Episode 16: The Rusty Chest

       It's been ages since you tidied up your house, and the place is starting to look more like a junkyard. Or maybe you're moving to a new house. In the process of packing things up and sorting them, you find that old, rusty chest where you once used to keep your most valuable things. That chest that you hoped would not burn in the case where a fire breaks out, so that you don't lose those important things. You stare at the forgotten items in the chest. They hold precious memories, but are no longer valuable now. I hope this blog post will be like that chest to me in the future. This is where I will upload any free apps I create for anyone to download for free.

          The Electronics Entertainment Expo Eye (E4)

              Since E3 is on now and I don't have enough time to properly browse through my favorite gaming news websites for updates, I created an E3 specific RSS reader. I did it in only four hours so it has almost no extra features apart from automatically (every ten minutes) refreshing it's list of E3 headlines, letting you view a summary of the news, a preview of the source webpage and optionally, opening that webpage in your default browser.

            As I said, I did this in a hurry so I had no time to do any proper error handling. Every time it encounters an error, such as failing to save a news item, it will simply skip whatever it was trying to do that caused the error, meaning it won't save the news item in my example. So it is not a perfect app by any stretch of the imagination, but it does what I want it to. It will keep me posted on all things E3 without my browsing through numerous web pages from numerous websites and you can download it for free here!

EDIT: Sad to say, but the download link for this app is no longer working. Even I have lost the original code I wrote so I've lost the app permanently. The good news is I've gotten better at both making software and backing up my code and apps online so the links to the other apps on this page are working perfectly and things will only get better.

      The GIF Viewer Simple

           Many times while surfing the net, you come across GIF images, images that animate in a loop almost like a short video playing repeatedly, but without audio. They can be used for educational purposes or entertainment purposes, or anything really. Thing is I noticed that most image viewers don't display GIFs. When I try to open a GIF on my computer, it opens with Internet Explorer (my default browser isn't even explorer, it's firefox). I got tired of this so I've created a very simple app that can display GIF images.

An educational GIF. Mode of vibration of phonons. Boring physics stuff.

         I'm very busy with basketball, school and stuff right now, so I didn't take the time to make a fully featured app. The app opens your default pictures folder when you double-click any space within the app and displays any picture you select, GIF or not. There's no next or previous button to cycle through your images and you cannot modify an image in anyway from this app, but it does what I want it to do. Whenever I click on a GIF on my computer, I no longer have to wait for Internet Explorer to start up. My GIF Viewer opens them now. Download it here.

Bill Cosby wiggling his head. Download the GIF to test my app

A screenshot of the Image Viewer. That's Hulk doing what he does best...Smashing!

      Instructions: To set this app as your default GIF image viewer, right click on any GIF picture on your hard drive, go to "Open With" then click on "Choose default program...". A dialog will open and display a few programs. Ignore them and click on the "browse" button. From there, follow the path (replace Tolu619 here with the user name that is logged in on your computer) "C:\Users\Tolu619\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\GIF Viewer Simple". You must have already installed the app, of course. Do this and the app will automatically open any GIF image you click on, while your default image viewer will open your other images. If you select multiple GIF images and hit the 'enter' key on your pc, each one will be displayed in a separate window as I didn't take the time to add tabs or any other feature. Here is the download link again. Let me know if it works ok on your pc.

The Ideal Gas Law Simulator

     For my final year project in the university, I created the Ideal Gas Law Simulator to be used by physics lecturers to demonstrate to students the effect of changes in the atmospheric conditions on the motion of gas molecules with the aid of a three dimensional video representation of the molecules of the gas. It is as if the observer were shrunk to sub-atomic size to watch the motion of the molecules in real time.You can get more info here or download it here (9.28B download, comes with manual). 

My Ideal Gas Law Simulator in Simulation Mode