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I’ve been developing freeware for 8 years now and during that time I’ve managed to build up a self-sustaining development environment. I’m not going to get rich any day soon, but I’m now spending less than I get in return. A first step for most people who host a website is to add ads to the site, for example: Google Adsense. Unfortunately you need a really large userbase which not only visits your site, but also stays there for a while and returns afterwards for this to actually be profitable. It is also tricky to work out an optimal placement pattern for these ads to generate as much revenue as possible. Regardless, this could compensate you for your hosting costs in the beginning when you don’t have that much traffic and needs on your server.

After a few years I noticed that my server and development costs kept rising while my ads revenue did not quite follow the same pattern. So I set out to find a way to make enough from development to support it. When you’re installing free software you’ll often find that it asks you to install some additional software, like a toolbar, a browser or any other range of things. This I thought could offer a solution to my problem. It did however prove to be very difficult to find a PPI (Pay Per Install) project that did not distribute any malware or require you to sign any sketchy contracts. Then about a year ago I came across InstallMonetizer. At the time the company wasn’t older than a year, but I signed up regardless.

I’ve now learned that InstallMonetizer is a great way to earn a revenue off of your freeware software, sufficient to pay for (most) of your development and hosting costs! The company works with a great variety of advertisers and pays revenues of up to $1/install. I choose to stay with this company because not only do they generate a decent revenue, they also work with advertisers that provide legitimate malware-free software, including things such as the Bing toolbar. This was the most important factor for me as I certainly did not want to bring my users in contact with any malware infested software. Payouts are done on a monthly basis and I can guarantee that they do actually pay out, as there are many other sites like this out there which are just scamming people out of their revenue. On top of these things they also offer easy to understand video tutorials on how to integrate their software into most popular installers.

So if you want to earn an extra buck from your freeware software and you’re not sure where to start, sign up for an account at InstallMonetizer.

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Windows 8 File Explorer

Many people have been giving a lot of negative feedback about the fact that Microsoft decided to integrate the ribbon interface as seen in Microsoft Office 2007/2010 and other applications like Paint on never versions of Windows. Personally I think this is a great idea and they should have done this sooner.

In my opinion, this new interface opens up the capabilities of the file explorer to the every day user who often has trouble finding certain commands. The great thing about it is that the poweruser who may think of the bar as a waste of space, can jut hide it with a click of a button.

As you can see in the image, Microsoft also took some time to increase the space available. The bottom bar which showed some file properties and such has been replaced with a simple status bar to free up a lot of additional vertical space, something that will certainly be useful for users with lower screen resolutions, such as many notebook users.

Aside from the new interface I’d also like to discuss some other cool features. The first of which is that it is now possible to open a command window directly from the file menu in the file explorer, including starting it with administrative privileges. It’s of course not a big adaptation, but it’ll take a tine amount of clicks and keys off of the current methods to open this.

Another cool feature is that it is now possible to mount iso and vhd files. For those who are not familiar with either one of these files, an iso file is a sort of disk image archive file, it contains a disk image for an optical disc such as a DVD. Normally one would burn these disk images to an optical disc and insert it into a optical drive to read it, but for quite a while now, applications like Deamon Tools and VirtualCloneDrive have been able to mount these images directly as virtual drives. Windows 8 now natively supports this, removing the need for 3rd party applications. Also new is the ability to mount vhd files which are similar to iso files, but these represent virtual hard drives. The iso files mounts as a virtual optical drive and the vhd files as a virtual hard drive, which both can easily be ejected by right clicking the drive and pressing Eject.

All of these features of course are fairly trivial, but I do feel they add a lot of value to windows as a product as they increase the user experience quite a lot.

If you ended up looking for this, then you probably came to the conclusion that Windows.RemoveDirectory() can not remove a directory that has files/directories in it.

About.com proposes the following solution: http://delphi.about.com/cs/adptips1999/a/bltip1199_2.htm

I can assure you that this solution is valid and works. However, the code as it is proposed there will move the deleted folder into the recycle bin which is something you will want to avoid more often than not. The following code I modified to remove that effect:

function RemoveDirectory(const Path: string): Boolean;
var
  SHFileOpStruct: TSHFileOpStruct;
  DirBuf: array[0..255] of Char;
begin
  if DirectoryExists(Path) then
  try
    FillChar(SHFileOpStruct, Sizeof(SHFileOpStruct), 0);
    FillChar(DirBuf, Sizeof(DirBuf), 0);
    StrPCopy(DirBuf, Path);
    with SHFileOpStruct do
    begin
      Wnd := 0;
      pFrom := @DirBuf;
      wFunc := FO_DELETE;
      fFlags := FOF_NOCONFIRMATION or FOF_SILENT;
    end;
    Result := SHFileOperation(SHFileOpStruct) = 0;
  except
    Result := False;
  end;
end;

Another way of doing this is recursing through all directories and removing all files before you remove the directories as seen here, but I imagine that might be slower as in the method above, the OS takes care of that internally:

function RemoveDirectory(const Path: string): Boolean;
var
  sRec: TSearchRec;
  t: string;
begin
  if DirectoryExists(Path) then
  try
    t := IncludeTrailingPathDelimiter(Path);
    if FindFirst(t + '*.*', faNormal or faDirectory, sRec) = 0 then
    begin
      repeat
        if ((sRec.Attr and faDirectory) <> 0) and (sRec.Name <> '.') and
          (sRec.Name <> '..') then
          RemoveDirectory(t + sRec.Name)
        else
          DeleteFile(t + sRec.Name);
      until FindNext(sRec) <> 0;
      FindClose(sRec);
    end;
    Result := Windows.RemoveDirectory(PChar(t));
  except
    Result := False;
  end;
end;

On occasion you’ll find yourself wanting to access a a protected property from a class in a different unit. If this is a 3rd party unit, you’ll often not want to modify it’s source code. So how do you access it? Sub-classing the class as you might have guessed, however, you can do this in very little code.

Delphi will allow any class to use protected properties from other classes as long as they are in the same unit. We can use this to our advantage. By creating a subclass, we can essentially use this to access protected values in the class we’re sub-classing, it works the same way, because your subclass is in the unit you need it in. All you have to do, is cast the object to the subclass and you’re set to access the protected property.

unit Example;

interface

uses
  Classes;

type
  TStringListEx = class(TStringList);

implementation

function SLChanged(const SL: TStringList): Boolean;
begin
  Result := TStringListEx(SL).Changed;
end;

end.

Finally, a laptop I can throw into a river!

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Elementary OS 0.2 Jupiter is the first stable release of Elementary OS and was release just over 10 days ago. I’ve been using the OS on one of my production machines for a week now and I’d like to share some of my thought about the OS.

Elementary OS is an Ubuntu remix, though things aren’t all that different. The only real difference between Ubuntu and Elementary OS is the interface. Elementary OS uses a custom built shell that runs on top of Gnome. The shell is clearly designed to resemble Mac OSX. The interface looks very sleek and tidy, is very responsive and overall I must say that it works really well.

As for functionality, the interface unfortunately doesn’t really add any, at the bottom of your desktop you will see a dock such as in Max OSX, opened programs will show up on the dock and you can easily stick them to do the dock to quick launch them. Aside from the dock, the interface seems to actually reduce the functionality of the Ubuntu desktop environment. The Desktop itself is completely gone, you can no longer put any files or folders onto the desktop and aside from this you no longer have multiple desktop support.

The OS still has a couple of bugs to iron out, often folders like Documents won’t launch and there’s a few other minor bugs.

Overall even though there’s some reduced functionality and small bugs, I must say I’m very satisfied with this new distro, the new interface looks very clean and is fun to use, it reduces that basic feel to Gnome while retaining the performance.

Note that you can use Ubuntu Tweak to bring back a lot of the functionality that was removed.