Clarion Folk

Updated (25th March 2008)

The problem is the answer. It seems impossible for the current Readers to contextually filter and range through the content.

Gary announced the new version of Organise365 on the newsgroups recently, and it’s big feature is Newsgroups.

This got me thinking about Newsgroup Readers.

For the longest time, I used Outlook Express. That was because I didn’t know any better. But the search capabilities really, REALLY, got my goat.

I then tried Thunderbird for a while. There were some _slight_ searching improvements, but not really enough. I really wanted to use Thunderbird, mostly because it’s from Mozilla, who make the wonderful Firefox (soon to be better).

Since getting this beastie, I’ve been using Windows Mail. It’s okay, but really, the searching hasn’t gotten much better.

I’ve heard Windows Live Mail might be better, so I’m going to go ahead and try it out.

EDIT: (25th March 2008)

Windows Live Mail looks pretty good. Not only does the Newsgroup Reading functionality looked beefed up (you’ve got a "View All Posts" ability, which is cool), but it’s got an RSS Feed Reader also. This was mentioned in the Skype discussions, apologies.

What is the problem with Searching Newsgroups? And what is it that we want in this Searching?

The problem is the answer. It seems impossible for the current Readers to contextually filter and range through the content. When I type in "Two Bob’s Code", I want not only any "Bob"’s who have posted, not only any Subject lines with "Bob" in them, but I want any post with "Bob" in the body. And I want them shown to me grouped like that.

This is some complicated searching, granted .. but newsgroups are an important part of development, and other businesses I’m sure. It’d be worth it.

Google Mail seems to track email conversations in the same way the Newsgroups work. But I’d like my newsgroup reader to be better at allowing me to follow the flow of the conversation. When I view without Grouping (that is, for example, all posts in Date order without any Grouping) I’d like it to be far easier to slip into a Grouping, or to see it’s order not only by Date, but by the next in the Grouping.

Not much to ask for :).

Here’s my current conclusion:

If Google add Newsgroup support to GMail the world will tilt on it’s axis and I’ll be a happy little dev.

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Desktop Search came up on the Skype channel recently.

updated

Copernic was the main topic of conversation. It’s very polite, only indexes when there is no activity, and from what people said, it takes about a day/night to index a dev computer.

Another one mentioned (that I could find) was the Windows Desktop Search. Not the one that comes standard, but a separate download. Begs the question why it’s not in Windows by default. I guess they have their reasons.

Not sure why, but Google Desktop Search wasn’t mentioned. It’s what I have running on this beast, and it does a pretty good job. The double-click of CTRL is fantastic, and I usually get a good answer from it. Actually, I usually cannot find the file, which then tells me it’s not on my computer, or it’s named something else.

Update:

Google Desktop Search was indeed talked about. My own internal searching algorithm is quite stupid it seems, heh.  Almost every comment was that it is limited. I respect the wisdom of my fellow Clarionites, so that makes me want to give Copernic a try. See what I’m missing out on.

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It was a beautiful winter over here. I can remember .. not much, being eleven years old.

Larry hit us up on Skype recently with this amazing PDF file .. ../clarioncallv1n1.pdf (3.5+ megs).

If you’d like to see Clarion bling at the earliest of stages, then take a gander at this document.

Interesting fact: Back in the day, they charged $19.50 for updates to Clarion, _but_ if you were the first to report a bug, the "correction update" was free.

Here’s a peek ..

[Click On Image]

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There’s been some great discussion on the Skype channel about Code-Signing your software applications. Especially with Vista this is something that we cannot ignore. Vista’s UAC makes it difficult for the User to install un-signed applications. This in turn will establish doubt and annoyance in them, at _us_, the developer.

The conversation led me to three links.

• Jane Fleming, Signing Your Applications, Part 1 - Clarion Mag (Subscription required)
• Jane Fleming, Signing Your Applications, Part 2 - Clarion Mag (Subscription required)
• Mark Russinovich, Inside Windows Vista User Account Control - TechNet, Microsoft

After reading the article I still don’t like UAC, but I do understand it better.

How has UAC affected your development?

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