For that reason, I have just released the first beta version of Control Runner 4 a week before expected.

What’s new on Control Runner 4

I have been posting the most important new features of Control Runner in three previous posts. Please take a look at them if you haven’t seen them already:

• Introduction
• New import options
• New program buttons options

Some pending Issues

1. The help file is not written and therefore the help buttons are not operative.
2. Most new planned options are being shown and saved on the Configuration dialog and the Program Button dialog, but some of them are not yet operative: button ‘hotkeys’, ‘use secondary monitor’ and ‘launch as administrator’.
3. Also, the new ‘Special targets’ button does nothing.
4. The new protection and locking options have not been implemented yet.
5. The icon management logic in the program button dialog should still be rewritten.
6. Some program options will not be available for all types of targets. These options will be disabled dynamically on the program button dialog.
7. Hints and tab orders of controls in the different dialogs may be wrong.
8. The "Zone Activation" mechanism is not implemented yet.
9. There should be some small glitches not yet discovered.

Apart from the above, the program is mostly stable. I have been using version 4 in all our XP computers for a couple of weeks and experienced no problems. Preliminary tests on Vista are also positive.

How to participate in the beta test

If you want to help us with the new version of Control Runner, I encourage you to participate in the beta test.

You will get a Free version valid for 90 days, and, if your contribution is significant you can get the new version for free, forever!

To participate in the beta test, please send us a message using our Contact form.

This version addresses two different issues:

1. Remove an error caused when entering very long values (greater than 255 characters).
2. Adds an option to ‘Process unchanged fields‘.

The history of a bug report

Last week we received a support message that informed us that FormsAssistant would cause an error if any of the values on a form was too long. That error would cause that the rest of the values were not processed.

As it turned out, the problem was caused by Word not accepting long strings (i.e. strings with more than 255 characters) as the parameter for the Find and Replace function.

This limitation also occurs when using find and replace manually.

The solution is simple, rather than using always find and replace, FormsAssistant first checks whether the entered value is a long value. If it isn’t, it uses the old method, otherwise it performs a manual (and potentially much slower) manual replace.

While implementing the new functionality, I realized that the ‘Process’ procedure used by FormsAssistant replaced all fields, even those that had not been changed.

Considering that this was a bag programming practice, and remembering my recent discussions about re-processing forms and optional fields, I decided to stop processing fields that had not been edited by the user.

Turning a bug into a feature

Anyone that has been involved in software development knows that users of our programs are usually more savvy that ourselves, and that they use our products in ways that we had not even thought of.

As it turns out, this was the case with the user that pointed out the string too long error.

He had noticed that FormsAssistant replaced fields with Comments when they were not filled in, and used that bad programming practice as a feature of the software. Therefore, he uses Comments to place default values on his forms. Brilliant!

For sheer luck, I had never noticed what was happening because we don’t usually use Comments on our own forms, and therefore had never noticed what would happen if a field with a comment was not edited.

In any event, on the new release with the new option added, we have the best of both worlds:

• Users that want to use Comments as a convenient way of having default values, should check the ‘Process unchanged fields’ option.
• Users that want to process a form multiple times, leaving unprocessed fields intact each time, should uncheck the option.

1. A sneak peek of the new version of Control Runner
2. New import features of Control Runner

On this post, I’ll concentrate on the new options added to what is the heart of Control Runner: the program buttons.

I have to say that all these new options have been asked for by users and that I want to thank them for giving me the ideas that make Control Runner a better product.

Better organization of the dialog

The program button dialog is now bigger, and gets two additional tabs:

(Click on the images above to get a better view)

Coloring buttons

Do you want a particular program button to be easily spotted. Now it will be easy using the ‘Color’ option.

Setting a custom color couldn’t be easier:

And the result is, of course, a nice colored button that stands out of the crowd:

Use your keyboard

Some people like to use a keyboard combination to open their most used programs. This has been possible since Windows 95, although the mechanism provided by Microsoft is less than convenient, involving creating a shortcut and assigning a hotkey to execute the shortcut.

Now, it will be possible to assign, in a similar way, a hotkey to launch any program, document, folder or link on your system (or the Internet).

Do you use a dual monitor system?

If you don’t, you should at least try.

Some programs remember the last position and state they had last time they were running and they revert to the same position and state they had, including the monitor in which they were shown. Some don’t.

As usual, Control Runner comes to the rescue. If you want to show a particular program in your secondary monitor, but the program seems unable to remember your preference, simply check the ‘Use Secondary monitor’ option.

Note: As with other similar features, the Secondary monitor option does not work with documents or links, i.e. items that are managed by other programs.

Programs working as a group

Do you have some programs you want to execute always as a group?

Up until now, you would place several program buttons and would click on them in turn to launch them together. Or, you could create a batch file and add that batch file to Control Runner.

But, who wants to remember how to create batch files these days?

The solution is to use the new ‘Multiple’ option on Control Runner. Simply enter many target in the multiple target list and have Control Runner launch them in the correct order, optionally pausing between them.

Run as Administrator?

Windows Vista surprised us with the UAC, that is giving us great times of joy.

Jokes apart, Windows finally has the concept of requiring elevated rights to execute certain programs that could potentially harm your system, and that is a nice and welcomed addition to the OS.

If you need a program to be launched with Administrative rights, check the ‘Run as Administrator’ option and have Vista take care of the nasty details.

Note: This feature is still not completely implemented and might be not present in the early releases of Control Runner 4.

Note: Of course, the ‘Run as Administrator’ option is only available on Windows Vista systems and only works with executable files (not documents, links, folders or virtual items).

Want to use a folder as the target of your buttons?

Some users are not aware that Control Runner happily accepts folders as targets for a program button. Unfortunately it was not possible to use the ‘browse’ button to select the folder. Therefore, you would have to either type in the folder name (ugly!), or drag and drop the folder from Explorer (better).

The new version adds a little button to browse for a folder as the target of a program button.

What’s next?

Next post will show the all-new Tools dialog. Stay tuned!

This version solves a problem that has been recently been brought to our attention; FormsAssistant would give an error if entering an empty string as the value of any field. The new version does not cause an error.

As usual, you can get the latest version on the download page.

Why would you like to use an empty string?

Even though this was an easy to spot bug on FormsAssistant, we never encountered this error. Why? Because our forms always require all fields to be filled in. When we include a field in one of our forms, the field is meant to be filled in with some relevant information.

But of course, your needs might be different. The user that has reported the error to us has given not one, but two different scenarios in which you might want to leave a field empty:

1. Optional fields: The most obvious case is when fields correspond to different options which might or might not be present in the final document. Consider for example a form used to construct an insurance contract. The insurance can cover many different items, but not all items will be covered in all cases. Hence, some “options” will not be filled in each particular contract.
2. Conditional fields: A field will only be used if another one has been already been used. Using the same insurance example, if the insurance includes some item, then there is an option that should be filled-in.

Using optional fields in FormsAssistant

The first case, optional fields, is perfectly covered with the current implementation of FormsAssistant. Simply leave empty the options that are not needed.

A template with options, therefore will include some fields like these:

• [Option 1]
• [Option 2]
• [Option 3]

Using conditional fields in FormsAssistant

The use of conditional fields is a different kind of animal. There is one field, [Condition] that should trigger a different set of fields depending on the value entered for the [Condition] field.

In its current implementation, FormsAssistant can manage the task, constructing the conditional part of the form template in the following manner (again using the insurance example):

[Condition]

[OptionA 1|Use if condition is "Car"][OptionB 1|Use if condition is "House"][OptionC 1|Use if condition is "Business"]

[OptionA 2|Use if condition is "Car"][OptionB 2|Use if condition is "House"][OptionC 2|Use if condition is "Business"]

I agree that this approach requires form templates harder to maintain and prone to errors when filling in the form. For that reason, I have added to the features list of FormsAssistant 2 a better treatment of conditional fields.

As the author of Control Runner, I am a little bit partial about it. What I mean is that I made it primarily to serve my needs, so I find it very convenient and easy to use.

Well, not really, there is something that I don’t like about Control Runner and that is the Import system. The current system to import shortcuts from the Start Menu simply doesn’t work.

But this is going to change in version 4, and I am going to show what are the new features I have implemented to make Importing your existing (and new) programs a breeze.

The old import dialog

This is how the current import dialog looks like:

There are two problems with this dialog. The first one is that, starting on Windows XP there are in fact two Start menus. One is the Start menu shared by all users of the computer (let’s call it the Common menu), the other contains just the items available for each individual user (that is, of course, the User menu).

Windows itself merges both menus when you open the Start menu, in such a way that you don’t usually know which items belong to each menu. And that is how it should be.

The other problem is that, the Import dialog displays items in a listview. That means that you have to open  each ‘folder’ to see its contents.

For these reasons, I don’t use anymore the Import dialog to import programs to Control Runner. Since most installation programs give the option to install a shortcut to the program on the Desktop, I use that shortcut to install the program on Control Runner.

The new import dialog

The new import dialog is shown below:

As you can see the ‘Common’ an ‘User’ button are missing. That is because on the new version both menus are merged together, as they should be.

Also, you’ll notice that the Start menu is shown using a Tree, which is the right way to show something with a tree structure like a menu system.

If you click on the image, you will see that I happen to have 683 items on 191 folders on my Start menu. If you are a little like me, then you’ll appreciate as I do the new filter items feature.

As you can see on the screen shot, filtering my Start menu with the words ‘Control Runner’ leaves only the items related to Control Runner on my Start menu.

The New items dialog

Importing existing items is made easy by the new Import dialog, but when you are a long time user of Control Runner you’ll have already setup all your applications correctly on Control Runner. What is needed is a quick way to setup the new items as you install new applications on your computer. For that reason, Control Runner 4 has a nice ‘New items’ dialog.

Whenever Control Runner detects that something has been added to your Start menu, a button will appear on the toolbar of the main window:

Clicking on that button will open the New Items dialog that is shown on the left.

As you see, this dialog only shows the Items just added to the start menu, in this case the icon for the great File Manager program, FileBoss.

Importing existing or new items to Control Runner has never been easier.

Keep tuned, next week I’ll present the new monitoring options of Control Runner.

In a series of posts starting with this one, I’d like to explain and discuss with our user base the ideas we have for the new version. We have always used input from existing users to enhance Control Runner, but this time we are going to do it in the open.

What is the problem with Control Runner?

In my opinion, the biggest problem of Control Runner is that the core is very old. There are some implementation details that were created more than 10 years ago for Windows 95. Over this core, I have added layers on top of layers, making the internal structure of the program too complex and prone to errors (solving an issue on layer 3 breaks layers 1 and 4).

The only solution is to rewrite from scratch the core of Control Runner. Users should not notice any difference, but the program will be easier to maintain and I will be able to implement many features that have been suggested by users.

In practical terms, I will be able to solve three pending issues that have caused most of the latest minor releases:

• Management of the icons used by program buttons.
• Loading the configuration files.
• Drag and drop operations.

What are the main enhancements of v4

New user interface

As can be seen on the following screen shots the interface of Control Runner will remain very similar:

At first sight, you’ll notice the following four differences:

• A toolbar has been added, containing the old utility button, some new buttons and an edit box.
• The monitor panel is changed.
• The general buttons have changed names, a new one (called Tools) has been added and the last one has a little arrow.
• The button with the logo of Control Runner disappears. Note that this only happens because the monitor panel is too big to show the logo. It will still be present on the new version with a more important role.

On the next posts in this series, I will be commenting in detail all these differences.

New program button options

Program buttons will include three new options:

• Select different colors for each button.
• Include hotkeys to launch programs when Control Runner is not on the foreground.
• Launch several programs with the same button.

Plug-ins

Control Runner will be modular. Some of its functionality is going to be implemented using plug-ins. I am creating a SDK for Control Runner which will make possible adding functionality through external plug-ins, without affecting the program itself.

Client/Server version

It will be possible to install Control Runner in a network so that a central Server application will control all  Clients installed on the network.

New security options

For public or restricted environments, Control Runner will be able to disable potentially dangerous operations such as the desktop icons, the Start menu, access to explorer, the control panel or the tasks manager.

We want to hear from you

If there is something about Control Runner you do not quite like or you have a need that is not covered, this is the time to influence the new version of Control Runner.

What’s new on this version

It seems that we are constantly tweaking the same things over and over. This time we have had to correct again the issues that have been addressed in previous minor versions, i.e. the loading of the configuration files and the CPU Load monitor.

But there are two new things:

• We have created a new way of testing if Control Runner is already running. It seems to work much better.
• We have completely rewritten the code to manage Program buttons. You won’t notice anything probably, but the new system is much faster (this should be apparent when you resize the main window). It will also enable enhancing the program buttons in the next Control Runner v4.

What’s the future of Control Runner

We had a plan in June. That plan involved working on the new version of Control Runner at the beginning of next year.

For various reasons that will be explained in detail in the following posts, we have changed our mind. And Control Runner v4 will be our next product released.

Keep posted. I’ll start revealing secrets very soon.

I say some support because, although PowerTOC will correctly create a Table of Contents using extended character sets, the title of the Table of Contents still does not support Unicode characters. The reason is that the edit control that is used to enter the Title of the Table of Contents does not yet support Unicode characters.

We are working on this issue which will be solved in the next few weeks.

PowerMerge

PowerMerge is in the pipeline. As its name implies it is an addin for PowerPoint that will make it possible to do “mail merges” inside PowerPoint.

We are pretty excited about this product because there isn’t any viable solution (at least that we know of) for such a mundane task as creating a bunch of presentations by replacing variables with the contents of a database.

I have been working on this add-in for some time now, and things are so far progressing quite nicely.

FormsAssistant 2.0

We are in the final design phase of the upcoming version of our flagship product. Development will start right after the release of PowerMerge.

After much consideration, we are planning to introduce four main enhancements:

1. Libraries of form models.
2. New field types.
3. Simplified field markup by moving field settings out of view.
4. A free form filler application to distribute forms to third parties.

Of course, in the future, the first three will be included in PowerForms. Unfortunately the fourth one will not be possible because it would require creating a new PowerPoint from scratch.

To really advance in the definition of the new version, it is vital that we receive feedback from our users.

PowerLinks

I have been playing with the idea of creating PowerLinks to automate the management of linked images, Excel tables and Excel charts inside PowerPoint presentations.

The add-in will serve two purposes:

• Ensure that only the representation of the tables and charts, but not the underlying data, is accessible from the presentation.
• Automate as much as possible the process of updating the presentations when the data changes.

Control Runner 4.0?

Control Runner is showing its age. I am aware of it.

I plan to start working on the design aspects of Control Runner 4.0 right after the release of FormsAssistant 2.0.

So, I guess that I am not going to be bored in the next couple of months.

With the release of PowerForms we will be able to start fulfilling our plans regarding our Office productivity add-ins line. I explain what is our current vision in the next post.

Meanwhile, enjoy our new product!