On how to make Blog Navigator store it’s data on a USB dongle or wherever you want it to be.

Originally posted on Wincustomize.com

I’ve seen some requests recently to make Blog Navigator run from a flash dongle or any mobile drives in our newsgroups lately. I was not quite comfortable with the inability to change the storage path by the user myself for a while, not to say that the data is stored in a wrong place, on the contrary, this default behavior does not change. But to make it confined to a Local Application Data folder was a bit too harsh. for my taste.

So, for Blog Navigator 1.2, I went ahead and made it totally customizable for the user to define where does he/she want to store the files. Currently there are 3 definable folders in Blog Navigator:

• <repositoryFolder> is the place that Blog Navigator stores its repository to it’s the file that contains all the knowledge and articles stored in your Blog Navigator
• <keepSafeFolder> is the folder that will be the default folder for keepsafed articles, unless the user defines differently globally in the Blog Navigator preferences or locally for a particular folder, and finally
• <temporaryFolder> this is pretty much where all the dynamically generated stuff goes, it’s the Blog Navigator working folder.

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Collect, Manage, and utilize the knowledge you’ve acquired with ease and grace.

Originally posted on Wincustomize.com

What we really intend to make for you with Blog Navigator is to create a robust and efficient way to manage all your on-line knowledge. You know how hard it is to actually find something useful on the Internet at times, right? That’s where our “Web Search Folders” come to help. You could already organize your knowledge into baskets, but we’ve decided that it’s not enough. While baskets were a great way of organizing your findings and keeping them for later reference, there were a couple of deficiencies of baskets.

To address that we’ve added two things to 1.2 version of Blog Navigator:

• you can easily put one basket into one another to make your knowledge more hierarchically organized, just like you can organize your Internet Explorer favorites.
• you can manage Internet Explorer favorites within Blog Navigator! (Firefox users, consult the final paragraph to learn how to import your bookmarks into Blog Navigator).

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Why can’t graphic applications get their channels right?

Originally posted on Wincustomize.com

[Updated 11 May 2005] Read at the end of the article.

I’ve been on a quest to improve a skin today and to do so I needed to extract a big archive in a proprietary and not widely supported format and get the images out of it and into the skin. Turned out the first part was not as bad as I expected as I’ve found some tools on the net to do this and Kris helped with the tool to convert the images in the proprietary format into TGA’s. Now here’s where the pain begun.

I needed to have my alpha channel kept in the files but I also wanted to process the files before making them into the skin.

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