Quick And Easy Software

I’ve started using Twitter. Follow my inane ramblings here.

Its been almost 5 months since I said it was my intention to release new beta versions of USB Disk Ejector “as often as I can”. Sorry about that everyone, but 1.2 beta 2 is finally here.

There has been a huge number of features added and bugs quashed so I’m looking for as much testing and feedback as possible. So far its only been very briefly tested by me on Vista 32 bit. Please, please let me know how this beta performs. I want to know about problems, bugs, quirks, or even if it all works perfectly. Contact me, post in the comments or add an item to the issues tracker. Please include as much information as possible, including your version of Windows and if possible, the steps to reproduce a bug.

Click ‘Read the rest of this entry’ for the list of new features and the download link.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve now created Google Code pages and uploaded the source for more of my programs:

Escape From Monkey Island Setup and Launcher

Curse of Monkey Island Setup and Launcher

Grim Fandango Setup and Launcher

Two things became clear during this process: one - I should have done this years ago, its a lot simpler than I thought, and two - I write some really bad code. Some of it was from 2002, a time when just getting a program to compile was my big achievement.

I’ve done my best to clean it up and in doing so I’ve moved all string constants into a separate unit - this should make it much easier for people to make translations. Anyone looking to update the installers can look at Hoanzl’s work for ideas.

As always, feel free to contact me if you have any queries. If anyone has any patches or changes they want to merge into any of the repositories, just let me know and I’ll either do it myself or add you as a project member.

Telltale Music Extractor has been updated.

A bug previously meant that all music from Strongbad season 1 was dumped incorrectly. It either didn’t play, or was missing the last few seconds. This has now been fixed and music from all games should now dump correctly.

Many thanks to Gary Kertopermono for spotting this bug and identifying the fix.

Download it here.

[Update] USB Disk Ejector Beta 2 has now been released, click here for more information.

I’m continuing to work on USB Disk Ejector when I get time. This post is just to let people know where I’m up to and keep you all informed.

I’ve added many fixes and features since the last beta, these include:

• Detecting card readers
• Allowing card media to be ejected without the USB device itself being ejected
• Better notifications for successful and unsuccessful removal
• Automatically closing explorer windows for the drive (helpful in Vista)
• Closing programs running from the drive (nicely or brute-force)
• Proper firewire support
• Window autosizing
• Window positioning fixes
• Miscellaneous other tweaks.

At the moment I’m fixing bugs and making sure that the new features all work correctly. Once that’s done I’ll release beta 2. My intention now is to release beta versions as often as I can. If I again find that I’m unable to work on the program for a long time, people will still be able to try the new features, without having to wait for a full stable version.

You can see a screenshot of the current build below, the icons are likely to change as I cant identify the author of the card reader icon to request permission to include it.

USB Disk Ejector 1.2 beta 2

As the observant among you may have noticed, I haven’t been releasing many updates to USB Disk Ejector recently. I am very busy at the moment and just haven’t had the time to work much on the app.

I’ve been thinking recently, of fully open sourcing the app and putting it on Sourceforge. However I’m not sure its worth the bother, its only worth doing if people would actively contribute to and work on the app.

Read the rest of this entry »

Telltale Music Extractor had a few bugs in the previous version. I’ve now fixed these and released Telltale Music Extractor 1.3.1.

Music from Sam and Max: Whats New Beelzebub now dumps correctly and a potential bug with some new format music files has been fixed.

[Update] USB Disk Ejector Beta 2 has now been released, click here for more information.

I’ve had very little time to work on USB Disk Ejector lately. I’m still continuing to work on it when I get chance, I am aware though, that its been a while since the last release. With that in mind I’m releasing a beta of the next version (1.2). Its not feature-complete and there are still unfinished bits but it should be usable until I am able to make a proper release.

Please remember that this is a beta version - not everything will work correctly. It will also only be posted here - not on the software page.

New in this version:

• Options dialog added - options can now be set and saved. Click on ‘more’ then ‘options’ to show it.
• Added options to:
  • Start the program minimized
  • Remember the last size of the program window
  • Remember the last position of the program window
  • Enable/disable balloon notifications
  • Close to the system tray
  • Minimize to the system tray
  • Enable/disable eject notifications
  • Use the standard windows eject notifications
  • Close the program after a successful ejection
  • Minimize the program after a successful ejection
  • Control the adding and management of hotkeys
• Hotkey support. Not yet fully implemented.
• Added popup menu to system tray icon.
• Added an ‘about’ form.
• Firewire devices can be ejected via the command line switches - I still need to add settings to enable/disable this in the GUI.
• Added ‘NOSAVE’ command line switch - when used the program will not save settings to a file and will ignore any existing settings file.

Download the beta version.

Read the readme.

Please report bugs in the comments, some (such as the incomplete hotkey support) are known, but there are bound to be others.

I’ve just released new versions of the Telltale Music Extractor and Telltale Speech Extractor. In both tools, support has been added for Sam and Max Season 2 and Strong Bad games.

The speech extractor has had a number of bugfixes: its decoding problems are now fixed, so all voices should sound just as they do ingame, annotations have been added for all games and the annotations for Sam and Max Season 1 and CSI: 3 Dimensions of Murder are now 100% complete. Many thanks to Aeon for completing the Sam and Max annotations.

[Edit - Telltale Music Extractor has been updated again to fix a problem with the music in Sam and Max: Whats New Beelzebub. Please download the new version if you are having problems]

Get them here:

Telltale Music Extractor

Telltale Speech Extractor

Hoanzl has taken the source for my Grim Fandango and Escape From Monkey Island installers and used them to make DVD installers for the games. This means that you can build your own Grim or EMI DVD and keep your originals in a safe place. You also get the benefits of my original installers (install under 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows, uses my launcher program).

Remember I did not create these, so do not contact me about any problems. You can post in the comments though and I’m sure he’ll address any problems you have.

You can get both installers here.

I’ve just released another update to the USB Disk Ejector. Its a minor update and fixes a bug introduced in the previous version. If a computer had a network drive that was inaccessible then the program would produce an error message and wouldn’t show any USB drives. Version 1.1.2 fixes this.

Many thanks to Michael Carman and Victor Rades for reporting and helping me fix this error.

Download it here.

I’ve released a small, interim update to the USB Disk Ejector. It fixes a bug where the /Showeject switch was ignored when combined with /Removethis.

In order to justify a new release I’ve also included two requested features. Firstly, proper Windows 2000 support. I know some people were disappointed that the old version didn’t work on Win2K - well now it does (for real this time). Secondly, displaying disk/volume labels. If you’ve given a disk a name it will now be displayed in bold and you can see an example of this in the screenshot below.

I still don’t know exactly when the next version of the program will be released. I don’t have much free time at the moment but I’m still slowly working on it. You can see a mind-map containing all the proposed features for the next version here.

As always, feel free to get in touch with me via my contact form if you have any problems or feature requests that aren’t on the mind-map.

Download it here.

[Update] It seems that some people have issues using the program when they have network drives that aren’t accessible. I think I’ve identified the problem and I’m just waiting for a few more people to test the fix. I’ll be releasing an updated/fixed version soon.

I’m now hosting some patches that allow Sam and Max Season 2 to run under Windows 2000.

Just to make it clear - I didnt make these patches, Maks Verver did. I am just hosting them on his behalf.

Also note that these are unofficial patches that are not authorized or supported by Telltale Games. If you encounter problems running one of the games on Windows 2000, you should reinstall the game on a supported operating system before contacting Telltale Games for technical support.

Get them here.

Wow. I wasn’t expecting that. Over the last few weeks, various big sites linked to the USB Disk Ejector. Many thousands of people have now downloaded the program and I am thrilled at the thought that one of my programs is in use by people all over the world.

Many thanks to those that have donated, I really appreciate it. You should all have had a thank you email, if you haven’t received one it may have been caught in your spam filter. Thanks also to those that commented or emailed me about the program. All feedback is useful and although I may not be able to implement every suggestion I will do my best to fulfil most requests.

A list of the ideas and proposed features for the new version can be found here. It was compiled from all the requests people sent me, along with a few ideas of my own. Work on the next version is happening slowly; unfortunately all the interest in the program coincided with a very busy period of my life. I have very little free time at the moment and this will be the case up until the end of April. After that I hope to be able to put in a lot more work on the program and get a new version released fairly quickly.

Until then, you can subscribe to my RSS feed here and please feel free to get in touch with me via my contact form if you have any problems or requests that aren’t featured on the list.

I’ve now uploaded the source code to all the programs released this week. I offer no guarantees on its quality, some of it is based on 5 year old code from when I was learning programming and a lot of it is ongoing development code, peppered with todo’s. Much of it shows a disregard for coding conventions and I haven’t yet found the time to refactor and clean it up. In short, your mileage may vary.

Download it here.

Quick and Easy week is now over, many thanks to those who’ve offered words of encouragement. Should you want to show your appreciation and support my work, you can do so via a paypal donation. The ugly paypal button on the right of the page will let you do this. I hope that people find the tools useful; as always people can contact me via the forums or my contact page if they have any problems or suggestions.