ASuite - application launcher

[El Salvador]

Wow, bummer about JTH. I follow PortableApps.com mostly for your posts and the post of one or two other persons. It is a shamed that a site that touts GPL licences all the time refuses "forks", "clones" and competition in general. Isn't this why the programs are GPL'ed? Oh well.

Hereafter ASuite's new menu will not be a PAM's fork.

My desktop is black if it helps to detect why the mouse sensors show up. ASuite 1.4 mouse sensor are truly invisible when I revert back to it.

Maybe it is a window's issue.

[Toxteth O'Grady]

Let me know what you think?

That looks really good.

El Salvador, after adding this theme to the MenuThemes folder and relaunching the program, there are no themes to choose from the menu.
I had to edit ASuite.xml manually.

Am I doing something wrong?

[El Salvador]

One folder one theme, so do you insert theme in a folder? If no, make a folder and put theme files in it.

[El Salvador]

Pls files don't launch my mp3 player, Apollo. This is probably because it does something wrong. The author of mp3utility had to adapt his program in order to make it launch Apollo.

It works on my computer.

For the other question, I launch ASuite. By default (my choosing), no window shows up. I open the new menu. I click on ASuite button to open the ASuite window. And the new ASuite menu remains open while the ASuite program window (which opens up) remains open.

One question, after you click on ASuite button (in default menu), do ASuite window activate or not?

P.S.: Sorry for double posts.

[uksamo]

Hi Guys,

Glad you approve of the new theme, and I feel extremely privileged that El Salvador's has chose it as the default theme. Hopefully it doesn't appear so much like PAM that we can start a new forum thread when v1.5 is released, the argument being that it's more like vista's type of start menu design than PAM, which of course is what both applications are based on.

As a slight perfectionist I noticed when producing the theme that the position and size of the divider.jpg object is a little off centre when compared with the scroll up and down arrow borders, I've positioned the white section so there's 2 columns of white pixels to the left and right of the arrow borders. This has meant that the divider.jpg needs 1 pixel adding to the right hand edge, and 2 pixels removing from the left. In the present state the divider leaves a small light coloured 1 pixel column from the under laying background showing through which I'd like to cover up. I've since noticed that the arrow within the scroll up and down borders isn't in the exact centre, so its possible that the divider has been aligned to the arrow and not the arrow borders?

Apologies if that's just confused anyone, I can illustrate with a zoomed in diagram of the pixel layout if needed, even just adding 1 extra pixel to the right edge of the divider object would solve this problem (at least in my theme). Let me know if this can be done and I'll output a replacement divider.jpg and process another zip file. Ideally it would be great and add a lot of flexibility if a theme xml file could be devised to position each of the forms objects, perhaps consider this as a future addition?

Also a small bug - If you change themes via the options button within the graphical menu you have to restart Asuite to see the change. If you change it from the Asuite menu it changes without a restart needed.

Many Thanks,
Richard

[Perindu]

elsavador thanks for ur great software i wonder if asuite can

1. start program when it start ( with delay )

2. stop program when it exit or crash?

[El Salvador]

1. start program when it start ( with delay )

With delay no, but you can change its order. Ex. you have these software in autorun startup: Firefox, Miranda and mIrc. You can change order in:
1 mIrc
2 Firefox
3 Miranda

2. stop program when it exit or crash?

No. You must create another software item with same exe path, but with parameter -exit or something like that (but this is possibile, if your program can exit using a special parameter).

I can illustrate with a zoomed in diagram of the pixel layout if needed

Can you?

If you change themes via the options button within the graphical menu you have to restart Asuite to see the change.

It's work on my computer.

[Fluffy]

I don't know what happened but I posted a long post on ASuite 1.5 beta on portableapps.com and the post disappeared.

John Haller deleted ASuite 1.5's topic because (from john's email):

I meant that the new look of the menu you introduced was a clone of the
PortableApps.com Menu. And, as forks and clones aren't allowed to be
self-promoted in the forums

That's pretty cute actually, considering the interface to his little feller is pretty much a clone of XP's Start Menu layout with a few additions. Cock. Anyways, glad to see a new version of ASuite out! I'll test it as soon as I'm done running around for the day. Would've done so sooner, but unfortunately there were some problems with my computer. And by problems I mean "I had every indication that my power supply had died but in fact it was a small quirk of my motherboard that means I just dropped 200 bucks on a new power supply for no good reason." Gotta love life. Will give feedback soon.

[EDIT] Absolutely wonderful - you get closer and closer to stealing me away from PStart with every release. Unfortunately I've grown extremely accustomed to using Launchy for my app-launching needs, so right now I'm looking into simple replacements for the Startup folder and something to handle hotkeys. However, until I find a suitably tiny replacement for those tasks, I'm leaning towards ASuite.

Quick question though: can you make it so that the menu is bindable to a keystroke instead of just pulling up the window? That menu is quite nice and I'd like to have my Winkey + 1 bring that up instead of the ASuite window.

[El Salvador]

That's pretty cute actually, considering the interface to his little feller is pretty much a clone of XP's Start Menu layout with a few additions

For me, between Xp and Vista (treeview). I make a list treeview similar to that of Vista menu and I never use Vista before the development of this menu.

Absolutely wonderful - you get closer and closer to stealing me away from PStart with every release.

Ok. Next version I will taken away from PStart once and for all.

can you make it so that the menu is bindable to a keystroke instead of just pulling up the window? That menu is quite nice and I'd like to have my Winkey + 1 bring that up instead of the ASuite window.

Yeah, I will add in stable version.

[USB_Kx]

A hotkey on the menu would be nice. Thanks El Salvador.



The surest way to remain poor is to be an honest man.
- French Proverb

[uksamo]

Hi El Salvador,

As promised here's a image detailing the divider location issue. As you can see the divider isn't centered relative to the scroll buttons with 8 pixels of divider image to the left of the button and only 4 pixels to the right. Could you possibly increase the divider width by at least 1 pixel to the right, or even increase it by 4 pixels so it's then equal on both sides?

I'll then re-process the divider image with the extra pixels which will then allow the divider to cover up the light coloured line that shows through from the background image?



Kindest Regards,
Richard

[Fluffy]

Hi El Salvador,

As promised here's a image detailing the divider location issue. As you can see the divider isn't centered relative to the scroll buttons with 8 pixels of divider image to the left of the button and only 4 pixels to the right. Could you possibly increase the divider width by at least 1 pixel to the right, or even increase it by 4 pixels so it's then equal on both sides?

I'll then re-process the divider image with the extra pixels which will then allow the divider to cover up the light coloured line that shows through from the background image?

Kindest Regards,
Richard

Damn, looks like I'm not the only one with OCD around here.

[El Salvador]

imgDivider (it is a TImage, a delphi visual component to show an image) is long up to 254 pixels. Your divider.jpg's width is only 252, so you can use more 2 pixels.

[uksamo]

imgDivider (it is a TImage, a delphi visual component to show an image) is long up to 254 pixels. Your divider.jpg's width is only 252, so you can use more 2 pixels.

I have to laugh! I didn't even try increasing the size to see if it would work

I've updated the theme (v1.1) and uploaded it to the same location as before (Download Here), apart from the divider modification I've also changed the 24x24 pixel A-Suite Icon and included an improved default "head" image (PersonalPicture.jpg) as shown in the picture below.

Could you possibly add an option to get rid of the white 1 pixel border surrounding the head, or even just get rid of the border completely? Also I assume the default head is built in to the executable, if no custom head has been selected perhaps allowing ASuite to use the themes head image would be good?

Here's how it should now look:



Possible Bug:

ASuite doesn't always seem to detect the themes, I've spent well over an hour trying to figure out why, even comparing one copy of Asuite with another and couldn't find the problem or a difference. What I did find was that moving the one of the themes out of the folder to somewhere else on the hard drive and then copying (not moving) it back resolved the problem every time. It's almost as if Delphi is looking for the folder in a different way to explorer and only detecting it's there if its changed on a system level! I even tried altering folder creation and modified dates to see if that helped and had no luck.

Let me know what you think?

Many Thanks,
Richard

[uksamo]

Damn, looks like I'm not the only one with OCD around here.

I have to admit I aim to be a bit of a perfectionist, the number of Photoshop layers I ended up with while creating this theme was enough to show a slight obsession, many were failed attempts! I think I must be catching OCD off the wife, you'd laugh if you watched how many time she checks the cookers off, the doors are locked, the windows are definitely shut... I could go on