Some time ago excel stopped opening files when you double click on them on my mother’s computer. The first thing I did was check the file accusations but they looked fine, Google was no help because there are too many sites about Excel. Good thing I read Raymond Chen’s blog The Old New Thing and I remembered seeing something about this a long time ago, the full detail and explanation are here. This can happen in any version of Excel including 2007 and 2010, the instructions in the post are the same only now the options dialog...

I'm now working on re-launching Squirrel Clock - my employee attendance clock. The first beta of Squirrel Clock didn't go so well - so I've decided to take it off-line and really fix it before releasing it again. The main part of Squirrel Clock - the interface used to clock in and out is nice and solid but all the supporting pages like the signup process and employee management weren't so good. So, I'm now going over each and every page of Squirrel Clock and I'm fixing all the mistakes I've made with the first version. ...

Dropbox at it’s core is a very simple concept – you define a folder on your computer (usually called “My Dropbox”) and the content of this folder is automatically synchronized with the drop box server (for easy backup) and with a similar folder on you other computers (for truly amazing effortless file transfer), they also have apps for the major mobile phones that let you access your data on the go. What makes Dropbox so amazing is how effortless everything is, you drag a PDF document into you dropbox folder and you can immediately read it on your iPhone,...

NDepend is a tool that can read .net assemblies and calculate all sort of code matrices from them – and it’s an absolutely amazing tool. The amount of information you can get from it is overwhelming, there are 82 built in code metrics (according to the web site, I didn’t count) and least 4 major kinds of visualizations and an SQL-like language you can use to query arbitrary details about your code. Now, I have to warn you, this tool has a pretty steep learning curve, it is downright intimidating (did I mention an SQL-like language to query your code?) but this...

I’m working on writing the first issue of the yaTimer Newsletter – a monthly short e-mail newsletter about productivity, time management and a little bit about yaTimer. I’m trying to write this newsletter to be compatible with the GTD “two minutes rule” (if something takes less than two minutes just do it immediately) – that means I’m trying to write a newsletter you’ll be able to read in under two minutes and still get real value from. If you have any opinion about what should go into the newsletter – or you have any productivity related story you...

yaTimer version 2.6.2 is now available, this version fixes a bug that can cause yaTimer to hang when running on Windows 7, Windows XP Media Center and maybe other Windows versions, especially when using custom themes. This is a free upgrade to all customers, download the upgrade here. It took me a long time to find this bug because it doesn’t happen on my exact Windows 7 configuration (and I don’t have XP Media Center), so please, if you find a bug in yaTimer don’t assume I already know about it, just send me a message and I’ll...

A few days ago (yes, this feature has already been live on the server for a few days) I uploaded the version of yaTimer Central that includes generating printable PDF reports for the entire team from the web. yaTimer Central now has all the reports yaTimer has with additions for multi-person reports (usually the name of the person that performed the task) where applicable. I’m now working on the customize reports feature – because I know you don’t want to send timesheets with the yaTimer logo to your customers, soon yaTimer Central will have all the same report...

Speed dial controls are cool, especially if they are done right with animated dial and everything - that is why those controls are relatively popular in commercial 3rd part control packs. Speed dial controls also take a lot of screen space to show very little information, that makes them appropriate for only a tiny number of real world cases – but they are cool, so we’ll write one. WPF has a very powerful concept called “lookless controls” – the look and feel of the control is separate from the logic of the control – and...

I use FastSpring for order processing, when you buy a yaTimer license you are actually buying it from FastSpring, they do all the credit card processing, handle taxes, send you the e-mail with activation code and take care of all the tiny details that needs to be taken care of when selling stuff on-line, once a month* the money just appears in my bank account. There are many other companies that have similar offering but what makes FastSpring unique is their customer support, you send them an e-mail anytime and you always get a quick response from someone that...

yaTimer Central development is continuing at an amazing pace and the data export for multiple users feature is already live on the server. Next feature on the list – printable reports.