Category Archives: Windows

Using a Windows Laptop with a Bluetooth Keyboard

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I recently purchased the Microsoft Bluetooth Mobile Keyboard 6000, and while being generally happy with it (despite the lack of dedicated home / end buttons) my main concern with it was that after just 8-10 seconds the keyboard seemed to go into sleep mode, requiring a second or so to wake up again. According to the Microsoft documentation the keyboard should not go to sleep until 8-10 minutes, so this behavior was quite unexpected.

It turned out that the issue was in the Thinkpad laptop. The default settings for the Bluetooth driver is to power down the Bluetooth chip to conserve power, causing the keyboard to become unresponsive after just a few seconds.

So if you too experience this issue, you can remove the lag by:

  1. Pressing the <Windows> button on your keyboard
  2. Type  ”Device Manager” and press <enter>
  3. Open the “Bluetooth Radios” section and right click your Bluetooth driver (in my case “ThinkPad Bluetooth 3.0″) and choose “Properties”
  4. Choose the tab “Power Management” and disable “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power”

Your keyboard should now be completely “lag-free” in daily use.

Strong Growth for Unity

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The game development platform Unity has doubled its user base the past 6 months:

“Unity Technologies, provider of the Unity development platform for awesome games and interactive 3D on the web, iOS, Android, consoles and beyond, today announced that its registered user base has doubled to more than 500,000 users in just over 6 months; 150,000 of these users are active monthly users representing well over a million hours of game development every month. In addition, installs of the free Unity browser plugin for playing web games have surpassed 60 million.”

Read the full press release

In a related press announcement, Game Developer Magazine readers named Unity the #1 game engine they use for traditional and casual games. Read the full story.

I have used Unity myself for almost three years now, and have always believed firmly in the potential of the platform. Congratulations to David Helgason and his crew for the success, you deserve it!

Tip: Window Clippings for Windows

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If you use Windows Vista or Windows 7 you should definitely checkout the program Window Clippings if you ever take screen shots of windows or window contents. Window Clippings was updated today to version 3, and it’s one of my favorite utilities for Windows.

Some of the things that makes Window Clippings better than the built-in “Snipping Tool” in Windows 7 are:

  1. Captures window transparency
  2. Captures menus and other complex elements
  3. Delayed capture of elements
  4. And much more

Check it out: Window Clippings 3

Customizing the Open and Save Dialogs in Adobe CS5 for Windows

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When installing Adobe Creative Suite 5 under Windows 7 I was amazed to see that Adobe still uses the 10 year old-style ComDlg32 dialogs for Open and Save dialogs. This is how they currently look in Adobe CS5:

Now compare this to the 10 year old Windows 2000 Save dialog:

The interesting part about this is that the old-style dialog box used by Adobe CS5 was outdated when Microsoft introduced Windows Vista four years ago in 2006. From Microsoft’s official developer documentation:

“Starting with Windows Vista, the Open and Save As common dialog boxes have been superseded by the Common Item Dialog. We recommended that you use the Common Item Dialog API instead of these dialog boxes from the Common Dialog Box Library.”
From Open and Save As Dialog Boxes at MSDN

This is how the dialog boxes should look like:

The main thing for me that I miss in the new Open and Save dialogs are my favorite locations (not the same as the Internet Explorer favorites). What you can do however to work around this is to customize the five places shown on the left side of the dialog. For me this resolved most of the issues I had with the dialog.

Here is a good link how to modify the PlacesBar. This works fine in Windows Vista and Windows 7. This is how it will look once you have customized it:

The Adobe CS5 Set-Up

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The Windows installer of Adobe Creative Suite 5 is now called Set-up instead of just Setup. I can see one of two scenarios:

  1. Adobe has decided that their software installers from now on should be called Set-up instead of Setup.
  2. No native English speaking person at Adobe tested the installer on a Windows computer.

Any other programs that use Set-up instead of Setup? This is the first time I have stumbled across this naming…

New Critical Adobe Flash Security Vulnerability

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With all the talk about Adobe Flash possibly being phased out for HTML 5 recently, what Adobe does not need at the moment is a major security vulnerability in Flash and Acrobat that opens up your entire computer to hackers.

Yet this is exactly what has happened.

This vulnerability (CVE-2010-1297) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild against both Adobe Flash Player, and Adobe Reader and Acrobat.

This text is from the latest security advisor from Adobe and Adobe recommends all users of Flash to upgrade to the release candidate test version of Adobe Flash 10.1. A fix for the current Flash version 10.0.x will not come until June 10th.

This exploit is already in full use by World of Warcraft trojans that will steal your game password.

So, you have two choices at the moment:

  1. Ignore it. You then risk having multiple trojans installed on your computer.
  2. Install the test version of Flash 10.1. You might get more crashes since this is a test version of a major update to the Flash player but you should get no trojans.