Well-behaved GUI software should make all functionality easily accessible from the keyboard. For Windows, most of this is covered by the Windows User Experience Guidelines. But there a some subtleties not covered there which many developers get wrong. And one that I see quite often is the improper display of context menus. Many [...]

Windows XP is a great operating system, possibly the best desktop OS ever. It looks great, is very stable, performs well, and rarely requires rebooting. And unlike earlier versions of Windows, it hardly ever needs to be repaved (format + reinstall). I’ve been running Windows XP SP2 as installed with my PC [...]

We’re excited to announce that you can now promote Ultra Recall (or any of our products) and earn 40% of every sale resulting from your promotion! It’s easy to join. Just send us an email with your request, and we’ll provide a URL with your affiliate ID that you can use on your web site, [...]

VC6 Our applications are written primarily in Visual C++. We started with Visual C 6.0 back in 1998 and used it successfully for many years. VC7 There was quite a bit of disappointment among C developers with the release of Visual Studio .NET (VC7) in 2002 and VS .NET 2003 (VC7.1) the following [...]

None of the popular launcher applications, nor Windows itself, do a very good job of integrating launching vs. activating an already-running application. LaunchAssist is a little utility I wrote to improve this situation. It works with most application launchers as well as the Windows Start Menu, Run dialog, Explorer, etc. To install, [...]

Several categories of Windows application launchers have evolved over the past several years. In this post, I’ll look at the best and most popular products in each category. I’m only going to mention products that are either quite stable or that have been updated recently. Auto-Config Products in this category typically provide a polished GUI, [...]

A few months back, I switched from Yahoo! Mail to Gmail for my personal email account, primarily because of its excellent keyboard accessibility. Yesterday, I encountered the first spam message to erroneously end up in my Inbox. Compare that with Yahoo! Mail, where I averaged a couple of uncaught spam nearly every day. [...]

The built-in Explorer application in Windows is rather wimpy, and every power user soon looks for a decent replacement. I looked at dozens of alternatives before settling on AB Commander, a dual-pane Explorer replacement. AB Commander’s dual-pane view suits me well, since I often need to deal with two folders at a time, but rarely [...]

A new sample has recently been added to Ultra Recall, called Journal.urd. While Ultra Recall can do much more than just managing a journal, it is very good at the task, which this sample highlights. The sample demonstrates using templates and other Ultra Recall features, and contains a pre-configured journal hierarchy. A [...]

Launching and switching between applications are two very common activities when using Windows. Keyboard aficionados will naturally seek to minimize the work involved in such common tasks. For launching applications, Windows provides the Start Menu (accessed from the keyboard via the Windows key or Ctrl+Esc), the Quick Launch toolbar (Win+Tab, Tab), desktop shortcuts [...]