O concurso Imagine Cup do qual já tive oportunidade de falar neste blog encontra-se agora presente no Hi5 (http://imaginecup.hi5.com).
Uma boa iniciativa para chegar mais próximo dos estudantes na divulgação do concurso, visto que as camadas jovens portuguesas se encontram rendidas ao universo das redes sociais.
I simply hate Programs and Features feature in Windows Vista when compared with the Windows XP Add or Remove Programs feature. Why? Just an interface issue. When you go to Programs and Features the list of programs starts empty and is filled while Windows finds out that programs you have installed.
Every time I try to click in a program to change or remove it, before the search is complete, I loose track of that item because there are always new items being added to the list and hiding the existing ones (when they are added before that one). Because the fill isn’t ordered, but the items remain in alphabetic orders, you never know in which position of the list a new item will pop up.
I rather prefer the old loading message before all the items appear at once. At least I don’t have the frustration of seeing the program I want to change and not being able to access it, and when I walk through the list I know that there will be no items appearing in the beginning of the list where I had already seen.
Maybe in Windows 7 this will be improved. Who knows? Meanwhile, I can live with it 
Yesterday I took a look at Songbird Media Player. I must admit that I was very excited as a read about this open source media player. why? Because it has many things that look like my favorite web browser: Firefox!
The screenshot bellow shows the default look & feel of this application that looks a lot like iTunes. I like a lot the library navigation. You can filter the musics by year, artist and album in a simple way.
How about Firefox similarities that I talked about? Here it goes. It is “developers friendly”. Has themes and add-ons support like Firefox. It allows tabbed browsing with a Firefox-based internal browser. As you can see in the screenshot below some interface elements like options and Add-ons menu are similar to the analogous ones in Firefox. Almost a copy of them, which can be nice while getting used to Songbird interface. This project is powered by Mozilla (which explains a lot 
).
The screenshot below which shows a album browser isn’t a built-in feature. It is a Java-based add-in which I installed. Looks nice but has some issues about resizing, and hangs a little bit too… You can navigate through the add-in list in here.
My deception was when I played some songs… Songbird takes a lot of memory and CPU usage in order to work.
I’ve tried iTunes 7.5 and tough it uses an considerable amount of memory it almost “doesn’t require” CPU time. I must confess that this memory usage of 47Mb doesn’t bother me. 2Gb of RAM is enough to handle it And I’m used to Firefox memory usage as you can also see in the screenshot.
With Windows Media Player 11 I had some great results about both CPU and memory. It is the least I can expect with a media player built-in into the operating system.
I must confess that I don’t use media players that often, and when I use it’s just to listen to music and leave the player running in background. Songbird seems promising, but for now I won’t use it because it doesn’t fit my needs (low memory, low CPU,shuffle and playing!). Although my experience wasn’t good, don’t stay stick to what I have written. Install it and give it a try!
I’ve found out about a nice C# feature that I didn’t know about. Operator overloading. It allows you to define the operators like +,-,/*,+=,-=,!=,etc. for the classes you develop. How? Just add an static method named operator-<operator> where <operator> can be an operator like +. The first parameter must be of your class type (in this example MyType), the second one can be of any type. Inside the method body you implement the logic associated with your overloaded operator, returning an instance of your class.
public static MyType operator+(MyType o1,MyType o2){
return new MyType(o1.Property1 + o2.Property1);
}
public static MyType operator+(MyType o,int i){
return new MyType(o.Property1 + i); }
The code above allows you to do something like this:
MyType o1 = new MyType(10);
MyType o2 = new MyType(5);
MyType rs = o1 + o2;
Another nice feature is related with cast operations. You can allow something like (int)o1 (where o1 is an instance of MyType) by adding another static method to your MyType class. explicit/implicit keywords define if you must add (type) before your instance to trigger the cast. Implicit does an implicit cast when it is needed. With explicit you must and the (type) to cast.
public static explicit operator int (MyType from){
return from.Property1;
}
A simple application (that doesn’t require installation). Maybe it is old news, but I have only found out about this software today. Pretty nice because it gathers some (sometimes) useful information. The features list is “copy-pasted” from the website.
Features:
I’ve found an hilarious game which is part of a series of video games. This is the 4th episode, and unfortunetly it is the only one that is free 
I’m talking about a point-and-click game (my favorite kind of game) where you must explore the scenarios and use objects to accomplish your objectives. The story and the dialogs between characters are very funny. They use a lot of the USA stereotypes in the argument.
I must say that I was stuck in the first minutes while playing (it is pretty hard), but it is worth using a walk through to follow the story.
I leave here some screenshots.
You can download this free game here. Enjoy it.
