Recently I opened my Pandora application and was greeted with a message stating that I needed to pay to continue using the Pandora desktop application. While it would have given me features such as ad-less music, I felt $36 was not worth the 12 months of music. I write free applications, after all. So after a quick inspection of the Adobe Air application that no longer functions properly, I decided it would not be terribly difficult to write my own application, so I did. I am introducing today the HazteK Software version of Pandora Desktop.

It is very basic in what it does, but it works great. It works exactly as if you had the pandora.com website open in your browser. It sits quietly in your system tray and plays back your music. Other than that, it doesn't do much. It won't show you what song is playing in a tool tip or anything like that, as there is no API for Pandora. You can view that information in the main window though. If you feel that you would like to try it out, feel free to download it and check it out. As usual, you can download it from the application's information page or directly from this post. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know by posting them to this entry.

Enjoy.

After a long absence from programming freeware, I have released a new application called FileGen Free. It is available from the applications page or directly from the information page. FileGen Free is an application that helps you quickly generate large amounts of files for testing. It was designed to help debug applications that run into issues on large amount of file system based databases such as StorURL. After seeing a cool application that generated tons of data for SQL databases at work, I got the idea to build this application for testing. It has helped me debug some problems with large amounts of Favorites databases, since I don't personally keep thousands of favorites in StorURL, I memorize most of my favorite websites.

As always with my free applications, you can download it from the information page or you can get it directly from this post. Note that this is an initial release. If you find any problems, please let me know and I will try to fix them as soon as I possibly can.

I have fixed a few problems introduced with the last update that allows you to export the entire database to Internet Explorer. Also here are some other items that have been updated.

• Search window remembers its size from the last search performed
• Quick search functions properly again, and is case-insensitive
• Added a progress screen for importing and exporting to Internet Explorer. Large databases take some time, and stopping it in the middle can cause the application to crash. This progress screen tries to prevent that from happening.
• Added a toolbar button for opening the Find feature for more advanced searching of the database
• Added case sensitivity option to the Find feature
• Updated the graphics on the toolbar to look better. 32bit PNG files are much better than blended GIF files.
• Fixed the automatic update feature to work properly with the 2.6.10+ versions. Versions 2.6.1-9 will not auto-update to version 2.6.10, you will be required to manually download this file. There is nothing I can do, it was a faulty checking mechanism in those versions. You can download the update file manually here and extract it over the previous version or download the full installer and install that.
• Fixed a problem where if you moved your Favorites folder to somewhere besides the default in Windows it would not import/export properly. It now dynamically detects your Favorites folder.
• Fixed a problem with the Opera import feature where it was looking in the Opera program files folder instead of the Application Data folder. This was due to a change in Opera and I haven't tested against the latest versions until this update. It should function properly again.
• Fixed a problem where if you drag a URL on the right to the category list on the left, but dropped it on blank white space, it would crash. Now it just does nothing if you do this.

So that was quite a few updates in this version compared to the last posted version, which was 2.6.7. If you find any problems with this latest version, please let me know! I can't test every possible scenario myself, as there aren't enough hours in the day, especially when it is free software. :)

I have taken some suggestions by a supportive user of StorURL and implemented in the latest version, 2.6.7. The following features and fixes have been included in the latest version:

• Holding the control key and clicking an item in the list will cause it to scan the website automatically, mark it with the scan result, and display it in the preview window if it is still a valid page.
• Holding the shift key and clicking an item in the list will scan the website and mark it with the scan result.
• Export entire database to Internet Explorer. If you choose this option from the File->Export menu, your entire StorURL database will be exported to the currently logged in user's Internet Explorer favorites folder/menu. It keeps the same structure as the StorURL database within the IE folder.
• Added the ability to search only the currently selected category. By default StorURL searches your whole database, but if you only want to search your selected category (except All Links) just check the box then run the search again.

As always, you can get the latest version a few different ways. You can grab it from the StorURL information page, download it directly from this post, or use the built-in automatic updating mechanism of a previous version of StorURL to upgrade to 2.6.7. If you find any problems with these new features, or you have more features you would like to suggestion, feel free to send me a message or leave a comment on this blog post.

Hello everyone. Recently I have been adding features to the SMTP Mail Sender application. One of the features I have recently included is the ability to translate the application to any language the user desires. I have used Babelfish to convert to Italian and Spanish, but I know that it isn't very good at translating technical terms, or even just regular terms sometimes. So I am going to ask my users to help me out. If you speak a second language, or if English isn't your primary language, and you think it would be helpful to have the application translated to your native language, please translate the following. All you need to do is copy and paste it from this into a text editor and fill in the values after the = signs. See the words to translate after the jump.

Read more...