I have finally uploaded Control Runner v4.0. Although the program has been finished for at least two months now, several issues (not related to Control Runner per se) have prevented me from releasing it earlier.

For that reason, I want to apologize to all my users that have been contacting me lately wanting to know what was happening.

I have to say that I have been using fairly stable 4.0 versions since the start of the year, so I have almost forgotten how was Control Runner 3.4, but for those of you that have not participated in the beta test, I am sure you are going to love the new version.

How to upgrade

I have decided to provide a free upgrade to all users that purchased the product after 1/1/2008 since I originally planned to release version 4 at the beginning of this year.

Users that purchased Control Runner before that date will have a 60% discount

In the next few days, the new customer portal will be live. This will be the preferred way to get the free upgrade keys or the link to the special upgrade price. Meanwhile, please Contact me to get instructions.

Again, thank you very much for your patience.

The second build of Control Runner v4 Beta has just been released!

Registered beta testers should have received a notification email with the download link. If you have not yet registered as a beta tester, you can use our Contact form to notify us your interest in becoming a tester.

What’s new on this Build

This build does not add many features to the previous one. The main reason for releasing it is that some of our testers have reported that the previous beta expired on their systems. Therefore I have reset the trial period on this build, therefore granting another full 90 days to test the program.

1. The Active Zone feature has been implemented.
2. The monitor panel uses a default font (Tahoma).
3. Memory monitoring now accepts systems with more than 2 Gb of memory installed.
4. Most of the third party components used have been updated to their latest version. That should improve performance, but might introduce some problems.
5. The hint system has been changed.

That’s all for now. Thank you very much for all your comments!

This should be the first time in my life that I have completed a programming tasks in less time than what I had originally anticipated!

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 is the third post in the series presenting the new Control Runner. The previous posts are:

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 is the second post of the Control Runner 4 Sneak Peek series.

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.

As I told on a previous post, we have finally decided to work on Control Runner 4. Truth is that Control Runner is showing its age in many aspects of the program.

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.

Today we have released what will most probably be (if we don’t discover any minor issue) the last Control Runner v3 version.

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 have always been curious about what features of Control Runner our users are really using. I guess each user only uses a subset of the available features (I personally don’t use them all!) because some of them are not useful for his personal needs, but mostly because the user does not know what features are available, or what are they for.

For that reason I plan to present some not so obvious ways of using Control Runner to increase your everyday productivity. I will present them in no particular order. In fact, my intention is to not even plan the series. I am so accustomed to Control Runner after nearly 15 years, that I am using it all the time without even noticing it. So, what I am going to do is to just go ahead and publish a post whenever I notice that I am using Control Runner to help me in my everyday work.

The feature of today is …

Make any window topmost

Today I have been working on our automatic registration system. This is a complex system that involves a PHP script that calls an executable maintained on our web server to generate automatically the registration keys for our products. The PHP script is called by our e-commerce partner when a client purchases a license for any of our products.

Since we are going to release a new product real soon now, I have had to change the key generation system in order to accommodate the new product.

It didn’t work. At all.

So, I had to do some tests using my local PHP Editor and a browser window. The routine goes as follows; you change a line in the editor, upload to the server (using the editor), turn to the browser, refresh the browser, notice what error is giving this time, return to the editor to try another thing … you get the idea.

When you are faced with a situation like this, it really makes sense to have both windows visible at the same time. Fortunately Windows makes it easy to have two (or more) windows tiled as shown on the following screenshot.

Figure 1 - Using tiled windows

This solution is better than having to switch from one of the windows to the other using ALT+TAB (and much better than using the taskbar icons).

But you can notice that I don’t really need to use the whole width of my screen for the browser, and that all the toolbars it has are really taking too much of my screen real estate.

What I do in these cases is shown on the next screenshot:

Figure 2 - Using a topmost window

I resize one of the windows (let’s call it the secondary window) to the smallest size that makes it easy for me to work with it. And I place it wherever it does less harm (note how I am taking advantage of the white space that exists in my PHP script). When I have it positioned, I press the following key combination: CTRL + ALT + T. That makes the secondary window a topmost window.

What is a topmost window? As it name suggests it is a window that is placed on top of all other windows, including the current window (the one that has input focus). This way I can see the main window and the secondary window at the same time.

You didn’t know of this keyboard combination, did you? Well, it doesn’t work unless you have Control Runner running on your system.

You don’t like the combination? Maybe it has too many keys. Don’t worry, you can change it.

Of course, when you have finished working, you can revert the secondary window to a normal window by hitting again the same key combination.

Do you have a favorite feature?

Please let me know it. I’d love to know how are you using Control Runner.

About monaSoftware

I guess that the creation of this blog comes just in time. I have been finally able to catch one of the more elusive bugs I have suffered as a developer and I’d like to take the opportunity to tell a little story about how did I catch this bug.

The purpose of this blog is primarily to supplement the information contained in the web site of my software company MomSoft. Not just informing of new releases and explaining obscure, or at least unusual, ways of using the software, but commenting in computing in general (usually Windows related, but not necessarily)

The bug. A succinct description

For these of you that don’t know it, Control Runner is our most beloved product. It was our first product (it was called MomShell at these times) and we have been selling and enhancing it for more than nearly 15 years now.

Control Runner, being so mature as it is, works very nicely. There are just a couple of glitches that we have not yet been able to solve, mostly related to the handling of icons of the targets of the program buttons. This problem requires a complete change on how are icons managed, so it will have to wait until we release version 4 in a few months.

But, from time to time we were reported a bug that caused the configuration of Control Runner to be lost. Some months we received one of these reports, some months we received none.

Now, this is a very serious problem. A typical Control Runner user has many many items configured on Control Runner. At the latest count I have nearly 200 of them on the development computer (much less on my normal working computers). Reconfiguring Control Runner from scratch is, to say the less, a pain.

For any one familiar with programming the worst case of bug is the irreproducible bug. This is bug that seems to be alive and not related to your one code. It happens, apparently, when the bug so wishes as opposed to when the program flow reaches an statement that has an error, or when the algorithm you are using reaches the point where it is wrong. For the software developer bug hunting usually involves setting up the exact same conditions that cause the bug to appear and use a magnifying lens (also known as a debugger) to see what is happening.

This was not the case. Our users were unable to describe what conditions caused the configuration to be lost. No error message, no computer hangs before. Nothing. Nada.

So, I had to figure it out.

The history of a frustration

I made an assumption. For me it was clear that the problem was that, somehow, Control Runner was not saving the configuration files correctly. Therefore they would become corrupt and the next time the computer started Control Runner would encounter an error and would restart with a default configuration.

I examined the code used to save the configuration and tried several tricks to try to catch this elusive bug. But nothing worked. It looked as if, after all, Control Runner was able to save the configuration files without problems (which is true). But I knew better. I knew that there had to be a problem because the configuration files were getting corrupt.

I asked my users to send me their configuration files to try to reproduce the problem. I wanted to see what kind of items could be causing the files to become corrupt. Unfortunately, when the error happened, the old (possibly corrupted) configuration files were overwritten with the new, empty files.

So, I made a backup of the configuration files before saving them and asked users to send me the backup files. It didn’t work either. The configuration files contained just normal items and I was able to open and save them without any problem whatsoever.

The solution. So simple

Then, one day I received the following message from a user:

I find at times CR loses all of it’s settings and just opens with the two default buttons. The only way to get things back is to re-load a backup set of files. I thought this might be due to some failure in writing the data files out at the end of a session but I now find that it is a problem at startup, not closedown. For some reason the program fails to read the data files and, of course, when I close it down then it wipes all the data away. If I make the data files read only then I can restart CR and it reads them perfectly.

And that was it. The problem was not that Control Runner was corrupting the configuration files when writing them, but rather that it was not reading them some times. The result was very similar, old configuration becoming lost. But the cause was completely different.

The lesson I have learned is: “When you are completely unable to find any problem in the particular code that you are staring at, no matter how hard you try, maybe the problem lies elsewhere“.

I still don’t know what is causing the problem. I suspect that some systems have too many processes running at startup and the file operation system used by Delphi stops waiting and simply returns without reading the file. I will investigate the matter further in the future.

Whatever the reason, solving the issue that has had me puzzled for years was just a matter of minutes. The user is notified if the configuration files seem to be wrong. This introduces the delay needed for the computer to finish the other tasks and, on the second try, the configuration files are read correctly.

Easy when you know where to look.