Dan Janosik

Dansposé 1.1 Installer Update

After a number of failed installations with Visual Studio’s built-in setup engine, I’ve taken a friend‘s advice and tried out the script-based, open-source software InnoSetup. It’s an easy-to-use program that let me quickly select all the options I wanted for the installer and spit out a setup executable that hasn’t had any of the old problems. InnoSetup also made it much simpler (checkbox option) to implement the “run-on-install” feature that I had to code by hand under VS’s setup engine.

You can get the slick new InnoSetup installer for Dansposé 1.1 right here.

Dan Janosik

Dansposé 1.1 Released

Dansposé version 1.1 is available for download from google code. This release includes a significant performance cleanup as well as a fix for the last major outstanding bug (minimized windows not animating correctly after being selected). Despite the small amount of time that the development took, this release has been in the works for the better part of a week. Since work has been extremely busy lately, I have had a hard time finding the motivation to come home and get this wrapped up.

Now that this release is done (which was important since I have been using Dansposé more and more), it is time to re-focus my attention to Firestorm and the tower-defense game that is in the early stages of development. Before development was halted due to motivation-drain from work, a key component of the engine and the associated interactive editor were completed, namely the file format used for Firestorm objects (which is now a zip-compressed set of files and an XML “manifest” to make sense of them).

Dan Janosik

Dansposé Rebranding, Google Code, and Other Thoughts

Dansposé Rebranding: After a fairly violent outcry from the Forefront community, the Forefront development team has decided to enact a rebranding initiative to move to the wildly popular application name “Dansposé”. To the community we proclaim “You have been heard!”.

Google Code: In other news, I have, at Alex‘s advice, begun to use “Google Code” to manage some of my software projects. Setup of projects was much more painless than I anticipated, and within minutes I was done with my first two, and had already used the Subversion hosting to checkout and commit from/to the code repositories. For anyone interested, my Google Code profile is at http://code.google.com/u/janoside/

Other Thoughts: More and more I find that I am migrating away from some of my firmly held beliefs about how I interact with my computers and information. As recently as a year ago, I would have considered my desktop computer tower my most important possession (as it contained the entirety of my meaningful “life’s work”). However, since beginning to use an external harddrive, I find that separating my information from the actual computing hardware is a very effective way to work; now I consider the external harddrive my most important possession and almost no important information resides (solely) within my desktop tower. Even more surprising to me is my eagerness to move my software projects to an entirely external storage such as Google Code. In some ways it troubles me that my very important information is entirely controlled by a third party (for data integrity and availability reasons, not privacy), but in this case the convenience of free hosting and universal access is irresistable. As a developer and poweruser who has always been attached to (and a strenuous advocate of) the traditional desktop computing environment, it is interesting to see how the emergence of various technologies and methodologies has influenced me. Before all is said and done it looks like Josh will have hit the nail right on the head in our arguments on the topic.

Dan Janosik

Release of Forefront

I’ve finished working on the first release of Forefront, my Windows Vista application switcher. I’ve been actively using Forefront for my frequent application switching and I find it quite powerful and easy to use. I hope to release Forefront as my first Sourceforge-hosted open-source project and will be investigating the steps necessary to do so in the next few days.