Good news and bad news on the USB Disk Ejector front. The good news is that I’ve been preparing a new build in preparation for another beta release and (finally) a new stable build. The bad news is that due to a combination of stupidity and a wonky backup strategy I’ve lost most of the code I’ve written since October.

I fully release that its been a long time since the last beta and an even longer time since the last stable build. The problem has been my bad coding strategy, instead of using subversion properly I’ve been keeping changes local and instead of making incremental changes I’ve been coding in chunks shoving in lots of new features without fully testing them and then not doing any coding for a month or so. Consequently the code is a mess. On the positive side – I’ve added the mountpoint support that people asked for, however that broke a lot of the existing code that relied on drive letters and I’ve not fully fixed everything yet. I can only apologise to those who’ve been waiting for new builds – however I’m going to try and fix this.

Read more

I’m quite busy at the moment, however I’ve had this sitting on my hard drive for quite a while in a mostly finished state so I’m releasing it now as a beta version. The application was almost completely rewritten so a few features that were in the previous version aren’t yet in this.

New in this version:

• Support for all currently available Telltale games, up to TMI Episode 4
• Complete annotation support for all games.
• A lot of bug fixes.

There are a few issues with this version, mainly things that I haven’t had time to implement. A popup will inform you of these when you run the application.

As always with my Telltale-related applications you must have bought the games to use this.

Download it here.

Telltale Music Extractor has been updated.

It now supports all currently available Telltale games.

This version adds support for Tales of Monkey Island Episode 1, Wallace and Gromit Episodes 1-3 and Strongbad Episode 5.? It also fixes an issue with filenames when extracting; all saved music now has the correct filename rather than “trackxx” as was previously the case with the Strongbad games. See the readme for more information.

Many thanks to Luigi Auriemma for his work on the V7 ttarch format and his updated blowfish code. TMI support would not have been possible without his work.

[Edit] Version 1.4.1 has now been released, adding support for Wallace and Gromit Episode 4 – The Bogey Man.

Download it here.

This site is now over 7 years old and its once-snazzy design is getting a bit dated. Its probably about time this page displayed correctly in Internet Explorer too.

In short – I’m looking for a new design for this site.? I could do it myself, but the internet wouldn’t thank me when I produced a design that burned everyone’s eyes off. That means I’m looking for help.

I need someone willing to update my existing WordPress theme or even to discard it and produce a new design. I dont have many requirements – you’d have pretty much free reign to do what you liked.

Experience has taught me to be pessimistic with requests like this, but its worth a try. Help me out – you know you want to.

Contact me.

I’ve started using Twitter. Follow my inane ramblings here.

[Edit] Beta 4 is now released see here.

Its been almost 5 months since I said it was my intention to release new beta versions of USB Disk Ejector “as often as I can”. Sorry about that everyone, but 1.2 beta 2 is finally here.

There has been a huge number of features added and bugs quashed so I’m looking for as much testing and feedback as possible. So far its only been very briefly tested by me on Vista 32 bit. Please, please let me know how this beta performs. I want to know about problems, bugs, quirks, or even if it all works perfectly. Contact me, post in the comments or add an item to the issues tracker. Please include as much information as possible, including your version of Windows and if possible, the steps to reproduce a bug.

Click ‘Read the rest of this entry’ for the list of new features and the download link.

Read more

I’ve now created Google Code pages and uploaded the source for more of my programs:

Escape From Monkey Island Setup and Launcher

Curse of Monkey Island Setup and Launcher

Grim Fandango Setup and Launcher

Two things became clear during this process: one – I should have done this years ago, its a lot simpler than I thought, and two – I write some really bad code. Some of it was from 2002, a time when just getting a program to compile was my big achievement.

I’ve done my best to clean it up and in doing so I’ve moved all string constants into a separate unit – this should make it much easier for people to make translations. Anyone looking to update the installers can look at Hoanzl’s work for ideas.

As always, feel free to contact me if you have any queries. If anyone has any patches or changes they want to merge into any of the repositories, just let me know and I’ll either do it myself or add you as a project member.

Telltale Music Extractor has been updated.

A bug previously meant that all music from Strongbad season 1 was dumped incorrectly. It either didn’t play, or was missing the last few seconds. This has now been fixed and music from all games should now dump correctly.

Many thanks to Gary Kertopermono for spotting this bug and identifying the fix.

Download it here.

[Update] USB Disk Ejector Beta 2 has now been released, click here for more information.

I’m continuing to work on USB Disk Ejector when I get time. This post is just to let people know where I’m up to and keep you all informed.

I’ve added many fixes and features since the last beta, these include:

• Detecting card readers
• Allowing card media to be ejected without the USB device itself being ejected
• Better notifications for successful and unsuccessful removal
• Automatically closing explorer windows for the drive (helpful in Vista)
• Closing programs running from the drive (nicely or brute-force)
• Proper firewire support
• Window autosizing
• Window positioning fixes
• Miscellaneous other tweaks.

At the moment I’m fixing bugs and making sure that the new features all work correctly. Once that’s done I’ll release beta 2. My intention now is to release beta versions as often as I can. If I again find that I’m unable to work on the program for a long time, people will still be able to try the new features, without having to wait for a full stable version.

You can see a screenshot of the current build below, the icons are likely to change as I cant identify the author of the card reader icon to request permission to include it.

As the observant among you may have noticed, I haven’t been releasing many updates to USB Disk Ejector recently. I am very busy at the moment and just haven’t had the time to work much on the app.

I’ve been thinking recently, of fully open sourcing the app and putting it on Sourceforge. However I’m not sure its worth the bother, its only worth doing if people would actively contribute to and work on the app.

Read more