I was sure I had blogged about this before, but apparently I haven’t. Anyway, I’m certainly not the first… I just love the way this thing talks to me. I’m talking about “Encarta Instant Answers”, which is a contact you can add to your Messenger using the email address encarta@conversagent.com. Just add the contact and start talking to the machine…

It’s really supposed to answer questions about god, the world and everything, and it does that really nicely, but even more it reminds me of ELI… …

This must be one of the stupidest messages in Visual Studio — how glad I am they kept it on board for 2005!

Let’s see: VS knows the file type I just dropped on it, because it can inform me about it. I have no solution open at this point — the internal state is just perfect for me to open a project if I want. I just have to do it in a specific way, and I believe this is the only file type I can open in VS where this ridiculous r …

Get it here, read about the new features here and tell them about what you don’t like here.

TestComplete by AutomatedQA is a tool for automated testing, useful in many software testing scenarios ranging from internal unit testing to black box UI testing. The next major version 4 has been in the making for a while now and they still don’t announce a release date, but every now and then they make previews of various new features available (for example on their new community site). The latest thing that caught my eye was that OCR is going to come to automated testing in TestComplete 4. F …

I’ve been evaluating MindManager X5 and I really dig it. It’s a great program, it’s able to work with ink on my Tablet PC, it can integrate with MS Project. I have tried eight other mind mapping tools (FreeMind, Visual Mind, ConceptDraw MINDMAP, Thought Mapper, MYmap, BrainMine, Mind Pad, Map it!, MindMapper and OpenMind, in case someone’s interested) and they just can’t compete with MindManager’s feature set. So, one seemingly small problem I’m having is that the fonts that MindManager shows i …

Here we go with another editor test, this time I took a look at EditPlus. You can find the introductional posting to this series here.

EditPlus is a commercial product by ES-Computing and it’s available from www.editplus.com. The version I tested was v2.12 (76).

First impressions

This program manages to show me two separate warnings on first startup, about the fact that I’m not a licensed user of the program. Why can’t they just let me get star …

I have now started to make a tabular overview of the tested text editors available. You can find it here and I will keep it updated with new results as I continue to test.

The second test in this series, which is the best text editor for me, is about TextPad.

TextPad is a commercial product by Helios Software Solutions and is available from www.textpad.com. The version I tested was 4.7.3.

First impressions

TextPad is one of those programs that for some reason always hide behind their open online help windows. This is something I find extremely inconvenient and I’m happy that I have multiple monitors — it would be …