Not dead (at least not yet).

The blog has been a bit stagnant in recent weeks (I've added a new Mozilla Firefox Persona however!) simply because I've not had the time to do much programming or reviewing. Yeah I know the secret to a successful blog is to update update update but sometimes we all need a holiday.

So what's the plan? Well my work for the Christmas run is still to complete Vampire Castle (it's a cursed project that is draining my life blood).

More usefully I've received some new suggestions for Aerofoil to disable services on the fly (such as the Windows indexing service) so I'm also debating an update to Aerofoil.

I consider emulator writing to be the holy grail of becoming a great programmer so I've been paying a little attention to Imran Nazar's blog on how to write a Gameboy emulator in Javascript. In the long run this could mean I write emulators on many platforms, but I'm not getting ahead of myself yet, especially as I'm still waiting on Imran to document the remaining parts (such as sound) before I really dig in.

Aerofoil 1.5.1 Released (64 and 32 bit builds available)

The award winning Aerofoil has now been updated to 1.5.1!

Aerofoil extends Vista and Windows 7 notebook battery life by:

• Allowing you to manually disable Aero Glass.
• Optionally managing Aero Glass user interface.
• Optionally managing sound muting.
• Optionally managing your chosen power plans.
• Optionally managing Windows Sidebar.
• Optionally showing a quick hibernate button.
• Changing icon colour to show whether on battery or AC.

Benefits over earlier versions and similar software:

• Much more efficient - Aerofoil is 100% unmanaged C++ (no .Net Framework!).
• Available in both 64 bit (x64) and regular 32 bit (x86) builds.
• Much smaller memory use (about 25%-30% of the size of similar software).
• Unlike other apps, Aerofoil doesn't poll battery level continuously allowing the CPU save power by being idle more often.
• No configuration file - everything is customised with the installer.
• Open source and free - no expiry date, adware, spyware or malware, download and compile it for yourself if you prefer*!

What reviewers of Aerofoil have had to say:

"Aerofoil Extends Your Battery Life Approximately 25%", "you really should download"
(netbooknews.com) Disclaimer: Aerofoil's author's (my) personal best has been (only) 10-15%, or ~10 minutes, on a 2 hour battery 17 inch HP notebook (DV9233EU) with power saver mode using the lowest screen brightness.

"Why couldn't Microsoft just make power switching part of the "Designed for Windows 8" spec or buy Aerofoil?"
(Woody Leonhard, Infoworld)

"This is definitely a worth-while little app for road warriors"
(Metro Area Personal Computer Club, Iowa, USA)

"great for gaming and notebook applications alike"
(Official Windows Magazine - 47th of top 100, 37th of top 40 Hot Apps / TechRadar)

"Aerofoil, though, is far, far smaller and more efficient"
(Dave Johnson, Bnet)

The great advantage of AeroFoil is little resource consumption..... works perfectly with Windows 7"
(Kavya, Techno360)

"a must for every Vista laptop user."
(Wim Van Acoleyen, ZDNet)

"Great utility for gamers and laptop users."
(The Glitch)

"simple yet amazingly effective software that the corporate bigwigs couldn't figure out"
(Umar, Techtites)

Changes in 1.5.1:

• Available as a 64 bit (x64) executable.
• Source code updated for the wxWidgets 2.9.0 framework.
• Project updated for Visual Studio 2010.
• Multibyte strings have been removed in favour of Unicode.
• UPX compression has been removed due to lack of a 64 bit Windows packer (memory usage remains the same).

Downloads (please read the important note below too):

Download from Softpedia (external site) (note Softpedia don't host the source code).
Download Aerofoil 1.5.1 (64 bit) Installer
Download Aerofoil 1.5.1 (32 bit) Installer

Download Aerofoil 1.5.1 (64 bit) Source Code (C++)*
Download Aerofoil 1.5.1 (32 bit) Source Code (C++)*

IMPORTANT: If you receive an error message regarding the msvcp100.dll being missing you may also need a Windows update - the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable. You can get this from Microsoft - links below - please choose the correct version:

Redistributable for 64 bit (x64)
Redistributable for 32 bit (x86)

* The source code has dependencies on the wxWidgets framework (2.9.0) and the project is for Visual Studio 2010. For 64 bit compilation wxWidgets will also need building with the WIN64 flag (instead of WIN32) and the project build platform targets set to x64. Additionally an environment variable $(WindowsSdkDirx64) needs to point to the relevant Windows 7.1 SDK.

Aerofoil update and 64 bit

I've recently updated Aerofoil to use a newer version of the GUI toolkit, WxWidgets 2.90, and got it building in Visual C++ 2010 Express Edition which has led me to idea of doing a native 64 bit build. Technically this will be no more efficient than the existing 32 bit but purists out there (myself included) would like to see a 64 bit build. Unfortunately as I'm no longer using VS 2008 Express I'm waiting on an integrated 64 bit compiler due in June and Microsoft say...

From the Windows SDK blog

I want to use Visual C++ 2010 Express. Should I install the Windows SDK v7.1?

If you install Visual C++ 2010 Express.... the Windows SDK v7.1 includes more tools than are delivered with Visual C++2010. If you want to install .... 64-bit native compilers/CRT, you may wish to download and install WinSDK v7.1....

and...

This SDK will be released soon after the RTM version of Visual Studio 2010 is released

I haven't decided whether to add any new features.

Aerofoil 1.5.0_03 Out

Again this is another installer fix - perhaps I shouldn't be making code changes after 2.30am and I might make less errors... Thanks to reader Timothy for pointing out another flaw!

There are no other changes to the Aerofoil itself (it still has version 1.5.0 in its About box).

Changes in 1.5.0_03

- Fixed installer to set auto mute option correctly which was always switched on in Aerofoil 1.5.0_02.


Downloads

Download Aerofoil 1.5.0_03 Installer

Download Aerofoil 1.5.0_03 Source Code (C++)

Aerofoil 1.5.0_02 Out

Sorry all - I rejigged the installer for 1.5.0_01 to change shortcut names and add a reconfiguration option to the Windows start menu and accidentally deleted the line to copy the readme.txt, this fixes that bug :(

Changes in 1.5.0_02

No code changes in this release just an installer bug fix to ensure the readme.txt is copied by the installer (which had caused a broken Windows shortcut icon).

Downloads

Download Aerofoil 1.5.0_02 Installer

Download Aerofoil 1.5.0_02 Source Code (C++)

Aerofoil 1.5.0_01 Out

UPDATE: Please get the latest (1.5.0_03) version of Aerofoil from here

No changes to Aerofoil, just to its installer (About box in Aerofoil still shows "1.5.0").

Changes for 1.5.0_01:

• Added installer options to add a "Configuration" shortcut to the start menu (configuration shortcut starts a copy of the installer for Aerofoil's reconfiguration).
• Added automatic shutdown of Aerofoil on installer run.

These changes should hopefully deal with the concerns raised about the ease of reconfiguring Aerofoil. :)

If you are upgrading from Aerofoil 1.5.0 it is recommended you uninstall Aerofoil 1.5.0 first.

Download Aerofoil 1.5.0_01 Installer

Download Aerofoil 1.5.0_01 Source Code (C++)

Softpedia Mirror Now Available

Softpedia has started mirroring some Silent Software that is GPL licenced ...although I didn't actually list some of it!! The following software has been awarded the Softpedia logo shown on this page.

Aerofoil on Softpedia
Image to ZX Spec on Softpedia
Gesture Magic on Softpedia

Please note some of the software available on this blog whilst free to download is NOT GPL (CPL and closed source). I'll be sure in future blog descriptions to make the licence more clear.

The latest versions of the software will always be on this blog first. As the copyright holder the source code (for the GPL and CPL software) will be available here as long as I distribute the binary downloads.

Aerofoil 1.5.0 Released

UPDATE: Aerofoil is now at version 1.5.1.

Original post follows.

The award winning Aerofoil has now been updated to 1.5.0(_03)!
Aerofoil extends Vista and Windows 7 notebook battery life by:

• Allowing you to manually disable Aero Glass.
• Optionally managing Aero Glass user interface.
• Optionally managing sound muting.
• Optionally managing your chosen power plans.
• Optionally managing Windows Sidebar.
• Optionally showing a quick hibernate button.
• Changing icon colour to show your power type.

Benefits over earlier versions and similar software:

• Much more efficient - Aerofoil is 100% unmanaged C++ (no .Net Framework!).
• Much smaller memory use (about 25%-30% of the size of similar software).
• Unlike other apps, Aerofoil doesn't poll battery level continuously allowing the CPU save power by being idle more often.
• UPX compressed meaning Aerofoil.exe is as small as it can be.
• No configuration file - everything is customised with the installer.
• Tried and tested on Windows 7 (thanks to D. Schiferli!)
• Open source and free - no expiry date, adware, spyware or malware, download and compile it for yourself if you prefer*!

What reviewers of Aerofoil have had to say:

"Aerofoil Extends Your Battery Life Approximately 25%", "you really should download"
(netbooknews.com) Disclaimer: Aerofoil's author's (my) personal best has been (only) 10-15%, or ~10 minutes, on a 2 hour battery 17 inch HP notebook (DV9233EU) with power saver mode using the lowest screen brightness.

"This is definitely a worth-while little app for road warriors"
(Metro Area Personal Computer Club, Iowa, USA)

"great for gaming and notebook applications alike"
(Official Windows Magazine - 47th of top 100, 37th of top 40 Hot Apps / TechRadar)

"Aerofoil, though, is far, far smaller and more efficient"
(Dave Johnson, Bnet)

The great advantage of AeroFoil is little resource consumption..... works perfectly with Windows 7"
(Kavya, Techno360)

"a must for every Vista laptop user."
(Wim Van Acoleyen, ZDNet)

"Great utility for gamers and laptop users."
(The Glitch)

"simple yet amazingly effective software that the corporate bigwigs couldn't figure out"
(Umar, Techtites)

Downloads

Download Aerofoil 1.5.0_03 Installer

Download Aerofoil 1.5.0_03 Source Code (C++)

If you use Windows Vista and receive the message "Side-by-side configuration is incorrect" you may also need a Vista update - the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable

* Note Aerofoil.exe is compressed using UPX so you will find your compiled executable is larger. You can find UPX here. The source code has dependencies on the WxWidgets framework (2.8.8) and the project is for Visual Studio 2008.

Aerofoil 1.5?

Recently I've also been thinking of improving Aerofoil to include new features that greatly improve battery life for Vista and Windows 7. This is not to say I will produce an Aerofoil 1.5, but more a general gauge of user feedback as to features you'd like to see. With up to 240 unique hits a day on this blog I'm hoping some of you will be able to give me some info on features you think would be worthwhile and would save battery life.

Things I have already tried and dismissed:

Feature	Expected Gain	Dismissed because...
Screen colour reduction (going from 32bit colour - 16.7 million colours to 8 bit colour - 256 colours)	Lower power GPU usage since it is doing less colour work	Tests showed no real gain, possibly a few seconds, but importantly Vista is mostly blacked out and very hard to use
Auto process priority management - lowering task priority for heavy processes	Lower CPU usage should mean greater battery life	Usage of a machine became unbearably slow. Conversely, trying to put the CPU priority up instead so a task was done faster is counter productive, since user input is slow and the application is waiting longer at high priority
Decrease the sound volume	Lower power usage from lower volume	Not much to be gained here unless you play music constantly, and probably quite annoying

Features like hardware disabling I think are overkill and is potentially dangerous so I won't be considering that (e.g. switching Bluetooth off, disabling Bluetooth driver stack). Hardware disabling would also require a lot of manual configuration, and one of the design paradigms behind Aerofoil is to keep it as simple as possible.

So what can I do, how can I improve Aerofoil - I was pretty much resigned to 1.4.5 being the last version - but given it's success I'd like it to become the defacto must have battery saving application for Windows Vista and Windows 7 Notebooks?

Aerofoil 1.4.5 and LocateMe 1.0.1 Beta

Aerofoil 1.4.5

- Fixes a small issue with hibernate closing explorer on resume

Download Aerofoil 1.4.5 installer
Download Aerofoil 1.4.5 source

LocateMe 1.0.1 Beta (source only release)

- Basic integrated GPS support (no need for a bluetooth GPS - Satellite View not yet working)
- Refactor of view handling

Download LocateMe 1.0.1 Beta source

Many thanks to Stefan Lembach for providing N95 testing, and Calum for providing an integrated GPS reader class

Aerofoil 47th in Hot 100 Windows Vista Magazine Utilities

IMPORTANT:
This page is just for archive purposes - Aerofoil is now at version 1.5.0 please click this link to get it.


Aerofoil has been rated at 47th out of 100 best software for Windows Vista!
(That's just one behind BBC IPlayer, and ahead of iTunes at 50)

Aerofoil extends your Vista and Windows 7 notebook battery life by

- Allowing you to manually disable Aero Glass.
- Optionally managing Aero Glass user interface.
- Optionally managing the best two power plans.
- Optionally managing Windows Vista Sidebar.
- Optionally showing a quick hibernate button - hibernate and power management were greatly improved in Vista.




Benefits over earlier versions and similar software:

- Much more efficient - Aerofoil is 100% unmanaged C++.
- Much smaller than older versions and other similar software.
- UPX compressed meaning Aerofoil.exe is as small as it can be.
- No configuration file - everything is done with the installer.

Windows 7

Aerofoil has been tested in a Windows 7 virtual environment and no obvious bugs were found. "Windows Gadgets" - "Windows Sidebar" on Vista - seems to be managed correctly - at least started when on AC, as I can't simulate battery power I can't tell if its shut down when on battery. Please also note that if your Windows 7 graphics card driver doesn't support power management then the Aerofoil "Hibernate" menu shortcut won't work.
For most people Aerofoil should work just as well as in Vista, having said that... if you notice any problems with Windows 7 and Aerofoil please report them here since I don't have real hardware to do the testing on!

Downloads

Download Aerofoil 1.4.5 Installer (read the note below!)

If you receive the message "Side-by-side configuration is incorrect" you may also need a Vista update - the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable

If you find your settings are not being saved please read this post (they are saved, this is not a bug)

Download Aerofoil 1.4.5 Source Code (C++)

Software Update: Gesture Magic 1.1, Aerofoil 1.4.4, LocateMe 1.0.1

I know from comments on this blog a lot of readers are watching for a new release of Gesture Magic, this is still at the front of my mind and is part of this schedule

Since I've been quite busy recently and job hunting I haven't had as much time to spare for work on the schedule as I would have liked. There have been a few updates, a few given feedback from readers of the blog:

Aerofoil 1.4.4 and a native version will be published sometime within the next week, this is small improvement to hibernate without a new process call, and a native version to improve memory usage (i.e. make it smaller when running, not the executable file size).

LocateMe 1.0.1 had a small amount of source code changes by me to make it a little bit more structured, and should support Java phones with a built in GPS (unfortunately the chap who emailed me the changes never kept in contact to say if they worked). Nonetheless I'll update this and post it as an unsupported alpha version when I get time or if you drop me an email at: uk co silentsoftware at ben (reverse add punctuation)

Vampire Castle has had all of it's main game graphics finished (but no menu system yet) I'm still hoping to get this completed within the next couple of weeks, and still roughly on schedule.

Gesture Magic is currently under investigation for an issue slowing graphics drawing down on some single core machines - a threading issue down to the fact it was built on a prototype/proof of concept version.

Aerofoil 1.4.3 - Small Update

The version of Aerofoil I have has been updated a few weeks ago, but since my laptop broke I didn't get to test it much. I've decided to release it this evening anyway, since it seems stable enough. There are no new features just small improvements in the way it works and particularly the size - it is now just 23K! (albeit the .Net framework still makes the running process much larger I still think this is the smallest utility of its kind!)

• Smaller file size (23K)


• Removal of duplicate embedded Aerofoil logo


• Optimization of the Aerofoil logo


• Fewer lines of code, few extra code comments


• Removal of "dangling pointers" (not a problem really as this is mostly managed code - just good practice)


• Removed a couple of obvious "intermediate" objects (but doesn't affect code readability)


• Updated to use C# generics (tut I should have done this in the first place)

Download Aerofoil 1.4.3

Source Code for Aerofoil 1.4.3

Upcoming exclusive free software schedule

Below I present an estimated schedule of upcoming software available here (free):

Product	Features	Estimated completion date
Vampire Castle 1.0 (Nintendo DS)	First release of this game	Late August/early to mid September
Gesture Magic 1.1 (Windows)	New built in gesture actions (e.g close window), better accessor keys, amongst other small improvements (this is a minor improvement release)	September
A new Nintendo DS project (I can't reveal more until this goes into production - sorry, however this project has already been planned ahead)	Includes wifi, mapping, video, some smooth jazz and advertising (NOT INTRUSIVE - trust me, this is a feature you'll enjoy :) )	December/January (I'm looking for a Christmas Day release)
Aerofoil Extra 1.0 (Windows) Aerofoil versions 1.4.1/.2 have proven so popular I'm creating a "pro" version. Aerofoil 1.4, due to its designed simplicity and small size will become "Aerofoil Lite". At least this is the intention. Lets see how it goes...	Subject to change - power managed hardware disabling, customisable process shutdowns on low power, XP compatibility, benchmarking and time estimates, task priority adjustments based on power mode, possibly written in C++ (not C# as per original).	February/March 2009

P.S. Google Analytics tells me Silent Development has now hit a new peak of 170 hits in a day - so whoever the "silent" hoards are - thanks for making this blog so popular, I'll try and keep the content original and fresh! :)

Aerofoil receives more high praise, Vampire Castle on the way

Two news items today - reviewingit.com have done a full page review of my tiny Aerofoil application - more praise! Thanks guys!

I'm also working on my first free Nintendo DS game, the first part in the series goes by the name "Vampire Castle". It's not moving as fast as I'd like because it's the second time I have ever used C++ since leaving university in 2000(!), and the graphics and sound are very time consuming for one person whose main tools are a pencil, scanner and GIMP!

I'm keeping this one under tight wraps for now, but it is progressing (first builds should be out in a couple of months - a realistic timescale) and hopefully it will be an award winner too.

Aerofoil 1.4.2 & Gesture Magic Preview 2

Having said I wouldn't do any more Aerofoil updates I did another- but I won't be taking this project any further because in my mind version 1.4.1 was as simple and elegant as I could get it.

New features added in 1.4.2:
- Added an optional configuration file to set default values, including showing messages, showing the hibernate option etc.
- Added double click icon event handler
- Upgraded the Visual Studio Project to Visual Studio 2008.

On the downside because of the the user definable config the size just went up 3k (10%), not that 32K vs 29.5K is really going to break the bank!

Usual places for the C# source code or just the download

Finally.... this is what is taking up my project time.....

Free laptop utility to disable Aero's Glass when on battery

"Hot" on the powersave/cooling subject of my last post yesterday evening I threw together a small tray icon application Aerofoil to disable Aero's Glass interface when on battery power. Hopefully this should cut heat and increase battery length a bit!

I'm hoping Microsoft add this functionality into the standard power manangement features of Vista at some point and this isn't needed anymore, but if they don't and the utility proves popular, I may add some other powersave functionality not currently available - although I don't know what yet, maybe options to disable sound, slow down gpu clockspeeds via atitool profile or similar!

GPL'd source code will be available shortly - I've not got time at the moment to bung in the relevant licence comments, readme and package up nicely. This should be in the next day or two.

Updated version

Get Aerofoil here!
Source code


If you find this useful and want the new features please post a comment or suggestions!