Parks Computing » utilities

Update on Ripsaw

Paul Parks — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 18:39:00 +0000

A while back I started an article series on a utility named Ripsaw. I have since gotten pretty busy with other projects, and the only extracurricular thing I’ve worked on in the meantime is the lesson series on how to play “Spanish Fly”. I was also waiting for Visual Studio 2010 to hit release, but I haven’t moved up to Professional yet, so I may actually drop the whole project back down to VS 2008 when I start it up again.

On top of all that, Blogger is yanking the rug out from under me with some changes to how it updates certain sites, and I want to get that resolved before I add any significant new content. I just wanted to let everyone know that the project isn’t dead; in fact, there have been several times over the last few weeks when I’ve needed a utility like Ripsaw, so this is definitely going to get done eventually.

A New Article Series: Ripsaw

Paul Parks — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:43:00 +0000

Several years ago I wrote a Windows application called “Ripsaw” that implemented the basic functionality of the Unix tail utility in a graphical application, with a few twists of my own. I had intended to release the application as an open-source project, and although I still use the tool quite a bit I never got around to giving it the necessary polish for a public release. I’ve only shared it with a few friends and co-workers.

I’ve just downloaded Beta 2 of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, and I’ve decided to create a new version of Ripsaw from the ground up so that I can become familiar with the new IDE and compiler. Besides being a chance to finally get Ripsaw right, this will also be an opportunity to create a series of articles on how I develop a complete application, from the first ideas through design, implementation, testing, and release. I’ll walk you through all of the design decisions and trade-offs, the problems I run into along the way, and the development methodologies I use.

I would really appreciate your feedback, ideas, suggestions, and criticisms. This is going to be fun!

Windows Drag Sensitivity Utility

Paul Parks — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:10:00 +0000

Inspired by an article by Raymond Chen about how to correctly change the Windows mouse drag sensitivity, I wrote a quick utility called dragsens. It’s a small command-line utility that will allow you to change the number of pixels the mouse has to travel before a drag operation is initiated. Just download and unzip the utility, then run it at the command line, supplying a single parameter that is the number of pixels for the mouse to travel.

If you’d like modify the utility, or examine its source, you may download the Visual Studio 2008 project. If you just want the utility itself, you may download a ZIP of the executable.

About the Utility

The utility is actually very simple. It accepts a single parameter, which is the number of pixels the mouse must travel with a button depressed before the motion registers as a drag action. Rather than separate out the width and height, I just set both to the same number since this is generally all that’s necessary.

BOOL success = FALSE;

success = SystemParametersInfo(SPI_SETDRAGWIDTH, numPixels, NULL, SPIF_UPDATEINIFILE | SPIF_SENDCHANGE);

if (!success)
{
  DWORD error = GetLastError();
  std::wcout < < L"Error " << std::hex << error << std::dec << " while setting drag width." << std::endl;
  return 1;
}

success = SystemParametersInfo(SPI_SETDRAGHEIGHT, numPixels, NULL, SPIF_UPDATEINIFILE | SPIF_SENDCHANGE);

if (!success)
{
  DWORD error = GetLastError();
  std::wcout << L"Error " << std::hex << error << std::dec << " while setting drag height." << std::endl;
  return 1;
}

It would be fairly simple to modify the application to set the width and height independently, if you so desired.

Update

I’m already at version 1.1. I decided to add a version resource and support for a “/?” parameter.