You’re a smart guy, figure it out!

Mike Grushin’s thoughts on everything tech-related and more…

Archive for May, 2009

UBitMenu: Classic Menu for Office 2007

Posted by mikeg on May 19, 2009

This looks very interesting/promising — though I am slowly getting used to the new ui/shortcuts. Available in multiple languages.

http://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/

UBitMenu is a simple way for professional Microsoft® Office users to get accustomed to the new ribbon based interface of Office 2007 without any performance loss. It will emulate / activate the Office 2003 menu in Word 2007, Excel 2007 and Powerpoint 2007.

If you have spent agonizing minutes trying to find features in Word, Excel or PowerPoint ribbons that would have been at your finger tips in Office 2003 you will soon appreciate UBitMenu, especially when you have to finish an important document under time pressure.

UBitMenu does not hide the ribbon interface, but adds the classic menu as a new ribbon. Gradually you will realize that many functions are easier to handle using Office 2007 ribbons. Microsoft® has done a good job there.

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Posted in Misc | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

BlackBerry JDE 4.2, ButtonField and disabling ContextMenu

Posted by mikeg on May 14, 2009

I’ve been playing around with BlackBerry JDE 4.2 for some time now and while using the simulator I would “click” on buttons using the Enter key. When I finally installed on the physical device I found that it is more intuitive to click on the button using the ball while moving around the screen. The problem is that by default it brings up a context menu which produces undesirable result:

image

Looking at API and doing a few google searches led me to implementing a subclass where I was planning to override either getContextMenu() or makeContextMenu(), but for some reason those methods were not being called. A few more random searches and turns out that you can pass ButtonField.CONSUME_CLICK and that will eliminate the undesirable display of the context menu.

Here is excerpt from API that fails to mention CONSUME_CLICK

ButtonField
public ButtonField(String label,
                   long style)Constructs a new ButtonField instance with provided label and style.
Provided a label string to show, and a style, this method builds a button field using your style.

Parameters:
label – Label string for the button.
style – Field style for the button: can be a combation of any generic field style, BARE, DrawStyle.ELLIPSIS, Field.FOCUSABLE and Field.NON_FOCUSABLE

Posted in BlackBerry, BlackBerry JDE | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

X1 — excellent tool/excellent support

Posted by mikeg on May 10, 2009

I’ve been a big fan of X1 (excellent email/desktop search) for a long time and have been introducing people to it. Not only it is an excellent product, when I ran into issues on Windows XP 64-bit (OS that is not officially supported), customer support went beyond my expectation to try to find the reason for my problems. Very impressed with their approach — I don’t know how big the company is, but it gives off an impression of a large corporation that mostly focuses on Enterprises with consumers being a small part. My experience have been very positive as a “consumer” and I will certainly continue recommending X1 to my “consumer friends” as well as my Enterprise customers.

Special thanks to Chris Wheaton who tracked and worked with me on the issue for over 2 months.

Overview of the issues I encountered:

I recently switched to XP 64-bit to take advantage of 4GB RAM (I tend to run many applications at the same time) and experienced a few issues with X1:

  • deskbar is not available (x1 said that it is a known issue on XP 64-bit)
  • I experienced intermittent crashes, which seemed to be related to standy/hibernate

Over the course of 2 months since I reported the issue to X1 there were a few Windows Updates and the issue with crashes seemed to almost go away. It is not completely gone, but is very infrequent. As I didn’t update X1 to the new version, I imagine Microsoft changed a few things that favorably affected X1 stability.

While I am pretty happy with 64-bit (waiting to use it for 6-12 months to make my final judgement), random applications (Ex: Skype, Pidgin) crash once in a while. Not enough to bother me too much, but also giving some indication that X1 crash problems might be more of OS issue than their code.

Posted in Utilities | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Cablevision/OptimumOnline charge $40 + installation fee for porting/transferring the phone number

Posted by mikeg on May 7, 2009

I recently signed up for TriplePlay and during account setup I had an option of porting the number or getting a new one. Porting a number meant a 2-3 week delay for getting an HD cablebox and because my new HDTV was already installed I decided to get a new number. I specifically asked if I can port my number later on and the response was positive and didn’t mention any fees.

I don’t use my home phone that much, but the new phone number we got is getting all kinds of crazy calls: from services trying to sell us something to people trying to reach previous owners of this number. I got fed up and decided to port my old number that didn’t have any of these problems.

Called up Optimum and they told me that there is a $40 fee to “buy the number from the other company” and $34.95 fee for a technician to come over and “install” my new number. When I pressed for details about what it means to “install” my new number the gave in and waved the installation charge, but were not willing to wave the $40 fee even though it wasn’t mentioned when I originally signed up.

I ported that number at least 3 times before without any charges. Pretty ridiculous. Interestingly enough there is not that much outrage on the web about this. This is one of the only links i found: http://text.dslreports.com/shownews/Cablevision-Charges-Excessive-Fee-For-Phone-Number-Transfers-91543

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »