Launchy and Application References: Workaround

Launchy, the open source keystroke launcher, is a useful application when you have a lot of application installed. By pressing ALT+Spacebar (default setting), you get a little popup window. Just enter (beginning of) the name, Launcy shows it in the popup window, with the corresponding application icon: just press enter and your desired application will start. So far so good!

But one of the little problems we have is that we have an application installed which is installed with the publishing feature of Visual Studio. This means, this application is installed on your pc, but instead of placing a shortcut (.lnk), it places an application reference (.APPREF-MS). This extension is not recognized by Launchy, even if you add this extension (its actually not showing at all in Explorer with 'showing all extensions' on).

Here is a work around I found to be able to start my published applications using Launcy.
1. Open the application reference file in a text editor.
2. Verify the location that is pointed to, e.g.: file://192.168.23.xx/Software/publish/MyApp/MyApp.application#MyApp.application
3. Create a shortcut to this MyApp.application
4. If you wish, you can change the icon of the shortcut to the one you needed (I placed an icon into the same directory).
5. Now you are ready. This shortcut does the same thing as the application reference (well, as far as I can see now :))

Good luck.

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Placeholder message in input box with jQuery

I love working with jQuery. It's powerfull and relative easy to use. So I use it also for working with placeholder text inside a input textbox in HTML. So, when no text was entered, a default 'help' text/message is shown, like 'Click here to enter your firstname...'
In my case, I just wanted to have the text 'Zoeken...' (Dutch for Search...).
See the following flash demo:


To get this working, I used jQuery.
First of all, I set up the text box like this:

<input type="text" title="Zoeken..." name="search" value="Zoeken..." class="text" />

In the head section of the page, you need a reference to the jquery library:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://YourUrl/jquery.js"></script>

Just before the end of the head section place the following piece of javascript code and you are done:

$(document).ready(function() {
 function switchText()
 {
  if ($(this).val() == $(this).attr('title'))
   $(this).val('');
  else if ($.trim($(this).val()) == '')
   $(this).val($(this).attr('title'));
 }

 $('input[type=text][title != ""]').each(
  function()
  {
   if ($.trim($(this).val()) == '')
    $(this).val($(this).attr('title'));
  }
 ).focus(switchText).blur(switchText);
 
 $('form').submit(
  function()
  {
   $(this).find('input[type=text][title != ""]').each(
    function()
    {
     if ($(this).val() == $(this).attr('title'))
      $(this).val('');
    }
   );
  }
 );
});

Remember to put this inside a script tag.

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Speed up Outlook 2007

Are you also irritated about the bad performance of Outlook 2007? Read this out.
When you are using Outlook 2007 (this is the version I am talking about), you have the option to use cache mode (previous version 2003 also). This can be helpful when you are working on e.g. a laptop. With this feature you can have you e-mail messages off-line with you.
So caching is fine, but it really slow down your Outlook performance (even your entire laptop as it seems). Switching off the cache mode (restart your Outlook) dramatically improve your Outlook performance. The startup time is much less and also, which is really unbelievable, the search option is amazingly fast. You use the search and indexing stuff of Exchange (in our case Exchange 2007) which is really fast.
We actually don't really need the off-line functionality, because Outlook Web Access 2007 is also a really good application to work with. So, if we have somewhere internet access, we can use OWA 2007 instead.

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