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Articles from
January 2007
Windows Photo Gallery is my default for all images because it's the quickest, simplest image viewer I've seen. There's only one problem... I tend to do a decent amount of graphics for applications I write, which don't usually have the same background color Photo Gallery does. Beyond that, transparent photos are displayed with a white background. I wish I could change the background color of Photo Gallery and see how transparency is used within the photos. While I want this for seeing how an image looks in different background colors, it's also nice to see images on a black background. Typically, if you're looking at photos or a movie, you have a black background to bring more focus to the color of the picture. Could you imagine watching a widescreen movie with a white background? I have a feeling it would be hard to do.
When encoding a video, I really wish I had some sort of floating toolbar or shortcut to start, pause, and stop my recording. For instance, when I'm recording a demo, if I decide to stop, I have to go find the application and click the stop button. I wish I could simply click stop on a floating toolbar (which would be invisible to the recording) or press Ctrl+Alt+E to stop it. Currently, I have to either press Alt+Tab to get to the Encoder window or click on its taskbar button, which is all recorded.
One thing I can't stand in Excel is when I have to manually click on spreadsheets when I want to toggle thru them. I wish there was a shortcut for this. The first thing that comes to mind is Ctrl+Tab, which usually toggles thru tabs in a tabbed environment. To the best of my knowledge, this shortcut isn't being used.
All too often I get an email talking about a meeting or event of some sort that I want to add to my calendar. From the inbox, I can drag the email to the calendar icon on the left. Now, if I could just do something similar from an open email. In Outlook 2007, there's an Other Actions menu item on the Message ribbon that would be perfect for this.
There are only two ways to see how much time has progressed in a currently playing video: pause/play, which interupts playback, and lock/unlock, which is just stupid. If you ask me, I think the lock/unlock work-around is simply a work-around by chance. Granted, it's better than pause/play since it doesn't interupt what you're watching, but it's not obvious. The reason I think it works by chance is because locking and unlocking adds/removes a lock icon that is only displayed next to the play time. So, when you lock/unlock, the icon is displayed, which coincidentally shows the playback timeline. What I'm thinking about is a simple play time on the informational screen displayed when you press the Enter button (I guess that's what you'd call the main button).
Give me a programmable interface!!! Need I say more? I think not.
In the end, I admit that this wouldn't be all that great of a feature. I'm merely looking at this from the point of, I have a bunch of stuff to sync and not much time to sync it in, so I want to get as much done as possible before I grab my Zune and go. I'm not sure if there's any real order to what gets sync'ed when, but I want my content to sync from the smallest/fastest to the largest/slowest. This means I want files removed first, then pictures, music by size, and finally videos added by size and conversion status. Honestly, this order may not be 100%, but you get the idea. I want to get the most sync'ing done in the least amount of time. If anything gets skipped, let it be the large video files that take forever to convert.
I was looking at a few contacts and wanted to find email I sent to them. I then thought about a feature in Gmail that listed all email with a given contact. This would be a perfect view off the contact's dialog. I want to be able to see any and all collaboration points with the contact, so show me email, appointments, and tasks. Hell, I'd even like to see how each contact is related to other contacts. Contact relationships might be a bit harder to visualize, but I can think of a few ideas that should work fairly well.
I love the fact that Visual Studio 2005 comes with a class designer. Unfortunately, as with most v1 products and features, it's quite lacking. One feature it needs is the ability to display show what interfaces a class implements and vice-versa. From any class, you can see its base class or derived classes. From any interface, you can see its base interface or interfaces. Why can't you see a classes implemented interfaces or an interface's derived classes? This just doesn't make sense to me and I hope it gets added into the next release. I haven't played with it, yet, but this is a seemingly small feature that should be included, one might think.
This might be good for other feed readers, but I'm mainly looking at it for Bloglines. When I discover a new feed, I ask myself whether it's worth my time or not. Most of the time, they aren't; but you won't know unless you give it a shot. The problem is that I read so many feeds, I don't always realize which ones are the good and which are the bad. Even worse are the aggregated feeds that come with both the good and bad. Heck, I've wanted a solution to the latter for years, now. Anyway, I have a potential solution: let me rate the feeds I'm watching. I don't care to share these ratings with the feed owners, tho. I merely want to be able to rate the feed's importance to me by noting how many good and bad feeds there were. Of course, since nothing's black and white, a 5-point scale would probably be best. This way, each reader can decide whether or not a feed's worth their ever-diminishing free time. For me, the point scale would be based on value and topic-orientation. I hate when people go off topic too much; so if someone had average content, but goes off topic a lot, I'd drop 'em. This would save me, in the long run, because I could ignore their feeds. Later, of course, I could re-evaluate them. Personally, I don't care about saving ratings after I drop a feed, but it could be useful. Simply having the ability to track a feed's quality is what I'd really like. On top of that, if I could rate individual authors within an aggregated feed  , I'd be even happier!
I like aggregated feeds because there are occasionally new people that have valuable content to provide. I hate aggregated feeds because you can't separate the good from the bad without losing the ability to see new authors. With this, I'd like to see the ability to ignore certain authors in aggregated feeds. This would also save the the annoyance of having to deal with posts in languages I don't know. Of all the requests I have for Bloglines, this is perhaps the one I'd like to see implemented the most.
I admit, I'm an organization freak. I have layers upon layers of directories to organize content on my computers that most would probably get a headache over. When I see people with 20+ files in a directory, I wonder how they can survive. Ok, maybe not that bad, but close. My blogroll is turning out to be just as bad. I have a lot of feeds I watch -- 148, to be exact, and a handful of these are aggregated feeds. Currently, Bloglines only allows you to add top-level directories. I want the ability to go deeper than that. Hell, even if it were only a second or third level, I'd be happy. My intentions aren't to test the limits, just organize my feeds.
When I consider my feeds, there are varying level of importance, which is how I group them. I have my main and casts groups for the main RSS and cast feeds that I skim thru briefly to pick and choose what I read; and then I have my "must read" and "spare time" groups that speak more to the level of importance the feeds are to me. Beyond that, I have two other groups of feeds which are even lower than the "spare time" group. Basically, I'd like to have more control over these groups without having 20 top-level groups. One nice feature is the ability to click on a group to read all posts in the feeds for the group. This is why I'd like the ability to group and read them hierarchically.
I know about the Win+D and Win+M shortcuts (among others ), but I want a shortcut that minimizes the current application, not all of them. Perhaps Win+Shift+M. Whatever the shortcut, it should minimize the current window and bring focus to the next window on the stack, just like minimizing a window from the toolbar. Actually, I like Win+Shift+M. Go with that one!
I sent an email to Bloglines a while back on this request, but they're not very good at letting people know what they think of their ideas, so I figured I'd post it here, too. Basically, I don't like the layout Bloglines uses for its feeds. The layout isn't horrible, but it could be better. I'd like to have the ability to use my own custom XSL file to render feeds. Furthermore, it'd be nice to be able to choose from a user-submitted, Bloglines-managed gallery of XSL files. Sure, having a gallery would be more of a pain, but I think Bloglines users would love the feature.
To enable fast playback in Windows Media Player, you can either right click the play/pause button or go to the Play > Play Speed menu item and select slow (Ctrl+Shift+S), normal (Ctrl+Shift+N), or fast (Ctrl+Shift+G) playback. This is great. One thing I don't like, tho, is there's no indication of what playback you're playing at in the play/pause button context menu. A simple check would be fine; just like in the Play Speed menu.
Windows Media Player supports fast and slow playback. While I have never used slow playback, I absolutely love the fast playback feature. Plain and simple, I want fast playback on the Zune -- both the Zune device and the player on Windows. Why the heck would I want this? Simple: casts. I watch/listen to a number of casts and when I do, I like to get thru them as quick as possible to maximize my time. Sure, I don't want to listen to my songs with fast playback, but having the capability for casts would be outstanding.
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