Alyus is a software development company that is more focused on providing commercial products, that will of course cost money to use. I have teamed up with a friend of mine, who is a graphic designer, and we are working on getting this new company on its feet. With a very limited amount of free time, this company is definitely taking a lot longer than we planned, and this lack of time is taking a very large toll on the company’s flagship software: Quick Clean.

Quick Clean essentially does what it entitles, it quickly cleans up your computer. It keeps your computer running smoothly by deleting unused files (chosen by the user), clearing web browser cache, and shutting down unnecessary processes. All of this is done at the users discretion, so no important data will ever be lost. All of this is done in a very efficient and user friendly manner. Quick Clean is the first product that I have ever worked on that actually boasts a custom graphical user interface, designed mainly by my partner, but stitched together by myself.

Quick Clean will have a base selling price of $9.99, but will offer discounts to those who buy license keys in bulk.

Once Quick Clean is complete, I am planning on returning to my usual routines of upgrading the BrandonSoft website, helping people learn on BP Forums, and creating new and exciting things, and updating old things. I do have alot of potential ideas in mind about where HTML-IDEx will go next.

So, keep an eye out for the grand opening of Alyus, which will be paired with the official release of Quick Clean!

Yammer

Yammer is a corporation driven social network, if you will. One sets up their own network based on the ending of an email address. For example, I have a network for everyone that has an email ending in “@brandonsoft.com” This service, Yammer, allows us to easily communicate. It is essentially a Facebook without the personal friends.

Not only does this service allow us to communicate on projects, share files, update others on our current progress, and complete other work related tasks, but it also allows us to share a more humorous side. Often times, the members of my Yammer network post jokes, comic strips, and everything else that has just a slight relation to the project at hand. Yammer makes work easier by providing us ways to communicate, and brightening our spirits with the posts of other users.

With my smartphone this also makes communicating very easy on the go. Yammer has a smart phone app, a desktop application, and a web client. This makes Yammer available to everyone that works with you, which is just fantastic.

http://yammer.com

Producteev

The second little tool that I’d like to discuss is known as Producteev. Now this is actually a little bit like Yammer, but not exactly. What it is, is actually a to-do list for people with the same email extensions. This makes for the perfect coordination in projects. Simply add a main project, add a few sub-tasks, and the members working on this project with check off the sub tasks when they are complete! No explicit communication is needed, and the project gets done.

From my knowledge, Producteev does not actually allow you to create little status updates to share with your co-workers. But that is why it is best paired with Yammer. Together, they get the job done.

The only complaint I have about this service is that its mobile app does not seem to work very well. Any tasks created by the mobile app tend to have half of their names cut off, and sub tasks can’t be accessed.

https://www.producteev.com/

As most of you know, when working in teams, communication is key. Although there are tons of ways to communicate in the modern world (IM, Phone, E-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Google+) a few centralized alternatives really helps managing things. If you have any services that you use with your coworkers, please feel free to share them in the comments.

The camera on the Droid X2 has an interesting feature, continuous focus, meaning every time the user makes only a slight movement, the camera will automatically begin focusing on whatever is in the center of the screen, unless it spots a face somewhere else in the screen. If this does happen, it will begin focusing on the face (Which is very useful). Now although this feature is great and has definitely saved me time several times, I have to say that it is a tad frustrating when I accidentally flinch after taking a picture, and right before the shutter closes, the camera focuses on something entirely different then what was meant to be focused on.

Another neat feature is it’s ability to take pictures in multiple light levels. With the built in LED flash, this camera has come in very handy. As soon as the camera detects that something will be dark, it turns the flash on, and the object is instantaneously lit up. Now this all too often occurs when you are photographing dark objects. The flash will turn on, because the phone thinks the user is in a dark environment, and the object’s darkness will be destroyed. However, you may manually turn off the flash for these occasions.

There are also several photo effects included with the phone, but who uses those anyway? The only thing that bugged me about the camera was a missing timer. You could not set the phone down, run to a wall, wait 5 seconds, and have a beautiful self-portrait. Instead, you have to physically hold the camera in front of you and hope that you press the shutter button.

As far as video goes, I struggled a bit at first because my videos, even when recording in 720p HD, would turn out extremely choppy, and for about two weeks I refused to record any video because of this. However, after some researching on the good ol’ internet, I found at that the problem was in a cheap SD card, which transferred data extremely slow. I simply set my videos to be saved to the phone’s internal storage, and all was good.

The video camera fares extremely well: it adjusts to light changes, has the ability to zoom in and zoom out, and can hold its own for long or short video clips. Not to mention the camera records in 720p so there is nothing to be ashamed of when uploading short home videos to YouTube.

Overall I give the included camera a 8/10, mainly because of the lack of a better focus system, the lack of a timer, and the shutter button being way to small. However, below are a few images I took with the camera at the San Diego International Auto Show. Enjoy!

So, after spending about an hour on HostGator live support with a kind representative by the name of Kyle T, I decided to make a switch to a Virtual Private Server, which would give me unlimited processes, and a much faster website (So quoted by the tech representative).

After switching over my domain nameservers, I noticed that all of my websites were now running very smoothly, and for a good reason. They now had their own dedicated server that I managed. Of course, this is a lot of power. However, I will not let this monstrous amount of power go to my head, and I will manage my servers in a good way.

So now that every one of my websites has a separate CPanel account, and each website is not slowing down its brethren, there should definitely be a speed increase, so if you notice such a thing, this is why!

Then, once I became a more experienced programmer in the likes of Java and VB.NET, I began to realize that getting people to help me with applications allows the job to get done much faster, and it creates a more fun programming experience. The only problem was, how could we work on the same code, at the same time, without creating massive problems with the code’s version?

Well, this would not be a problem if the programming language that I needed to collaborate with was something simple such as HTML, where we could simply use a service that allows people to edit things in realtime, like Google Wave. However, the language VB.NET is not simple, and is most easily worked with inside of the Visual Studio IDE itself, and this IDE does not support collaborative coding at all. (However, there may be a plugin somewhere that allows you to do this)

Therefore, my “coding buddies” and I have scoured the internet looking for a solution. The closest thing we’ve found? Dropbox. This service allows you to upload your files to their secure servers (The dropbox client does this automatically), where it will then be automatically downloaded by anyone who has rights to a particular folder. Now, this solution has worked so far, and has allowed us to work together on projects very well. However, the only drawback is that we cannot code at the same time. Before we even open up the project, we need to make sure no one else is editing it… and if they are, we may not touch the project at all. This is only a small complaint, since my friends and I share completely different timezones, so while one is awake, everyone else is sleeping (Of course this makes communicating a bit difficult).

But all in all, this post was pretty much written up to alert my fellow programmers of Dropbox, and offer a cry for help, asking for anyone who knows of a solution where two people may code collaboratively, to speak up!

For the next few months, my main goal was to improve Brandon’s HTML-IDE, and I did this by create various patches that fixed every bug that I could find. However, no new content was ever being added. I thought it was time to change that. So I completely rewrote Brandon’s HTML-IDE, and named it Brandon’s HTML-IDE 2. This version lacked all of the bugs that existed in the previous version, and contained a very small amount of line numbering, and syntax highlighting. However, this was not enough, and I soon stopped operation on the project.

After being contacted by a school who actually wanted to use Brandon’s HTML-IDE to teach their students HTML, I realized that the program would simply not due in a classroom setting due to the massive amount of bugs and lack of proper functionality. After several days of frustration, I simply closed the project.

Skip forward about a year, I wanted to once again revive Brandon’s HTML-IDE; However, the name “Brandon’s HTML-IDE” Seemed to mean “Bugs, bugs, and more bugs” – So I gave it more of a modern name, HTML-IDEx. I also did not want this application to run into any bugs whatsoever, so I made the application open-source: allowing all other developers to simply fix any bugs they find, and upload their own version of the program.

Of course, eventually I came to the same brick wall as I had when coding Brandon’s HTML-IDE, and I couldn’t find anyone to help me. So, I gave up.

Then, about a week ago, a friend on Stack Overflow introduced me to an ancient control coded by Marc Cramer, which had built in line numbering and syntax highlighting. This was just what I needed. I then rebuilt HTML-IDEx around a system of tabs, and used Cramer’s mkc_Codebox control to do the heavy work. Things were working out wonderfully, and they still are. The use of the Krypton Toolkit also gives this application a very beautiful look.

So far, I have almost completed the .2 BETA release of HTML-IDEx, which should not contain any bugs whatsoever, and should work extremely well. I am very excited about the release.

By popular request, I have updated the RunAsAdmin Library to version 1.0, which is the official public release of this library. What is this library you may be asking? Well, if you have been reading my blog at all, you’ll know that I have been fed up with the idea that ClickOnce applications (Published applications) Cannot be run with Administrative Privileges in Windows. So I went ahead and created a fix for this, and dubbed it, The RunAsAdmin Library, and it is now available to the public.

It is very simple to implement into your project. The package itself comes in a .zip file, which contains a .dll file and an executable file. Simply add this .dll file as a reference to your application, and include the .exe file into your application. More details about implementing this library can be found on the video posted on my YouTube channel.

Then, simply add this little line of code to your Form Load event,
RunAsAdminClass.RunAsAdmin.runAsAdmin(“ProjectNameHere”, Command(), Me)
Of course, replace “ProjectNameHere” With the name of your project. More details on this can also be found in my YouTube video.

Once that is done, go ahead and publish your application, and run it. You should be prompted with a User Account Control dialog asking for Administrative Rights to your harddrive, simply allow this and your program should be running as Administrator!!

Go ahead and download RunAsAdmin at: http://brandonsoft.com/RunAsAdmin.zip
Enjoy!

Now the concept behind it is simple, send a parameter to another application, asking it to launch the target application with Administrative Privileges, which it does. A UAC Confirmation window then shows up, with the application name of RunAsAdmin.exe — As long as the user allows this application to run, it is run as an administrator. This will solve many problems with Updaters and other things that require access to Windows files or the harddrive itself.

Now whether or not I should make this component available to the public is the question that has been long in my head, so I was hoping to get my readers’ opinions. Should I offer RunAsAdmin as a component that the everyday programmer can implement into their projects, or should I make it a payware component, or better yet: Should I make it a component that is only available to BrandonSoft Licensed Programmers? The details are still left blank.

So, readers, do you think I should make this new component available to the public?

At first, the component was simply a code library, and although this version is still available for download, it’s methods are outdated and implementation into an existing project can be tedious.

Then, we upgraded the component, turning it into a physical control, allowing a user to implement the component into a project with a few mouse clicks. And once that is complete, the user may initiate the update process with one line of code. Simple as that.

Shortly after the release of this new version, I received several complaints because UpdateVB runs on .NET Framework 4.0, which of course is the latest and most stable version of the .NET Framework, however, most consumers do not have it installed on their computer, limiting the amount of people that will download your software. Because of this, developers use .NET Framework 2.0, which comes standard with every copy of Windows XP and above.

Of course, I can understand their concerns. While using the .NET Framework 4.0, you are limiting the consumers to a range of people who have about an hour of free time to download the necessary framework, which is only a fraction of most computer users. This made me think, UpdateVB does not fully utilize the features that come packed with .NET Framework 4.0, and it would be losing almost no functionality if it was downgraded to .NET Framework 2.0.

Considering this, I have officially decided to appeal to a wider audience by downgrading to the .NET Framework 2.0 for UpdateVB 2.4.

UpdateVB 2.4 Also contains several other updates, such as better error tracking, the ability to specify usernames and passwords for your executable file, and more! UpdateVB 2.4 Alpha and all other related releases can be found at UpdateVB’s webpage found at http://updatevb.codeplex.com

Income Tracker .2.1 Beta

• Added multiple currencies, so users can select their currency symbol. However, they must type in their own instead of choosing from a list
• Added the ability to subtract from total profit (So one may keep track of spending as well)
• Added a launcher, which ensures that the application is launched with administrative privileges.
• Fixed the installer so it installs the latest version (.2.1b) And it also installs the .NET 4.0 Framework and all needed libraries.
• Fixed a couple bugs regarding multiple symbols appearing in the main interface

Twit Control 1.6 Beta

Although this application is not available to the public, here is a list of already implemented features:

• Faster Twitter synchronization (By using multiple threads)
• Faster Facebook synchronization (By using multiple threads)
• More reliable Facebook synchronization (By the use of WatiN libraries)
• More groupboxes on the main form to make the application seem more organized
• More secure transfer of Facebook passwords
• A new about page
• A new layout to the Twitter authentication window
• I have yet to add this, but I will soon: A method to update both Twitter and Facebook statuses directly from TwitControl
• Added an advanced error tracking system that automatically reports all errors to me.

Xinonz .1 Alpha

This application was never released to the public, and was started about 2 years ago. It is basically a little menubar that anchors to the top of one’s desktop, and makes accessing files easier. I simply revived the project by updating it to .NET Framework 4.0 from 3.5