Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Simple Document Viewer: A Help Utility for My Projects

Considering I’m starting a large toolkit of tools for computer users, I’d figure I’d start by posting about my newest complete utility: a Simple Document Viewer designed to view online help for the rest of my toolkit in a fast and efficient manner. It renders pages in basic HTML, sadly CSS is not supported. I was going to add the Firefox renderer in, but that’s too large for my purposes here.

Here’s a screen capture:

screenie2

As you can probably see, its GUI is more sophisticated and involved than that of my simple File Incinerator tool. It consists of the standard back and forward navigation buttons, as well as an HTTP address bar. This address bar, however, is most likely going to be removed and replaced with a label showing the current address. The drop-down options dialog box is used to view the About text as well as choose the application of which help will be displayed.

Any comments on how the GUI looks will be much appreciated and welcome in the comments form below.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Mint Linux: The Open-Source Future!

I just downloaded Linux Mint, one of around 300 active Linux distributions, onto a Live CD which I can boot from. I played with it, and really love it. I think that Linux is a fine and dandy OS. The first time I used it, I went like lightning. It did go a bit slower the second time, because I tried to download a bunch of stuff from the built-in package manager, even though it was running on a DVD.

I had to plug it directly into my Internet, and when I did, bang! Firefox was the fastest I’ve ever seen it. On my first run-through, I also played music directly from my Windows drive, which was great.

I’ll post screenshots in the future. You can download Linux Mint at http://linuxmint.com/.