A New Niche Utility - RatTrap

RatTrap is a new utility developed for the Cyborg R.A.T. mouse. It's job is simple. It will switch profiles automatically for the current foreground program. This is one of the features missing from the mouse's software that's found in other brands, like Logitech.

ArsClip Version Jump

The official release of version 4.0 of ArsClip has been uploaded. I've jumped versions because of a major feature change. The change in this version is a completely new popup window. The changelog for this is rather long, so instead of trying to tell you about it, I threw together a video preview.

ArsClip Youtube Video

1 in 1000

For every 1000 downloads I usually receive feedback from 1 users. This is why your feedback is so important. To put this in perspective, the previous version of Rename Master was downloaded about 60,000 times in 8 months -- I'd expect 60 responses. Only a portion of this feedback is about program features or issues.

Each Public Beta may only be download a few dozen times, so the odds of receiving feedback is much lower. This is why I make my beta versions open to everyone.

The good news is that I've been receiving more feedback than normal the paste few months. This is why there have been more beta updates than usual. Each bug fix posted is usually the result of a report and each new feature is at least indirectly related to a specific email received.

Rename Master Fine Tuning

In the new Rename Master v2.9.6, the changes made are subtle.

The emphasis of interface changes is on improved logical placement and visual cues. Buttons that are logically related to scripting have been moved to the Scripting tab. Renaming Steps are now color coded and only display addition text when enabled -- improving recognition and readability. Also, folder operations have been centralized in a new Folder Tools button.

For new users, the initial interface defaults are designed to make learning easier by only showing the more important features of the program. The main window was originally designed when desktop resolutions where smaller, so the default starting size was rather small. Even so, most of the area of the window was wasted with large control areas. These sizes have been adjust for a modern desktop and to utilize the window space more efficiently. The default script has also been updated so that changes in one step are not easily undone by a following step.

Finally, several months worth of small improvements and bug fixes are included with this update. Many sections of the program have been re-visited to smooth out rough spots that have gone unnoticed.

More ArsClip Fine Tuning

In version 3.2.0 of ArsClip, I went back to older forgotten sections of the program to polish it up. In the current 3.2.1 version, I found more forgotten parts of the program and improved them as well.

The Edit History and Remove Clips windows are now one window, with tabs to show the Popup Clips and the Removed Clips. This helps logically combine all clips into a single window that shows the entire history of the clipboard. Also, this gives an easy way to link these clips back to their configuration settings now found in a single page under [Clipboard>History] in the configuration. Since the configuration page also links back to the Edit History window, this makes navigation and discovery much easier to do and understand.

The Permanent Clip window was also altered with just a single major change (beside some aesthetic tweaks). I've hidden the advanced, lesser used settings by default and included a "More/Less" toggle button. The first time a user sees the window, only the Menu Caption and Clip settings are shown, to help enforce the purpose of the window works. This also doesn't overload users with too many options that make learning the basics confusing.

The last major change I've made was to the Sound options. I no longer use the Windows routine that requires a registry write, and this was the only setting that was not portable. I've also created a new [Clipboard>Sound] category and re-written the configuration settings to be much easier to configure. No longer is the Control Panel required for setting up a sound event.

The rest of the changes are smaller tweaks or bug fixes and are listed in the changelog.