MontyFax

It’s time to introduce my biggest project!

We’re working hard on it for nearly 3 months and having a stable beta version at the moment.

The project I’m talking about is MontyFax – a free online fax service. You need no login, no payments and so on. You can send pdf-files and free text to an international fax-no.

There’s also a Windows 8 app in development. Of course there are some things to do:
- User authentification without Captchas
- Building a nice “your fax has been sent”-site
- more powerfull freetext editing
For the moment I want to you show some screenshots of this new service:

Developing apps for the upcoming Windows 8

Silence, change and impressions…

These are the words which discribing this blog and my work for the last 7 months.
I got the Windows 8 Developer Preview and didn’t know what to do with. After that I downloaded the Consumer Preview and recognized that the SuperBar applications are the wrong way to get what I want to give the user. The Metro interface is intuitive and saves your computers performance in a way a desktop app never can.
These are some good reasons for a new start… -Building Metro style apps!

The first app is already finished. It’s a Clock. Maybe Microsoft forgot this feature xD
However I learned much about life tiles, backgound tasks and scheduling. So I hope you impress me with your ideas for building some more apps for Windows 8.

-Monty.

Friday post – SuperBattery 2 BETA

It’s time again for the friday post… Today I have the Beta release of SuperBattery 2 for you.

I was hoping to present the final build of it, but there are several problems yet. The Tray-icon is not implemented yet, there is an ugly black frame around the window when aero is disabled and the codebox for the alert understands all UTF-8 letters while the codeblock only lets you type numbers. So be carefull with this beta build!

But let’s talk about the positive things: The new GUI is already known from SuperCPU 2 and works fine, also the settings for power schemes are implemented. Here I can proudly say, that you can change the scheme direct via the jumplist!

Also the alert is working fine (as long as you type in a numeric code). If you have turned your sound of or very low, the alert window enables the sound and raise the volume to maximum in order to have maximum attention on the alert. The correct code disables the alert and set the volume to its previous status.

Now SuperBattery 2 had become the Pin/Unpin behavior known from SuperWeather 2 and SuperCPU 2. That makes two lines in the overlay unnecessary because its always possible to show a user specified task icon. If you pinned the program and set the task icon to “application icon”, SuperBattery doesn’t unpin from the taskbar.

The other features are already known from SuperBattery. So it’s possible to show the battery status as progress and disable it when the battery is fully charged, using task- and overlay icons to display charge status etc (tray icon not implemented in the BETA-Build).

 

Hope you like it and help me with your feedback ;)

Friday post – SuperWeather 2 v1.1

Hi folks,

today I introduce my 3-week plan… Every friday you will find an update or release of another application on this blog. But don’t let me talk too long, here is the plan:

Friday – December 9, 2011 (today):
Release of the new SuperWeather 2 Version with significant updates and bugfixes. You will find all information on the SuperWeather page.

Friday – December 16, 2011:
Hopefully the final release of SuperBattery 2. But i promise there will be a usable Beta-Version!

Friday – December 23, 2011:
The first release of SuperMail.

So if everthing is going right I have plans for the weeks after christmas:

Friday – January 6, 2012:
Introduction of SuperSuite

Friday – January 13, 2012:
Final release of SuperMail

Ready for the future…

The SuperBar applications are ready for Windows 8. I just tested them with the Developer Preview in a virtual mashine. I plan to build Metro-Style GUIs for them too.
I hope you will follow me into the future with Windows 8 and the SuperBar applications.

 

SuperBattery 2 – A look at the work progress

Today I want to give you a look at the SuperBattery 2 development progress…
At first I want to tell you from where it comes and what will be different in the next version. SuperBattery was my first program for the SuperBar and because of this it’s the last of my programs which bases upon Windows Forms.

As you can see in the other applications like SuperWeather 2 or SuperCPU 2 the possibilities with WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) are much bigger than with Windows Forms. So it is time to write SuperBattery 2 in WPF and make a nice glass interface. And that was the first design idea in 2010 which I introduced at the 6th February 2011. It already had dropdown boxes for AC- and Battery-Mode, the same options etc. To keep it short: it was only a new design but the old functionality. The language support was the only new feature.

I thought that the old GUI was not that intuitive as I wanted and so I made a second design suggestion. It was completely different to all other programs. The idea was to show the battery life time with a track bar from 0 to 100% and sliders for the different stages (fully charged, battery low and battery critical). A mouse hover over the area of a stage or a slider displays only the information you need for the specific state.

I saw two big problems with this design: At first the development effort is very high and second I think that design is so different to the most other programs for windows, that a normal user could have problems understanding the design while the first use.

Because of this thinking the project slept some times on my computer while I develop SuperCPU 2 and SuperWeather 2. Finally SuperCPU 2 brought the final GUI. The preview of the task item in the program with related dropdowns is an intuitive and easy way to configure the settings. So I began the development of SuperBattery 2 again.

As you can see it has a similar design to SuperCPU 2. The AC- and Battery-Mode settings are selectable via a dropdown menu at the top of the task bar settings. This way makes it possible to only show the necessary information with well-arranged menus without getting confused by other settings. With the live previews in the settings you don’t have to imagine what the result of your decision is, you can see it as you make the decision. A very new feature is the alert. If you’re sitting in a plane, a train etc. you can enable the alert and if you fall asleep and somebody what to thieve your notebook he would remove the wire. At this point SuperBattery 2 opens an overlaying Window with a code block and plays an alert sound. I know the bad guy could disable the alert or remove the battery and so on but the few seconds of the alert could give you the time to wake up and… well that’s your decision ;)

You may ask where the development is at the moment… I have to do the whole taskbar integration for the Battery-Mode (some annoying copy-paste work). The tray icon need to be build which is a bit difficult with WPF so I have to read some how-to’s. The last thing to do is an issue with the alert. The alert is senseless when the sound of your computer is turned off or very silent. So SuperBattery 2 has to unmute and raise the master volume to maximum. I don’t have an idea how to do that yet.

You can see there is a lot of work already done and some work to do. I hope you like the software so far. I would appreciate your comments.