I decided to try my hand at incorporating Virtual Earth into a Windows Forms application and surprisingly, it wasn’t all that difficult.
The result of my work will be downloadable after the Sylantro Global Summit in September and this screen shot gives you a basic idea of what it does.
Jensen Harris, the author of the excellent and very useful KnockOut utility for Outlook has agreed to let me bundle KnockOut with TEO 3.0 when it is released later this year. This is very cool because it will expose more people to the utility and TEO users will be able to easily include it in the installation to compensate for Outlook shut down issues.
All too frequently do I get an email from a user who doesn’t see the TEO menu after installing because Outlook was invisibly open in the background because of something like ActiveSync or another add-in. And once TEO is installed and working there may be times when Outlook refuses to shut down even when you think that it has. KnockOut allows you to monitor and control these invisible processes with a simple intuitive tray menu.
Although I take every precaution that I can to prevent Outlook shut down problems, the reality is that Outlook with Add Ins and external apps like ActiveSync will sometimes just not shut down on its own. Now TEO users will be able to fight back against processes that refuse to die!
Oh and by the way, KnockOut is a free download. You don’t have to wait for TEO 3 to get it. You can download it now.
Since I got this Motion, I have been having a major problem with Standby and Hibernate in XP. The options worked just fine if I used the Start Menu to bring up the options but after a defined period of inactivity, the computer would never go into Standby or Hibernate.
The weird thing was, the monitor *would* turn off after the specified period of inactivity.
I thought first that an application may have been denying standby in the WM_POWERBROADCAST message so I fired up Spy++ and watched but this message never happened.
I searched Google Groups to no avail, then I downloaded Speedswitch XP and started dicking with some of the advanced power options which really had no effect.
Finally, I started shutting down apps and services one by one and Indexing Service was to blame. To confirm this, I searched Google Groups again but this time with “indexing service” in the query and confirmed my suspicions.
I guess I installed Indexing Service pre-emptively because I assumed MSN Desktop Search needed it. I don’t know why I thought that but I uninstalled Indexing Service and now Standby and Hibernate work fine (except for that damned 1.5GB memory bug…) and MSN Desktop Search still works.
Hopefully someone will come across this in their search and save themselves some time.
Rob Bushway is a good friend of mine. He even recently helped me out in a big way that may have saved TEO by going to bat for me with some of the Infinotes issues I had.
So I am always glad to hear good news about Maggie, Rob’s daughter who has (had actually…) brain cancer and has been on a really brave and inspirational road to recovery. A few months ago she was declared “cancer-free” after several risky procedures and now she’s making great progress in getting back to her normal self. Go read Rob’s post about it because I can’t really capture the relief and joy he must be feeling.
Read Rob Bushway’s Blog
Stay up to date with Maggie’s progress
Just noticed I have exceeded the 10,000 download mark over on TabletPCPost.com. I wanna thank Lora, Loren, Layne, and any other Heiny that contributed to that site. It truly is an awesome place to list your Tablet PC software.
Let’s make it another 10,000 real soon with TEO 3!