Archive for App-A-Day tag
QuickReminder mini-app – Time based reminders in your system tray
Whether it’s a meeting for a specific time or remembering to stop the tea brewing in 7 minutes time (lovely tea from Adagio Teas that deserves it’s own blog post) events often whiz by without me noticing. I’m not great at time based background threading… but a computer is.
Sure I fire up Outlook (which I don’t use any more), iCal (Only open when I need it) or Google Calendar, create a new event, choose the type, choose which day and time it occurs at and mentally do the math in my head for 7 minutes from now taking the seconds into consideration…. but that’s distracting enough I think “No, I’ll just remember” and I don’t.
What I want is to make a few clicks to set-up an event – ideally based on previous ones such as another “Green tea brew”. I don’t want audio alarms just a pop-up silent balloon that completely disappears with another single click.
Inspired by App-A-Day I thought “what the hell” and wrote it.
Download QuickReminder (.NET) with full source (29KB).
The source includes a few useful snippets including how to:
- Access icons/resources in your Resource.resx file without casting or resource managers
- Make your app register/unregister for automatic startup in Windows
- Access configuration settings without casting or setting managers
- Launch a URL from a label
- Make your system tray based application start-up without a form showing on-screen
Have fun,
[)amien
App-A-Day & SubSonic
App-A-Day
Self-proclaimed Code Jedi Dana Hanna is on a mission to destroy his personal life by writing an application every day for 30 days.
There are a few great apps in there and all come with source – the ones I checked out were in C# :)
Some of my favourites are:
- WPM Tray – display you word per minute count graph. Also a demonstration of how to hook global key-presses in C#
- Jedi IRC – a small IRC application as a Visual Studio plug-in – both interesting things to see done in C#
- Mouse Heat Map – get a display of where your mouse lives on your desktop! :D
I must confess these tiny fun apps have inspired a couple of my own that I’ll hopefully knock up and post at some point.
SubSonic – The Zero Code DAL
In other news SubSonic has come on a lot having addressed all the major issues apart from still being ActiveRecord based over DataMapper pattern. (If you haven’t seen it before check out the 20 minute screencast)
Rob, the brains behind SubSonic, has been interviewed over at the DotNetRocks podcast and I recommend giving this one a go – don’t let the first 5-10 minutes of warm-up and ads put you off.
He’s also put together a starter site solution you can pick-up from the same place which has some useful bits.
[)amien