Ink Gestures for Microsoft Word now available

Feb 252006

I gotta hand it to Loren Heiny of Jumping Minds software. This is just a very natural, no brainer. The ability to use commonly used proofreading gestures to edit Word documents and email messages makes perfect sense on the Tablet PC and he’s executed it very well. Like me with TEO, Loren discovered the hard way that writing Office add ins for Tablet PC isn’t a cakewalk and after what seemed like an eternity, the long awaited Ink Gestures 1.1 is available for the public. There are also several videos showing how to use it.

Congrats Loren on beating me to market! :) And on making Office one step closer to being the ideal Tablet PC software.

http://www.inkgestures.com

Anagram – Awesome Outlook AddIn

Feb 082006

I’ve heard great things about this add in for quite some time but only now did I get a chance to actually install it. I think this is a must-have for any Tablet PC user but it’s also very useful to anyone that likes to keep an organized PIM.

Basically, what Anagram does is parses text from the clipboard and converts it into a Contact, Task, Appointment, etc. I mostly use it for contacts because many times people will email me with their contact info but it’s not in a VCF. It’s in an email signature or even worse, the body of their email. So you select the text (it doesn’t matter if you get stuff that isn’t a part of the contact) and Anagram will do its best to figure out where fax numbers, home numbers, email addresses, etc. all go.

The best part is, since TEO 2.x and above will override Outlook’s standard UI’s for things like this, it just works by default with TEO! I’m working on a screen capture video much like Rob Bushway did with TEO and ActiveWords to show off how Anagram works with TEO. I have one already but it has someone’s contact info that might not want to be shared.

Get this add in!

AutomatedQA AQTime 4

Dec 232005

When you see how fast TEO 3 is (yes even in the first beta) you can thank the folks over at AutomatedQA. This profiling tool is very intuitive and is probably the best performance profiler I’ve ever seen. I took a few hours to tune up TEO 3.0 tonight and made about an 85% speed improvement opening new and existing items.

Sorry I haven’t posted much. Been busy with Christmas, TEO, and sick as a dog for the last week. I have a pretty big announcement to make (about my personal life) on Saturday so stay tuned.

KnockOut to be bundled with TEO 3.0!

Aug 152005

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.

SnagIt is great

Oct 262004

I’ve heard about this software occasionally for several years but I never bothered to look into it until recently. Snag It is a screen capture software for Windows and while it may seem like there is not much to that since you can ALT+PRINTSCREEN to capture a bitmap image of the current window without any software, Snag It really takes this so much farther.

As a software developer, I’m constantly building UI’s or sending screen shots to others for various reasons. It’s a real pain to do it the old fashioned way. ALT+PRINTSCREEN, then open a paint program, paste the image, crop it, save it as an optimized format, go back to your IM window, send file, browse for the image, send it.

With Snag It, I just click capture, choose an IM recipient and its gone. But SnagIt can do so much more such as animated screen captures. (This is SUCH an awesome feature by the way.). There’s too many features to mention but if you take screen shots regularly, then you need this software.

[Check out a video of Snag It in action.]

Here is a screen shot of some of the profiles I use most frequently.

o_SNAG-0001