Developer Blog

Screencasting seems to be becoming more and more popular lately among software developers, and for good reason. It's a great way to showcase your software to a potential user; for those who don't like text, a short little video showing the software in action is perfect.

So after trying a bunch of different screencasting apps, I found BB FlashBack Express (free) to be the best, in my opinion of course. There are plenty of other alternatives out there, too. Wikipedia has a long list of programs you can try out here.

Making the screencast didn't take as long as I expected... I was able to showcase all of IcyScreen's features in under 3 minutes. And the .SWF file that was produced by BB FlashBack is under 600KB. Cool!

You can check out the screencast here.

I recently had to upgrade to .NET 3.5 from version 2.0.

The download size was 60MB. That's huge -- and that's just the size of the upgrade. If I wanted to download the full version of .NET 3.5 the size would be nearly 200MB. Holy smokes!

After the download completed, the installation process took a little over 5 minutes... a relatively long period of time for a software installation.

I think that the .NET Framework is an excellent idea (though I think it'd be cooler if implemented as a natively-executing C/C++ library) and from what I hear and read it makes programming much easier for the developer, but why does it have to be so large, and why must the installation process take so long?

I think users still appreciate small downloads, fast installations, and quick application start times.

The past few days I've been dealing with access-control lists (ACLs) quite a bit. These things aren't the simplest in the world, so the Security tab that's available in the file Properties window (right click a file or folder and select Properties), really comes in handy. It provides access to Windows' built-in ACL viewer and editor, a tool that let's you see exactly what users and what groups are granted/denied access to any file or folder on your system, as well as a lot of other good stuff.

However, if you're using Windows XP Home Edition, this tab doesn't exist in the file Properties window unless you boot into Safe Mode. Anyone who's been in Safe Mode -- i.e, "bare-bones mode" -- knows that while it can be useful, it's definitely not a good environment to do your daily activities in, and who wants to reboot their system every time they want to look at or edit the ACL of a file or folder?

So after booting in and out of Safe Mode a few times, I finally Googled and found that you can "unhide" the Security tab in the file/directory Properties window by downloading and installing Microsoft's free Security Configuration Tool.

After you download, just extract the contents to the location of your choice, right click setup.inf and click Install, and once everything is complete, you should be good to go.

After a month of development, IcyScreen 3.00 was released yesterday.

There are so many changes and improvements in this release... there's no way we could've made the new version anything less than 3.00. You really have to check it out to see all of it's awesomeness. The changelog lists all of the improvements, but the jist of it is, IcyScreen gets:

• Support for taking a screenshot of just the active window.
• Greatly improved timestamp/format code support -- one improvement being you can now put a timestamp/format code anywhere in the screenshot file name and directory
• Improved global-setting file handling, to make managing settings for multiple users a lot easier
• Faster upload speeds, as well as improvements made to the e-mailing code
• Support for automatic setting-file reloading; if the setting file has been modified since it was last loaded, IcyScreen will reload it and use it automatically; this functionality can of course be disabled, but it makes central management a lot easier.

... plus a whole lot more. Download it, see for yourself, and let us know what you think.

Just to let everyone know, AutoScreen is now known as IcyScreen.

Not only does the new name look cooler (by the by, if you're wondering what the "Icy" is supposed to mean... think "I see") but it's also more unique and it'll make finding the program easier.

Of course, if you've already purchased AutoScreen you can still use IcyScreen. They're both exactly the same products right now, it's just that from now on we'll only be developing it under the IcyScreen name.