rory in software | No Comments


I’ve just written a little app that groups bunches of photos together into subfolders, based on dates. Basically, it looks for photos which were taken within 90 minutes of each other (or however long the user specifys) and creates subfolders for them. That’s it. Took about 20 minutes to write and put the UI on it. Here it is.

You can control the sensitivity by telling GroupPhoto the timespan and minimum group size.

Before I realised that ‘group size’ was required, I accidentally separated a folder of 900 images into about 120 subfolders. I then wrote an ‘undo’ feature which actually takes a folder and merges the contents of any folders within that folder. This doesn’t act recursively – it only affects the level directly under the folder you choose, and no subfolders of those folders. Could be useful in it’s own right.

http://roryok.com/apps/GroupPhoto/GroupPhoto.exe

Things You Need To Know:

  • Based on WPF/XAML so it requires .NET 3.5 Framework or higher – you can get that here
  • That’s it!

UPDATE:
Got some feedback, and it turns out GroupPhoto has one or two bugs – not least that it doesn’t run on 64-bit machines. I’ve decided to re-write the whole thing in an earlier version of .NET and skip the whole WPF thing entirely. I’m hoping to re-release it shortly but realistically I’m super duper busy right now

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Hermes – The Regex File Mover / Renamer

Jul 7

Posted by rory in software | No Comments

Last year I found myself faced with the mammoth task of renaming and sorting thousands of files according to a strict set of rules. I couldn’t find a piece of software to do exactly what I needed, so I wrote one. Hermes (named after futurama bureaucrat and legendary sorter hermes conrad) is a regex based file sorting application. It allows you to change the path of a file (which covers both moving and renaming) based on regex criteria.


Say for instance you have a folder full of images of paintings by famous artists. These are all in the same folder, and it’s getting a little out of hand trying to sort them all. You started out with a neat naming convention
c:\art\Hieronymus Bosch - The Garden of Earthly Delights.png
c:\art\John Everett Millais - Ophelia.JPG
c:\art\Leonardo Da Vinci - Mona Lisa.gif
But now things are getting out of hand, and you want to sort them alphabetically by LAST name, not first. Then you decide you would like to group each artist’s paintings into their own folder. Then you decide it would be best to group the image formats into different sub folders too. Now, you could easily rename all the files using a program like AntRenamer, or Albert Bertilsson’s wonderful RenamerNG (my favourite), but how would you go about creating the folders for each artist?


That’s where Hermes comes in. Hermes allows you to use Regular Expressions to alter the path of the files, which covers both moving AND renaming at the same time. Hermes would do the job above by using a RegEx string like
c:\Art\([A-Za-z0-9\.\&]+) ([A-Za-z0-9\.\&]+) - ([A-Za-z0-9\& ]+).([A-Za-z]+)$
and turning it into
c:\art\$2, $1\$4\$3.$4

As you can see from the screenshot the app is not very complete – still using the default Visual Studio icon for instance – but it does do what it’s supposed to do, and does it fairly well. I’m working on an upgraded version but for now if anyone really needs it, download it here:

http://roryok.com/apps/Hermes/Hermes.v0.1.zip

Things You Need To Know:

  • It requires .NET 3.5 Framework or higher, you can get that here
  • It starts by default in C:\ and with Regex (.*) and recursive UNTICKED. If you tick recursive and hit process, it will iterate over every single file on your C:\ drive, which could take hours, so don’t do that. Use the recursive feature carefully!
  • I accept no responsibility for any loss of data as a result of using this program. Use it at your own risk and for feck sake make some backups first. I would. Even if it works flawlessly, it’s very easy to get your regex messed up and tell it do rename all your files to something random. Be CAREFUL!

PS: The screenshot is from an older build that was still called RegexFileMover – the version for download is called Hermes but I’m too lazy to change that.

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Rocketdock and Taskswitch

Jul 13

Posted by rory in everything else, freeware | No Comments

Two more productivity apps that I find very useful

RocketDock
http://www.rocketdock.com

A windows version of the dock application based on the Mac dock. Except its better because its on windows of course. =)

If you’ve ever seen the Mac dock you’ll know what to expect. You can add icons to the dock, and also folders of icons using the Stacks Docklet (a separate download, here). In fact there are all kinds of addons available on the site, although most are fairly simple stuff, usually just adding a shutdown button or some other trivial function.

Rocketdock also shows your minimized tasks, and I can happily report it works very well with previously blogged app miniMize.

Apple recently won a legal battle to patent the dock, so it may not be around forever, as they’ll no doubt try and keep it exclusive to macs. hopefully by that stage the geniuses behind XGL or Bumptop will have created some ingenious new way to interact with our PCs.

TaskSwitch XP
(http://www.ntwind.com/software/taskswitchxp/download.html)

Even with miniMize and RocketDock, you’ll still need to alt-tab occasionally (sometimes its just more instinctive). TaskSwitchXP replaces the default alt-tab menu with a much better one, which allows sticky mode (the menu stays on the screen until you pick something with the mouse) and is super-customisable.

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Get Full Windows 7 Taskbar in XP in 3 Steps

May 28

Posted by rory in everything else, freeware | No Comments

I’ve blogged about some of the bits of this before, but just for convenience sake, here’s all the steps together.

1. Open up regedit and go to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics

Create a new String Value called MinWidth and set the value to -255.

2. Right click on the taskbar, and click properties, tick ‘Group Similar taskbar buttons’ and click OK

3. Install Visual Task Tips from http://www.visualtasktips.com/ and log off/on again.

Here’s a Screenshot of your resulting Windows XP Super Taskbar in action:

windows_7_bar_in_xp

The Windows 7 bar also allows programs to show up little submenus with actions. This feature has been much talked about as a brilliant new addition to the taskbar in Windows 7, but it is already possible in XP. Not many apps seem to support it, but it can be done, as demonstrated by the lovely J River Media Jukebox:

windows7_taskbar_2_jukebox

One Missing Feature

The first screenshot above is showing two instances of chrome, rather than two tabs in chrome. This is one advantage windows 7 has over this. Until someone writes an XP util that duplicates this functionality (which, lets face it, will likely never happen) then we’re stuck with only showing window instances.

One Unfortunate Side Effect

Windows minimized in Photoshop CS3 (and probably other versions) seem to inherit the width from the MinWidth value, so you may come across this problem:

windows7_taskbar_3_photoshop 
I can’t find a way around it except to access these windows via the window menu, if anyone comes across a fix let me know.

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Windows 7 Taskbar Hack

May 6

Posted by rory in everything else, freeware | No Comments

This is a picture of my current taskbar.

cluttered task bar

As you can see I’ve applied a hack which removes the text from each item on the taskbar, similar to the Windows 7 super bar (or whatever its called). It’s a registry hack. The thing I love about registry hacks is that they’re overhead free. I didn’t have to install any extra program to make this work. Here’s what you do:

1. Go into Regedit and find the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics

2. Create a new String value, name it MinWidth and set it to -255

3. Restart (or log off and log on again)

Simple!

Although we’ve installed nothing, we could now install VisualTaskTips (http://www.visualtasktips.com), which would give us a windows 7 style preview of any item we hover over in the taskbar.

Coincidentally, I’ve been experimenting with using Taskbar Shuffle to colour code my taskbar icons during particularly long sessions.

I know it sounds daft, but I have this theory that when we look for an icon for a program, we identify by colour first. Thus, if we need firefox, our eye is drawn to the orange / red hues at the end of the taskbar, and we find it faster. It also looks way better:

ordered task bar

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Receiving a Bluetooth file in XP

May 5

Posted by rory in everything else, freeware | 2 Comments

Whenever I take a pic with my camera phone, transferring a file is as easy as right clicking on the bluetooth icon in the taskbar, sending the file and clicking 'next' on the Bluetooth dialog. Microsoft have made it wonderfully simple to transfer a file to your PC from a bluetooth device.

Transferring lots of files, however, is a different story. by the time your on the 5th or so file, you'll be getting fairly tired of right clicking on tray icons.

I put the following command in my autohotkey script, using WIN + SHIFT + B as the shortcut key.

%windir%\system32\fsquirt.exe -receive

Now if I want to transfer ten photos, I hit WIN+SHIFT+B ten times, ten dialogs spring up, and I can fire away all my photos from the phone end.

PS: fsquirt? Who thinks up the names for these things?

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ProcessTamer

Jan 7

Posted by rory in everything else, freeware | No Comments

http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/proctamer/index.html

I used to use this app all the time a few years back, and I thought I no longer needed it until yesterday.

Picture the scene: You have a pile of windows open, working on lots of stuff, some saved, some not. Suddenly, your PC locks up. nothing will respond. The mouse barely moves. Windows will not redraw. CTRL + ALT + DEL seems to offer help, but once you click on 'Task Manager' the whole process just repeats, and we lock up again.  So what do you do? Sit there and hope for the best? Restart?

Well if you've already installed ProcessTamer, this might not happen at all in the first place. Process Tamer simply watches for system processes (programs) which are hogging too much of the CPU and reduces their priority.

In the early days of Firefox memory leaks, I found this hugely useful. Ever since firefox 3, I haven't had a need for it. But yesterday, I downloaded a piece of software to interface with my Sony Ericsson phone which completely crapped out and hung my system. Only through patient clicking and waiting did I manage to kill the process, and even then it took over 10 minutes to do.

Process Tamer is a tiny piece of software, with a tiny memory footprint, which you may never have to use in your entire computing life. However, if you ever do need it, you'll be very thankful for it.

PS: Just an additional tip here, on the same subject. I've seen a lot of people complain that their system is running slow because something called 'System Idle Process' is at 99%. People wrongly assume that these are background windows tasks hogging all the resources. In fact, System Idle Process is a process who's only job is to keep the CPU running when nothing else needs it. I don't know the exact technical reasons, but the CPU needs to be kept working constantly, if not intensely. If you ever see System Idle Process running at close to 99%,
it means that your system resources are almost 100% available, and nothing else is using them.

Update:

Looks like I already posted about ProcessTamer back when I started this blog! Whoops…

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Remove Windows Media Player Shell Integration

Sep 9

Posted by rory in everything else, freeware | No Comments

Even though you probably don't use Windows Media Player (especially now that you've found J River Media Jukebox and Songbird ) you'll no doubt have those shell extensions every time you right click on a media file. You know the ones. Play this with media player. Add this to media player playlist. 
Want to get rid of them? Its this easy

Start > Run > regsvr32 /u wmpshell.dll 


Yes. Really. 

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Reset Default Folder Actions

Dec 17

Posted by rory in everything else, freeware | No Comments

Ok, this might not strictly be freeware, but it's free, and it's very useful at times.

If you've spent any time messing with default actions for file types or folders (in my case, trying to add "play this folder with 1by1") you'll inevitably end up with your default folder action screwed up, often searching a folder on doubleclick instead of opening it. Well, relax, because theres a very simple solution.

I came across a vbs file during a google search for a solution to this problem. The file is by Doug Knox, and available on www.dougknox.com. You can go there and download it, or you can just copy the source below into notepad and save it as whatever.vbs and run it. Et voila – your folders are fixed.

'folder_open.vbs – Fixes problem where Search opens on a double click
'© Doug Knox – 03/13/2002
'Downloaded from www.dougknox.com

Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

p1 = "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\"
p2 = "none"

WshShell.RegWrite p1, p2

p1 = "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\"
WshShell.RegWrite p1, p2

X = WshShell.Run("REGSVR32 /I /S SHELL32.DLL",4,True)
Set WshShell = Nothing

MyBox = MsgBox("Folders will now Open when double clicked", 4096, "Finished!")

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