User Experience

AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition is a very good Anti-Virus software for personal use. Totally free, and very powerful, I use it as my only software to protect my computer.

But these days I found something with AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition make me very uneasy. Every time AVG updates itself, there will be a window shown up like picture below:

In my personal opinion, update should be very silent. A balloon notification is already too much, a dialog box? Why do you think I should be so much awared that my software is up to date? I do not think so. May there should be a notification to me that my anti-virus database is out of date, but not up to date.

Well, I think it must because this is a free edition. Maybe AVG just want to do some advertise in such a way, just some ads. I am think of changing to another free software, maybe AVS?

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What Friendship Should Be

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Power Menu, Enhance Your Right Menu

Power Menu is an utility to enhance your standard Windows right menu. You may encounter some condition that you have too much windows in your task bar that you want to send them to the tray with only  small icons shown, or sometime you just want some windows to be shown on the top of your screen, no matter if them are active or not. But with standard Windows right menu for applications, you can not do it. Power menu is just this kind of tool to enhance your right menu for Windows. You can minimize nearly any applications to the system tray, or send any application windows on the top of your screen. There are some more functions, like set transparency, or set priority for applications, but I seldom use them. For me, what are useful are "Always On Top" and "Minimize To Tray".

Power menu is a free software, any green software, which means you need not to install it. Just copy it to anywhere you like, and run it. That is great, right?

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Vista for Free?

Vista for free? Absolutely not. Microsoft seldom make something for free, especially operating system, which is the foundation of microsoft. What I showed up is a pirated Vista I found in a forum, so called free.

I really do not support anyone use pirated softwares. If you have programmed once, you will know the efforts for making a software. It is really a hard job, so if the author want other body to use his software for free, we will of course say "thank you", while if the author do not agree us using for free but ask us to buy it, the best choice is buy it with your result of hard working, that is money, or do not use it, try some other software instead.

There 's no software in my computer that is pirated software. They are all free softwares, like Pspad but not UltraEdit, AVG Anti-Virus Free but not Kaspersky Anti-Virus Personal, EverNote but not Mybase. Maybe Windows is not so easy to find a substitution, but we can use an OEM version, which is brought to you when you buy a computer, or you can use Linux.

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EverNote in Certain Language

Evernote is really a good software. I like it very much. There are two different kinds of text, which are text note and rich text note. Commonly, when we talk about text, we mean plain text, nothing like link or format is supported. You can only type plain text, just like what the standard Windows notepad does. If you want to creat some format for easy reading or good looking, you will have to use rich text note. Well, that is true, but not in EverNote. In EverNote, text note means HTML based text, in which you can type anything you want, including images, links and all the other types. But in rich text note, you can only creat some kind of format text, image and link are not supported in rich text note. So it seems that there's no need to use a rich text note, which is only limited functionality. Yes, that is true, if you are not a Asian or Middle-Eastern Language user. Asian or Middle-Eastern Language is not supported in the standard text note in EverNote. Only some garbled messages will show if you type these languages in a standard text note, like picture below.

The first line is some characters I typed in a standard text note in Chinese, but only show some garbled messages which mean nothing. And the second line is what I wanted to type. You can try the same thing in a rich text note, what is different?

So this is the problem. If your language is Asians or Middle-Eastern language, and you want to use standard text note, you will have to type it some where else, and then paste them to EverNote. Or you will have to use rich text note instead, which is function-limited.

This is a very unpleasant message for us Asians. We can not get the most of EverNote. I hope the author can fix this problem in next version.

New Vision of Google Pinyin

Google Pinyin has released a new vision, that is 1.0.19.0. Based on the official website, new vision will update itself automatically, so there's no need to manually download and install.

New vision has 4 improvements:

1. fixed the unresponse bug in some condition;
2. support user setting for automatic update;
3. add choose character by word function;
4. improved compatible in some games;

Although it is said that this new vision can automatically update itself, my Google Pinyin has not updated, which means that mine is still 1.0.18.0. what about yours?

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