Universal Feature Wishlists (UFWs)

In my brief quest to find the ultimate blogging and photo sharing combination I found many excellent applications that either have a deal-breaking flaw or require some kludge of a workaround to fit them into a particular workflow. More often than not, my search for an elegant solution only turned up more people with the same unresolved issues. After several days of searching for perfection, I had a bit of a revelation - every piece of software and every web application does certain things well, and others not so well.

Obvious, perhaps, but it made me question why nobody has created a Universal Feature Wishlist (UFW) - some kind of categorized, wiki-style poll database where anyone can add new ideas for functionality, vote for existing ones or give kudos to those that have implemented something brilliantly.

For example, I think that online photo albums like Picasa Web Albums should have a template system to personalize their look, and to allow for the kind of scripting required by Google Analytics. I also think that the template and layout interface used on Blogger is excellent - it allows for easy point-and-click editing as well as direct modification of the HTML code. Marrying the two would be brilliant!

I suppose I could send the vendor a feature request, but the likelihood of getting it implemented is probably pretty low. However, I suspect if there was an established UFW, your chances would increase dramatically since the competition would likely be working on the same thing too. Vendors would start competing over the quality of the features, rather than the quantity, and we would eventually end up with fewer bugs and faster code. And, if open source developers and hobbyists had access to this kind of information, we would probably see a lot more of those rare applications that make you think "Wow, this is exactly what I was looking for!"

Fantastic. Now that I've solved all the world's software problems I just need to find a UFW to determine the features that will be included in the first UFW...

TrayMonitor v1.1.0

TrayMonitor is a small VB.NET utility that provides a quick overview of performance counters from the system tray.

Each running instance displays a small bar graph corresponding to a performance counter that you select. The results are averaged over a configurable number of samples to provide a smoother animation. Update frequency, colors and maximum values are configurable, and the settings can be saved and loaded from simple, editable configuration files.

By associating the file extension (TMC) with the executable you can quickly start your favorite counters with a double-click, or even add them to your Startup folder so they are running each time you log on.

This project was a bit of a learning exercise for me, and a lot of the code has been borrowed/modified from the ConfigOpt and NotifyIconChart articles at http://www.codeproject.com/ and other places on the w3

You can download the file here, or if you would like a copy of the source code, please send me a quick email.