Please Can I Have Permission to Delete My Own Fracking Files?

I’ve been using Vista for about a year now and overall I’m pretty happy. It’s essentially XP with nicer drop shadows. But there is one thing that drives me absolutely nuts and I’ve yet to find a solution for it.

Almost every time I try to delete a folder off my machine I get this message: “Destination Folder Access Denied. You need permission to perform this action.” It’s my folder, I created it on my own machine. Who do I need permission from? Bill Gates? My mother?

permission

The whole idea is ridiculous. This is my machine, I’m logged in as an Administrator – I should be able to delete any file I want. If the file is in use by another process, please let me know about it, but ultimately the decision to delete should be mine.

This issue is symptomatic of a general level of distrust in the user. It’s great to prevent newbie users from deleting the ‘windows’ directory, but please have a power-user mode where I don’t have to be nannied with warnings and wizards every step of the way.

Unlocker is a nice freeware app that sometimes fixes this problem but often it too is helpless against vista’s security restrictions. I did disable the UAC (another vista annoyance is the fact that you get a warning message every time you reboot telling you that disabling the UAC is a terrible idea) but this does not help with this issue.

(This anti-Microsoft rant is here to provide balance for some of my previous anti-Apple rants).

PostcardViewer Update

PCV

I completed the viewer update trifecta – PostcardViewer has been updated to v1.2.

I actually re-wrote the code from scratch, since the previous code was starting to show it’s age. The main new feature is captions. Since the images are rotated slightly the text requires an embedded font to render. This means that non-english characters, italics and bold are not supported (PostcardViewer-Pro allows you embed different character sets as required). View the complete list of updates here.

I always liked this viewer since it is very simple but fun and effective. It uses Flash’s fast scaling code to produce nice zooming transitions. About the image rotation in PCV – a few people have complained that the rotation degrades image quality. I think the slight rotation adds a subtle real-world cue that makes the images more visually interesting and ‘real’. Think about it – when you look at a set of actual photos, they are not all perfectly perpendicular to each other. Your brain does a fine job of working out which direction is up and which direction is down within the image. Let’s break free of the tyranny of the 90 degree angle 😉 (PCV-Pro allows you to disable the image rotation).

PostcardViewer-Pro customers are notified via email when there is an update. All 1.x updates are provided free of charge.

SimpleViewer v1.8.5 Released

SV grab

When I first created SimpleViewer back in 2003, it was mainly a reaction against the multitude of bad web photo galleries that were out there. The idea was to create a gallery that was simple, unobtrusive and usable. I did not expect 5 years later that it would be getting over 15,000 downloads a week!.

This popularity has spurred me to keep improving the gallery. The 1.8.5 updates include:

  • Added full localization support
  • Allow direct links to images within gallery
  • Added PNG and GIF support (publishing to Flash 8 )
  • Added 3 new XML options: vAlign, hAlign, navPadding. These improve layout for small format galleries.
  • Added 5 new Pro AS options: showCaptionOnRollover, captionUnderThumbs, captionFontSize, titleFontSize, captionPadding
  • Allow setting caption and title colors via HTML font tags

As usual, these new features are mainly based on the awesome feedback that comes from the forums. Unfortunately due to the high volume of posts I do not have time to answer each one, but I do read every post and take note of the issues raised.

SimpleViewer-Pro customers are notified via email when there is an update. All 1.x updates are provided free of charge.

Please download the latest version, give it a whirl and let me know if you see any bugs. Thanks!

AutoViewer Update

I’ve spruced up AutoViewer a little as part of my spring cleaning. The biggest change is that captions now support HTML formatting, including hyperlinks. The UI was tweaked to be more useful in small format situations (see example below). Also added localization support and some new config options. See a list of all the changes here. Most of the new features are based on feedback posted to the autoviewer forum.

AutoViewer-Pro customers are notified via email when there is an update. All 1.x updates are provided free of charge.

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/autoviewer/examples/small/autoviewer.swf” width=”400″ height=”300″ fversion=”8″ bgcolor=”#000000″ fvars=” xmlURL= http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/autoviewer/examples/small/gallery.xml”/]

The 'Add to Friends' T-Shirt

Add To Friend Shirt

The ultimate blurring of the line between the real and virtual worlds? Or just a really geeky t-shirt? You decide. The ‘Add to Friends’ t-shirt allows anyone with a camera phone to friend you on facebook with one snap.

Towards the Next Generation of 3D Visualization

desaxis

I love Flash – I’ve been using it for years and know most of it’s tricks. Now with papervision and away3D we have a some nice 3D APIs. While these are great, 3D in Flash is seriously lacking in rendering power. Once you throw a few hundred simple 3D shapes on the stage, your frame rate starts to plummet.

Flash is still the best choice for ubiquitous interaction on the web, but for 3D graphics, there are some better alternatives. Please note that I am not lobbying for native 3D graphic card support inside Flash (that didn’t work out too well for shockwave).

From my research so far, 2 of the most interesting apps for creating next-gen realtime 3D graphics are processing and vvvv.

PROCESSING

Processing has been around for a while and is gaining traction as a 3D visualization tool. Processing is free and cross-platform. The flickr processing pool shows the kind of stuff you can build with it. Since Sun updated the java preloader graphic to be cool and orange, we might even start seeing some all processing websites.

proccessing IDE

I’ve resisted learning processing for a while, but when Robert Hodgin generously released some of his source code I had the motivation to download and try it out. Surprisingly, processing comes with a nice, lightweight IDE. Each project is a sketch which is basically a folder containing simple text files. Processing has a number of libraries and examples for handling 3D graphics.

Lennyjpg is creating some beautiful work with processing:

...

As is Flight404:

VVVV

vvvv is a ‘toolkit for real time video synthesis’. It’s a crazy app built by some crazy german people. The tutorials are written with typical deadpan teutonic humor. It’s currently windows-only and free. Jitter is a similar cross-platform app.

The concept of vvvv’s UI is ‘patches’. Modules are laid out in a 2D space and patched together with virtual wires. The beauty of this paradigm is that there is no compilation – results are rendered in realtime as you tweak the patches. Since I come from a textual programming background I find this to be quite baffling, but maybe it’s good to have your head turned around now and again.

patches

Desaxismundi has been creating some fantastically beautiful pieces using vvvvv such as this deconstructed sphere:

and these:

desaxis

desaxis