Launching and switching between applications are two very common activities when using Windows. Keyboard aficionados will naturally seek to minimize the work involved in such common tasks. For launching applications, Windows provides the Start Menu (accessed from the keyboard via the Windows key or Ctrl+Esc), the Quick Launch toolbar (Win+Tab, Tab), desktop shortcuts (Win+D), and the Run dialog (Win+R). For managing running programs, Windows provides the Taskbar (Win+Tab) and Alt+Tab window. Other than a few innovations in the Start Menu, such as recent and pinned items and highlighting of recently installed programs, little changed in these features between Windows 95 and Windows 2003. They aren’t the most robust implementations:

One of the great things about Ultra Recall is that it is flexible enough to be used for a variety of purposes (of course, that very flexibility makes it a bit challenging to market, and that’s one of the reasons for this blog).

One use that Ultra Recall excels at is data archiving. Here at Kinook, we file all of our business documents, including emails, invoices, purchases, faxes, tax documents, and more, in an Ultra Recall database. The database is located on the network for easy access by multiple users and so that it gets included in our nightly backup process.

Whenever someone needs to lookup any information, the database can be quickly opened and instantly searched by name, email address, subject, any text in the stored documents, or other attribute (metadata) values. One benefit of archiving this information in one database is that we only have to look in one place, regardless of what type of data we might be looking for. We use both Outlook and Outlook Express for email, but since Ultra Recall can store both types of messages, we can locate any email message (as well as Word, PDF, and other documents) in one step.

Another benefit is that we only have to backup one file to ensure that all of our data can be recovered if and when our server’s hard drive goes south. We don’t have to mess with backing up users’ personal email and document folders, and everyone can easily access the documents.

As an avid keyboarder, one thing that has always slowed me down is having to move my hands to reach for the navigation keys (arrow keys, home, end, page up/down, etc.). Methods to reduce the problem are available (for instance, space bar scrolling in browsers, special navigation modes in editors like vi/vim, etc.), but they are all application-specific. I’ve always wished for a vim-style navigation capability that worked everywhere in Windows.

Rare Pebble Software has created an ingenious solution to this problem: TouchCursor is a simple Windows application that turns your Space bar into another shift-state key, allowing you to combine it with home row keys for navigation and other common keystrokes.

For instance, by default Space+J is bound to left arrow, Space+L to right arrow, Space+K to down, Space+I to up, etc. Regular shift states (Ctrl, Alt, Shift, Win) can be combined with Space to type almost any combination from the home row. It sounds a bit odd, but it works surprisingly well. Note that it does work differently than a separate mode (ala vim).

The key bindings can be customized as desired. I like the defaults that are provided for the right hand, and I’ve also added bindings for other hard-to-reach keys like Esc and the function keys. Now my hands hardly ever need to leave their home positions.

A training mode is provided, and it only takes a few days to get into the habit of using the TouchCursor key combinations. TouchCursor is also a boon for use on laptops, which tend to have funky layouts for the navigation keys.

It even works inside Remote Desktop sessions and guest virtual machines (Virtual PC and VMware) without having to install it on the remote/guest systems!

Once you start using it, you’ll never want to use a computer where it isn’t installed, and TouchCursor can run from a USB drive, making it easy to take it wherever you go. If you want to become more efficient at the keyboard, TouchCursor will be a welcome addition to your system.

Vista adds some neat new behaviors for mouse users, but keyboard users seem to have taken a back seat. Just a few annoyances I noticed after using Vista for a few hours:

#1: Vista adds a new “message box on steroids” called the task dialog. It adds some sorely-needed features, but unfortunately, one handy Windows feature (common to message boxes and dialogs containing only buttons and labels) that it doesn’t implement is the capability to make a selection via a mnemonic letter without using the Alt key. For instance, the UAC dialogs are task dialogs and have choices like Allow or Continue, but you must press Alt+A or Alt+C to select those choices rather than A or C by itself.

#2: Too many tab stops to navigate panes in Windows Explorer (4 in XP vs. 8 in Vista), and the tab order is not intuitive (for instance, the list view precedes the column headers). Dedicated keys to jump directly to each pane are sorely needed.

#3: When launching an application from an Explorer view and a UAC prompt is displayed, when returning to the Explorer view, the keyboard focus is lost and you must tab 6 times to get focus back to the file list view.

#4: More steps to log off. Windows Vista: Windows, Right, Right, Right, L. Windows XP: Windows, L, Enter.

This week I spent some time installing my essential software applications under Windows Vista (RTM build). The results were not great. Out of about 35 applications that I depend on, 8 of them either would not install or run properly, with little prospect for them working any time soon (if ever in some cases):

Microsoft has long (at least since Windows 2000, which was released 7 years ago) recommended that users not run as administrators. But most users still do, partly because most computers are configured out-of-the-box with the user as an administrator, and partly because software vendors have not done a very good job of following Microsoft’s guidelines to allow their programs to run well for non-administrators. The primary offenses are writing to locations like Program Files and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE in the registry, both of which are read-only for regular users. Case in point: I just bought a game for my kids last week that won’t start if run from a regular user account on XP.

To address this issue, in Windows Vista by default (with UAC, or User Account Control, enabled), even administrators don’t actually run as administrators most of the time. For Vista-aware applications (and programs that Vista recognizes as application installers), when an operation that does require administrative privileges needs to be performed, an elevation prompt is displayed, which the user must confirm before continuing (of course you have to wonder if users will quickly tire of these prompts and mindlessly click Continue or disable them altogether, but it’s probably about the best Microsoft can do since users and developers refuse to change their habits).

Microsoft also built an entire virtualization layer into Vista to minimize problems with legacy apps (file and registry access to restricted areas is transparently redirected to user-specific locations). So even though Vista is more secure, it will actually be more compatible with poorly-behaved programs than Windows XP is. I haven’t tried yet, but with the game I mentioned earlier, a non-administrator will probably be able to run it in Vista. However, virtualization doesn’t solve every problem in legacy applications, so it’s still best to for developers to properly support running with least privilege (not the least of which is to work better on Windows 2000, XP and 2003).

Vista has released to manufacturing, and it will be in the hands of users soon (starting with MSDN subscribers within days, then businesses by the end of November, and consumers and new computers by January). For you slacker developers out there, it’s time to pay the piper and get your applications ready for Vista. A couple related blogs may also be of use.

My initial reaction to IE7 was positive, but it quickly soured. Then I happened upon a way to make IE7 look like IE6 by running %WINDIR%\IE7\iexplore.exe rather that %ProgramFiles%\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe.

Now that the final version of IE7 has been released, I decided to install it again to try out this technique, and sure enough, it does work. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a simple way to make the IE6 look the default one (for file, protocol, and shell associations). I tried both copying the files from %WINDIR%\IE7 to %ProgramFiles%\Internet Explorer and munging the relevant registry settings to point to %WINDIR%\IE7 instead, but neither of these worked properly.

I also discovered another annoyance with IE7: After closing all IE7 windows, the iexplore.exe process remains in memory and never goes away, and starting another IE7 instance results in another iexplore.exe process. This can quickly eat up a lot of memory, with the only way to resolve being to manually kill the extraneous processes.

So I uninstalled it again. Unfortunately, IE6 would no longer start (iexplore.exe was gone). I tried running the IE6 install and encountered the error “A previous installation has pending work requiring a reboot. You need to restart your computer to complete that installation before running Internet Explorer Setup. Setup will now close.” Rebooting (again) didn’t help. A search led me to a KB article to work around this problem. But after that, running the install resulted in “Setup has detected a newer version of Internet Explorer already installed on this system.” A fix described in another seemingly relevant KB article did not resolve the problem.

Fortunately, I still had IE6 installed another computer, and copying the files over from its Internet Explorer folder fixed the problem. I was also lucky to not run into other problems after uninstalling IE7.

I also played around with running IE7 standalone to test pages in IE7 without replacing IE6, but it wasn’t very stable.

I recently installed Windows Vista RC2 (Build 5744) on a secondary partition of my main computer. The installation was very smooth (whereas installing RC1 on my AMD Athlon 64 X2 with NVIDIA nForce RAID array was painful and LAN access was atrociously slow). Out of the box, it recognized all my hardware except the SoundBlaster X-Fi sound card, and their Beta drivers worked with RC2.

Boot time is about the same as Windows XP and performance feels similar as well. However, shutdown and restart don’t really work — Windows mostly shuts down but the PC remains powered on with a black screen (I have to hold the power button for several seconds to force the PC to turn off). My machine is less than one year old, so I would expect that to work.

Vista uses a new boot manager (Boot Configuration Database), which can be easily removed (if you know the magic incantation) via Bootsect.exe (available in the Boot folder on the Vista DVD) if you wish to completely uninstall Vista:

bootsect –NT52 All

Vista makes itself the default boot partition, but I’m not ready for that, and this is easily rectified via BCDEdit (accessible from a Command Prompt [running as administrator] in Vista):

bcdedit /default {ntldr}
bcdedit /set {ntldr} Description "Windows XP"

You can also edit the default partition and boot delay (but not the description) in Vista at Start - Computer - System properties - Advanced system settings - Startup and recovery - Settings.

Of course, the first thing you’ll notice about Vista is the completely revamped user interface, which has been discussed ad nauseum elsewhere. For the most part, I do like the new Aero Glass interface, although I’m suprised they don’t provide an option to retain the Windows XP Theme (just the Classic theme). And while pretty, it is a step back in at least one area: In Windows XP it’s easy to instantly tell which application is the active application (the entire caption and window border background is faded for non-active applications):

But on Vista with Aero Glass, the difference between the active window and others is much more subtle, making it very difficult to quickly identify the active window (the only obvious difference is the color of the close button):

The lack of a conspicuous focus/active window indicator really hampers productivity when switching between applications, especially on a multiple monitor system.

I tried to get IntelliType and IntelliPoint software running to utilize my mouse and keyboard to the fullest (I have Microsoft hardware — an IntelliMouse Optical USB and Natural Ergonomic 4000 keyboard — and both have only basic functionality in RC2). No luck — these are still in private beta, and the workaround I found did not work for me.

The next thing I’ll try is installing my essential software to see how it fares on Vista. While Vista is a significant update to Windows, the problems and shortcomings I’ve encountered so far have tempered my enthusiasm about its ability to replace XP for me any time soon. I’ll talk more about useability and new features in later posts.

Blogs (RSS feeds) are all the rage these days. I’ve found that while there is some good information to be gleaned from blogs, the signal-to-noise ratio tends to be quite low. And manually monitoring dozens of feeds quickly becomes very wearisome. RSS reader applications were invented to monitor your feeds for you, allowing you to quickly scan newly published articles. So I evaluated the available RSS readers to find something that could assist me with keeping up-to-date on blogs I’m interested in.

I looked at many online and Windows desktop solutions. Since I’m a keyboard freak, I expected that I would end up choosing a thick-client Windows program, but to my surprise I found Bloglines, an online feed reader, to be the best option.

Bloglines provides a simple, easy-to-use two-pane interface with a subscribed blogs list (categorized into folders) on the left and unread feeds on the right. Subscriptions can easily be imported or exported to OPML format, and subscribing to new feed is as simple as selecting a ‘Sub with Bloglines’ favorite in the browser.

Bloglines periodically checks each subscribed blog for new articles, and when viewing your My Feeds page, it highlights all blogs with new articles. All new articles for a subscription or folder are aggregated in the right pane for easy scanning or reading (from the keyboard via Spacebar). Pressing ’s’ marks all articles for the current subscription as read and advances to the next subscription with unread articles. Pressing ‘f’ does the same on a folder-by-folder basis. Pressing ‘m’ shows or hides the left pane.

This is very efficient, reducing the time I have to spend scanning newly published articles to just a few minutes once or twice a day. When I do come across an article that I’d like to archive for future reference, I can simply right-click the article link and choose ‘Send to Ultra Recall (copy)’ to store a copy of the article in Ultra Recall for safekeeping on my computer. If I’ve been offline for a while and don’t want to scan all articles that were published, all feeds can be marked as read with a single click.

FeedDemon is one of the better choices for Windows desktop readers, but ironically, I found that Bloglines provided much better keyboard accessibility (and the other Windows apps I looked at fared worse than FeedDemon in this category). Another advantage of an online reader is that a web server, not your computer, is responsible for monitoring and maintaining all the article updates and content. Only information that is important to you needs to be stored offline.