It's not a bug, it's a feature

I often wonder about the perspective of the different parties in a given bug report.

In open source and free software
 
How bug testers think they write emails:
"I noticed something was wrong!  I'm helping."

How developers probably read these emails:
"You suck at software and should give up and become a florist.  You twit."

What the bug report actually says:
"It doesn't work ... it worked before and now it doesn't (doesn't say what "it" is)."

At a company where I was a bug tester

Me:
"Your program is shit and you should admit it and give me a medal."

What I imagine they thought:
"Oh look, my Reddit post is doing well!"

Portable Media Center?

This is old news now but Microsoft walked away from an advanced media hub and there are some potentially portable alternatives on the scene.

I've been meaning to test these for portability but I just don't have a setup where these tools make sense and nobody's really rallied for portable media center tools on PFW.  Although most media centers are on a dedicated box anyway, I can see a portable option being really useful if you want to stand up a quickie entertainment hub at a party or event.

Various flashdrive-related links (part 1)

I keep wanting to draw up some kind of link breakdown on all the great USB tools and tricks.  Since it just doesn't seem to be coming together, I'll just do an informal series on it here.

• HP USB Disk StorageFormat Tool - specifically it's ability to handle formatting drives with a FAT or FAT32 filesystem makes this a must-have. I've been meaning to add this to the official PFW database for quite some time.
• Assign a custom icon to your flash drive - since all drives looking alike makes finding them somewhat difficult.
• Write images to multiple USB drives - great for giving out lots of Linux or portable software flash drives
• USB Device info ... "lets you view a variety of technical details about connected USB devices, including vendor id and product id, serial number, device type and transfer speed. Also shows USB 2.0 or 3.0."

(Two of these were thanks to an old PFW post)

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See Part 2

Keyboard monitor tools

When doing software HOWTOs, it's hugely important to be able to show what keys are being pressed at any given time.  Especially when you're trying to show easy shortcuts to jump through a tedious process.

A great example of this function.

This may become it's own category eventually but for the time being, I wanted to list all the tools in this group:

• Carnac - so far my favorite, used in the example above
• QiPress
• NohBoard - not portable
• ShowOff - super simple, from the developer of PushMonitOff and many other great tools:
• KeyCastOW

Super simple map-making tools

Sometime back I went looking for a simple map-making program for drawing out a loose view of areas either for a home, apartment, or a Dungeons and Dragons campaign.  I'm not pursuing this track any longer but I spent enough ours looking around that I decided I'd list out some possibilities:

• RPG Boss (open source, might be portable)
• Tiled  
• Other RPG Creation software (wikipedia)

I had some success once upon a time with Paint.NET (not portable) zoomed in with the "Grid" settings enabled but not much more.

Related: a portable tool for real map management

Idea: Tagging program

I had an idea for a program that I'm still fleshing out.  The primary idea is a very simple entry screen where you can type out a simple note. 

The Tagging System

What happens is that I have a note pad program where I write down a few quick notes and I've developed a shorthand for how this works.  I put down a few keywords separated by semicolons like so:

Recipe: Bread: www.whateversite.com/bread

Todo: store: buy honey

Music: Coldharbour Sessions 012

I'd like to enter these into an entry window and then view in a separate catalog window.  This catalog window would be able to view by various tags, as a nested list, view in order of creation, search, etc.  I'm thinking entries (by default) would allow carriage returns, so I'd say you'd press "CTRL+Enter" to get it added to the database.  Others would just need one line, especially for really simple ideas and todolists.

Sub-Categories

Another optional feature would be double colons for sub categories. For example:

Blog: Funny (would represent both blog and funny)

Bird:: Hummingbird (Hummingbird as a subgroup of Bird)

 I'm not sure if anyone else needs this but it's been in my head for some time now.  I might write something more detailed including mockups and use cases if someone's interested.

Todo lists

Of course, some are just notes but if we could specifically call out todolist items somehow, that would be even better.  Perhaps a multi-line system like:

TODO: Grocery: Ketchup

TODO: Research carpet cleaner

I'd like to see some of the tags get treated differently

When you click on one tab, it should show you them as a list but the TODO list items should have checkbox marks next to them. Then, when you click the checkbox, it switches the TODO tag to DONE.

Multi-line duplicates

Perhaps a multi-line system would have a "copy above" tweak where you use a "+" symbol to just copy the first tag.  So for example:

TODO:: Grocery: Ketchup

++: Lettuce

++: Mayo