I’ve updated my program for transferring digital pictures to your computer while organizing them into grouped folders. There’s now better keyboard navigation and some more guiding text as well as support for mpg files and a bunch of “raw” formats. It’s also been made localizable (and I’ve added a language too), for personal reasons. The version is now 1.0.4.0.

Check out the program page and download the new version.

Categories: Software
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The HP TouchSmart “shell” version 2.5 is now posted at the HP Support site. It lists only one enhancement, the resolution of a 1618 installer error. But there are plenty of other things in there. For one, this version of the shell (2.5) is part of the Spring 2009 update mentioned at http://www.touchsmartcommunity.com. It is the version that comes preinstalled on IQ52x and IQ82x TouchSmart PCs.

I thought I would give a few more details on this update, mostly for developers and other technically minded people.

• The shell is now DPI/screen resolution independent, in other words it should display correctly no matter what DPI and resolution the computer uses.
• Memory usage has been reduced by eliminating two previously needed processes.
• The minimize command line argument now also minimizes a hosted application in large layout.
• In Personalize, an option is now available to pick a background image.

This version reports itself as 2.5.3238.28760 and as version 2.5.312 in Add/Remove Programs.

Categories: HP TouchSmart, Software
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Just in case you haven’t seen it, this is probably the neatest geek game out there right now (next to World of Goo).

Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo

Go get it at www.crayonphysics.com.

Perfect for the HP TouchSmart PC, by the way!

Categories: HP TouchSmart, Software, Tech Toys
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I just caught the replay of the CES keynote by Steve Ballmer. I think this is the first time ever that I’ve seen Microsoft allow non-Microsoft software to be shown in a keynote product video. I was blown away to see the HP TouchSmart software actually shown and interacted with instead of the Windows Desktop. Thank you, Microsoft!

Categories: HP TouchSmart, Microsoft, Opinion, Software
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Part of the motivation to write my Simple Photo Tagger program was to make sure that when I put a caption on a picture, it will be embedded in the picture in all the various “locations” (I have no better word for it) that the various tools out there use.

And let me tell you, it’s a big mess! To illustrate, let me use the WIC query notation for metadata that Microsoft uses and list which program uses what locations to store “caption” (and “select” other) information:

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 Organizer
/app1/ifd/{uint=270}
/xmp/dc:description/x-default
/app13/irb/8bimiptc/iptc/Caption

Windows Live Photo Gallery 12.0.1347.718
/xmp/dc:title/x-default

Google Picasa 3.1.0 (build 70.71, 0)
/app13/irb/8bimiptc/iptc/Caption

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 1.0
Title
/app1/ifd/{uint=270}
/xmp/dc:title/x-default
/app13/irb/8bimiptc/iptc/Object Name

Headline
/xmp/dc:description/x-default
/app13/irb/8bimiptc/iptc/Caption

Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1
Caption
/app1/ifd/{uint=270}
/xmp/dc:description/x-default
/app13/irb/8bimiptc/iptc/Caption

Title
/xmp/dc:title/x-default
/app13/irb/8bimiptc/iptc/Object Name

I actually used Simple Photo Tagger to discover these differences, since it will query most of the above locations and display any that have data “in them”. The ones that don’t have data, will not be shown.

So if you want to make sure that no matter which tool you use to work on your digital photos, they will pick up your caption properly, use Simple Photo Tagger. It will make sure to write your caption to as many locations as the various other tools out there seem to use.

Categories: Software, WPF
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You may have seen the CardSharkV program I’ve published here previously. So far it hasn’t met with much interest out there. Maybe this one will: Simple Photo Tagger.

I’ve been looking for a program that will help me work through commenting on thousands of my digital photos. I haven’t found anything that’s focused solely on this one task that I consider essential for adding value to my collection. So, like any developer not finding what he/she wants, I rolled my own.

I’m making the result available to you, in case you’re interested. It’s written in WPF 3.5 SP1, in case you’re curious about such details. I’m looking for testers and feedback, so for a while I’ll waive the nominal charge for a license key.

Categories: Software, WPF
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From a couple of people at touchsmartcommunity.com comes a report of the Weather tile always reverting back to "Cupertino" after closing and re-opening the HP TouchSmart software. Until a proper fix for this can be published this is a series of steps that can be taken to get the Weather tile settings to "stick" and not revert back:

1. Close down the HP TouchSmart software completely. You may have to go to Personalize – TouchSmart Settings first and uncheck the QuickLaunch option to ensure everything closes down completely. If the QuickLaunch option is checked, the Close button behaves more like a standby function in that it hides the HP TouchSmart UI but keeps things running in the background for faster re-opening.

2. Start Windows Explorer, for example by using the Win+E keyboard hotkey combination, or by using the Vista Start Menu to open the Documents folder.

3. Type %LocalAppData% into the address bar:

(4.) and then press Enter on the keyboard.

5. Now navigate into the Hewlett-Packard folder:

6. Now navigate into the Weather.exe_Url_* folder (the cryptic letters after the _Url_ part will be different on every system, on my system it looks like above):

7. If you have two folders as shown above (particular folder names are not that important), delete the one with the smaller version number. In the above example it would be the 1.0.3106.17497 folder. Alternatively you can rename it to start with anything but a digit.

From now on any setting changes you make in the Weather tile should be remembered properly.

Categories: HP TouchSmart, Software
1 Comment »

Looks like my hosting company decided to move my blog from a 32 bit OS to a 64 bit OS, breaking the PHP CGI in the process. Thus, my blog was offline for around 20 hours or so (rough guess).

Support claimed I had a “custom” PHP install, which I think is not the case. Anyway, I had to copy the 64 bit PHP CGI binary from their system location to my blog location, update a pointer and now everything is good again.

Apologies all around for going “dark” for a while.

Categories: Personal, Software
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I had a very unpleasant experience today. My wife is trying to deal with pain in her arms and hands from too much typing by using Vista’s speech recognition feature along with Word 2007. She was writing a final paper for a college class and had just finished the last four of nine pages. That’s when she noticed an extra word in her paper, right at the end: “document”. It didn’t belong there, so she did what you’d do naturally and said “delete document”.

THAT’S WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPENED. Apparently the speech recognition software turned that phrase into a command and proceeded to empty the nine page paper of all content without hesitation. On top of that, the undo feature of Word seemed to not have noticed the command (or been bypassed somehow), so she couldn’t get the document back via undo either!

This all happened while I was in a meeting at work right before lunch. When I got back to my desk I had several panicked voice messages. Luckily, five pages from the day before could be salvaged because my wife had the presence of mind to close the document without saving, which let her recover all but the about four hours of work that had gone in before the disaster struck.

I went home over lunch to see if I could salvage any more. I decided that I needed support from Microsoft. Well, the call with Microsoft Product Support was less than pleasant (as support calls usually are) and didn’t get us the four pages back, either. Best I could tell nobody had ever reported such an issue before.

I’m surprised this glaring problem escaped all testing at Microsoft. One of the cardinal rules of software development was violated in this case: “Never, EVER, lose the user’s data.” I can’t believe there was no prompt to confirm if she really intended to delete everything in response to the phrase “delete document”. I can’t believe there was no undo possible.

I just can’t believe it. Yet, it’s true.

Categories: Microsoft, Personal, Software, Vista
2 Comments »

Lots of people find that once they’re outside the touch optimized environment that the HP TouchSmart software provides, things in Vista are not all that easy to use with touch.

This is something we addressed with what we called a “Touch Optimizer” on the IQ770 (our first TouchSmart series). On the IQ500 series we initially left this program out of the factory configuration (the reasons would bore you, trust me.) Now we’ve brought it back as an update that you can get at the HP Support website: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?softwareitem=pv-66423-1&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&lang=en&os=2100&product=3752240

This utility will increase several “non-client metrics”, as they’re called in Windows developer lingo, to sizes that make things easier to hit with your finger. If I remember correctly, the tool increases scrollbar, close/minimize/maximize buttons and taskbar quicklaunch icon sizes. It also turns on single click for desktop icons so you don’t have to double-tap to launch programs from the desktop anymore.

Until Windows 7 arrives with better integrated touch in the whole OS, try this tool and see if it doesn’t get you 60% of the way there. Maybe even 80%.

Categories: HP TouchSmart, Software, Vista
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