Like always, you can grab the latest version from the application information page or download it directly by clicking this link.

Also released about the same time was a new version of Zune Playlist Editor. It now supports command-line parameters so that you can call it from a batch script, as well as basic support for batch scripting built in. Please feel free to download it from the application details page or directly from this post.

As always, you can get the latest version by visiting the application information page or via directly downloading Remote Manager.

Today I am releasing an updated version of Pandora Desktop. It doesn’t have any feature changes, but it does now work on 64-bit versions of Windows. 64-bit versions of Windows ship with both a 32-bit version and 64-bit version of Internet Explorer. The 64-bit version is basically useless though, as there are very few plugins available on the internet that support 64-bit browsers. Flash player is not one of them, and that’s where the problem occurred. In order for Pandora Desktop to function, it needs the Flash plugin working properly, and by default, .NET applications that use the Internet Explorer control run in true 64-bit mode. There is a way to compile .NET applications to target a specific platform, i.e. x86 or x64, but you need to be running a full version of Visual Studio. Since I don’t make any money from my applications, I write everything in the free Visual Studio Express, which doesn’t allow you to target a specific platform. Alas, there was a solution, and a fairly easy solution at that, and I was able to implement the solution to release a 64-bit version of Pandora Desktop. I am already getting into too many technical details for this blog post, but if you want to know more, feel free to post a comment and I will post more details there.

As always, you can download Pandora Desktop from the application details page, or click here for a direct download. Have fun rocking out!

Update: I have discovered that the latest version fails to launch after updating. A file is missing from the installer called settings.txt which needs to be placed in the same directory as the application, usually C:\Program Files\Pandora Desktop. The file can be blank and the application will start properly, but until that file exists, it crashes at start up. There will be a fix posted to the site later today (2011-01-28), but if you want to get the application working immediately, just right click in the Pandora Desktop folder and create a new Text Document and name it settings.txt. Sorry for the inconvenience this problem has caused.

Update 2: The new installer includes the proper file and should work fine now. You can either reinstall over the top of the previous version, or uninstall and reinstall the latest version.

PS: I now have Windows 7, so I will be working on updating all my applications to work properly under Windows 7, including all the security changes that currently require most of my apps to run in Administrator mode.

I have uploaded a new application called WOLSend. It’s a very basic command-line only program that allows you to send the “magic” packets on a local area network to wake up specific computers. To add to the program, I have for the first time for any of my applications, released the source code for the application into the public domain. It is a very simple amount of code, and it’s my first step towards being more open with my free applications. Feel free to download the source and compile it yourself. All you need to do is create a new command line project in Visual C# (I used 2008, but it will probably compile in 2005+) and remove the Program.cs file, replacing it with WOLSend.cs. It may or may not compile using Mono in a Linux environment, but I have not tested it at this time.

You can see more details about WOLSend by visiting the application details page.

I have recently noticed that a significant amount of TrueIP users have set their update time to an unrealistically low value, which is causing servers to slow for others. I would like to request a few changes be made if possible. Firstly, while I originally included an update page on the futurec.net domain, it is not longer available. There have been hundreds of thousands of requests to this page that no longer exists which are needing to be redirected to something like myip.dnsomatic.com. Recently, there have been firewall rules being put in place on the server to drop all connections from repeat requests from the same IP address. If you still have the www.futurec.net/trueip.php source setup as your primary IP, please change it to myip.dnsomatic.com, which provides the same service. Secondly, please increase the amount of time between refreshes if you are using a high speed connection like DSL or cable. Your IP address most likely doesn’t change more than every 15 minutes. If you are on a very flaky dial-up connection, then it probably doesn’t matter too much if you are requesting it every few minutes, since some of the requests would fail anyway.

With these changes I think that people will have a better experience with TrueIP and the server admins will have an easier time with connections to their servers.

Thanks

Glass Button Maker Main Interface Screenshot

It is a very simple application that requires little input to generate the desired results. It then allows you export the image as a full image for static buttons or as a simple CSS tile-able graphic that saves on bandwidth and disk space. The buttons on the main page of the HazteK Software site were made using the same technique that is applied within the application, along with some extra CSS to make them look like they are floating over the header. I hope this application will save other people time, or at least give them a starting point for making graphics that seem to be so popular these days.

As always, you can read more about Glass Button Maker through its application page or download it directly from this post.

It is very basic in what it does, but it works great. It works exactly as if you had the pandora.com website open in your browser. It sits quietly in your system tray and plays back your music. Other than that, it doesn’t do much. It won’t show you what song is playing in a tool tip or anything like that, as there is no API for Pandora. You can view that information in the main window though. If you feel that you would like to try it out, feel free to download it and check it out. As usual, you can download it from the application’s information page or directly from this post. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know by posting them to this entry.

Enjoy.

FileGen Free is an application that helps you quickly generate large amounts of files for testing. It was designed to help debug applications that run into issues on large amount of file system based databases such as StorURL. After seeing a cool application that generated tons of data for SQL databases at work, I got the idea to build this application for testing. It has helped me debug some problems with large amounts of Favorites databases, since I don’t personally keep thousands of favorites in StorURL, I memorize most of my favorite websites.

As always with my free applications, you can download it from the information page or you can get it directly from this post. Note that this is an initial release. If you find any problems, please let me know and I will try to fix them as soon as I possibly can.