Twitter search results truncated after downtime

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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It seems that after yesterday’s extended downtime for Twitter (which no one really raised much of a fuss about, since it’s just another routine day for tweeps worldwide — unlike, say, Skype) has some (severe?) repercussions: search results are being limited to the past ~6 days for low-volume queries.

A quick search for “git tower” on Twitter returns results limited to the past six days, only. (A quick shout-out: Tower.app for OS X gets our award for best Mac development tool of 2010!) And the same goes for searches for “NeoSmart” or “EasyBCD.” (Unfortunately, none of these topics are anywhere near “trending” on twitter, and the low volume of search results serves to prove the point).

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Things that suck about CoD Black Ops

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Treyarch released last month Call of Duty: Black Ops, the latest in the much-hyped “Call of Duty” game lineup. Black Ops made headlines when, within 24 hours of going on sale, it managed to sell some 7 million copies in the US and the UK. However, all is not well in the land of Call of Duty, while this game has received rave reviews from a number of gaming sites, including Game Spot and Metacritic. But reviewers at Amazon seem to get it right, with a thus-far average rating of only 1.8/5 stars. The reasons? Many.

I’ve personally been a fan of the Call of Duty series for quite some time, as the games tend to be well-developed and well-written on both the technical and storyline aspects. But Black Ops falls far, far short of the mark and in many ways is a step back from what we’ve come to expect of its predecessors. On many different fronts, Black Ops fails to deliver — consistently failing to impress and, perhaps most disturbingly, almost as if it was intentionally made this way.

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Updating Flash Player Manually on Chrome for OS X

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Recently (late November), Adobe finally got around to releasing an update to Flash Player for OS X that comes with the long-awaited hardware-based rendering of H.264-encoded videos. However, for those of us that use Chrome, there is no way to updated to the latest 10.2 beta of Flash; Chrome uses its own copy of Flash that comes built-in and cannot be externally updated. These steps below will guide you through the process of using Flash Player 10.2 with Google Chrome on OS X:

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EasyLDR and EasyBCD 2.0’s New XP Support

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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At NeoSmart Technologies, we’re not just about making cool software that makes your life easier – we also like to share the how and why behind our work, to make things all the more beneficial for one and all. While the EasyBCD documentation has been out of date for a while now (we’ve been too busy working on the code and support), we’re making a real effort to bring things up to date.

We’d previously finished the tutorials for dual-booting Windows 7 with Windows XP and with Ubuntu 10 (complete with picture-by-picture steps!), but now we’re getting started on the real meat: the technical details of just what exactly is going on behind the scenes. The normal OS boot process is one of the most complicated parts of an operating system with just one OS in the mix – with multiple operating systems, each that works in its own way, things get that much more complicated, and it’s always good to have a nice, illustrated guide to refer to.

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EasyBCD 2.0.2 Released

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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It may have taken us over 2 years to go from 1.7.2 to 2.0, but now that we’re there we have no intention of letting EasyBCD languish. Those of you unfortunate enough to run into a fatal error in EasyBCD may have noticed the presence of a custom error reporting dialog that we now use to keep track of crashes and errors as they occur. As a result of error collection over the past 2 weeks, we’ve released a point update to EasyBCD.

The changes in EasyBCD 2.0.2 correlate to 21 issues in the bug tracker, and can be seen after the jump.

Download EasyBCD 2.0.2 (1343 KiB)

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Software with a (Subtle) Sense of Humor

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Every once in a while you come across something in a piece of software that makes you smile. In this case, it was trying to open a 60MB CHM file in BetterZip, the best OS X unzip utility out there. A lot of software out there tries too hard to be funny, and really doesn’t come across as such (I’m look at you, ImgBurn).

But here’s a very serious program that does some very serious stuff. It’s never cracked jokes at me before, and it’s been a dependable creature, all business thus far. But all work and no play makes Jack a very dull boy. And so that brings us to the sense of humor – image after the jump:

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Free Download: Timeline 2.1 Home Edition

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Four months ago (though it does feel like much, much less than that!), we posted about the release of Genie Timeline 2.0. Timeline, in both its free and paid Home/Pro editions, has been well-received around the globe – the free backup software market is severely undersaturated, especially when it comes to good stuff that actually works.

Earlier this month, Genie-Soft released Timeline 2.1 which fixed a number of issues and greatly improved the performance. For the next 24 hours (well, 23 actually as of the time in this posting!) Genie Timeline 2.1 Home Edition is available 100% for free on Giveaway of the Day.

Download: Genie Timeline 2.1 Home Edition

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Welcome to EasyBCD 2.0!

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Hello and welcome to EasyBCD 2.0!

It’s rather hard to believe, but EasyBCD 1.7.2 has been out for over 2 years now, and we’ve been working on Version 2.0 ever since. In that time, a lot has happened. Windows 7 has shipped, ext4fs is the new cool kid on the Linux block, GRUB2 is finally seeing some adoption, VHDs are the new wow, and everyone and their grandmother want a dual-boot between Windows 7 and Windows XP.

Worry not, we haven’t been sitting on our (not-so-proverbial) behinds this whole time. In fact, the entire NeoSmart team – developers, supporters, testers, and all – have been working around the clock to make EasyBCD 2.0 the biggest, coolest, greatest, and awesomest thing ever since the invention of the MBR. And now, over a 150 beta builds later and 2 years in the making, we’re super-pleased to introduce you to EasyBCD 2.0. It’s so incredibly overhauled and improved, so stuffed-to-the-brim with features, so much of a true one-click dual-boot experince, so customizable, so powerful, and so EASY that it took a lot of self-restraint to keep from calling it EasyBCD 10.0!

What’s new, you ask? We’ll get to it. But let’s just first give you the download link, because we know you just can’t wait to get your grubby, geeky paws on it ASAP:

Download EasyBCD 2.0.1 (1337 KiB)

(Yes, it really is 1337 kibibytes in size. And, no, we didn’t do it on purpose. We’re just übercool that way!)

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Intel C++ Compiler 12??

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 has been officially released for 3 months now (to the day), and to be pedantic, it has also been available in beta form since October 2008. Its bugs not withstanding, Visual Studio 2010 been a pretty successful hit. Besides the huge improvements to the .NET language and platform, big on the list of features for C++ developers is basic support for C++0x (the next standard version of C++, with lots of new & revolutionary features) and plenty of IDE enhancements. Intel’s C++ Compiler is the industry-standard with regards to performance and optimizations, still doesn’t support Visual Studio 2010 or C++0x.

As numerous postings on the Intel forums indicate, a plethora of users are in pressing need of an update to the Intel C++ Compiler. Questions on the matter are brushed-off, with short and rather-useless replies such as:

“This question has been discussed several times recently. The first such integration would come in a beta version of icc 12.0, which hasn’t yet been announced.”

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SPARQCode / QR Code Scanner for BlackBerry

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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One of the most popular (and addictive) group of applications making the rounds on Android handsets these days are Barcode Scanners. Barcodes traditionally contain a very minimal set of information, namely just a product SKU that can be used to (somewhat-) uniquely identify items at the store or lying around your home. QR Codes are an extension to barcodes that have been updated for the 21st century: they’re specifically designed to be easily ready by the low-resolution cameras on mobile devices, quickly and accurately. SPARQCode itself is yet another layer of extension to the QR Code. It provides more functionality and adds support for extra usages.

A quick Google search for SPARQCode viewers for the BlackBerry fails to retrieve any interesting results. A similar search on AppWorld also shows no such luck – if you were to believe what you see, BlackBerry doesn’t (yet) have a usable SPARQCode viewer!

But that’s not true. It’s there, though the RIM Geeks over in Canada – in their infinite wisdom – put away that functionality in such an impossibly-illogical location. But it’s there.

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