Little Big Tomatoes » QiiNinja

Shuriken R6 released

gyurisc — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 07:10:00 +0000

Shuriken R6 is out. The changes are:

Added Action as an extension point. Still need some polish though.
Added new Actions for Shuriken, namely: Settings, About, Exit
Settings is for displaying the setting dialog, and About is for displaying the about window.
Exit quits the application.

All comments and feedback are welcome. Enjoy!

Shuriken R5 released

gyurisc — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 11:38:48 +0000

This morning I made a new release of Shuriken. This release is called Shuriken R5.

In this release, the following has been changed:

An xml file is used to store preferences for Shuriken, with these changes the app should load and save the settings without any problems, so if you pick a new hotkey to launch Shuriken, it will use the hotkey you picked after restart.
Shuriken now remembers and stores the search terms used for launching an item. As you are using the search term more frequently to launch an item, the search term will be promoted for that subject and the subject will be on top of the search list.
For example, If you are using the search term Reader to launch Google Reader, but you have Adobe Reader installed then normally Adobe would be the first on the search list and the default. All you need to do is to select Google Reader, so Shuriken can register the hit and the next time the default will be Google Reader.

If you are interested only using this release, just go to the Shuriken R5 release and download Shuriken.zip, extract it and click on Shuriken.exe to start using it. If you are interested in looking into the code then download Shuriken Sources.zip. To compile you will need Visual Studio.NET 2008 or Visual C# 2008 Express.

All comments and feedback are welcome. Enjoy!

Shuriken R4

gyurisc — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 08:11:47 +0000

This morning I made a new release of Shuriken. This release is called Shuriken R4.

In this release changes are made in order to add commands as an extension. As an example a new plugin has been added to this release called System Commands. The System Commands plugin has the following commands implemented

Lock – locks your computer
Sleep – sends your computer to sleep mode.
Shutdown – shuts down your computer.
Restart – restarts your computer.
Logoff – Logs you off from the computer.
ForceRestart – Forces restart.
ForceShutdown – Forces shutdown

If you are interested only using this release, just go to the Shuriken R4 release and download Shuriken.zip, extract it and click on Shuriken.exe to start using it. If you are interested in looking into the code then download Shuriken Sources.zip. To compile you will need Visual Studio.NET 2008 or Visual C# 2008 Express.

All comments and feedback are welcome. Enjoy!

QiiNinja is no more… long live Shuriken!

gyurisc — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 14:39:47 +0000

Not so long ago, I decided that I need to make QiiNinja free and share the source code as well. The motivation behind this decision is that a., I am more interested in having a really good utility in my hands than to make some money and b., I do not have the time anymore to work as much as needed on it.

So I created a new project on codplex.com and uploaded all the sources. For this new start, I renamed QiiNinja to Shuriken. As you see there is even a new icon to reflect the name change.

You can get the binaries, the source and post bugs or feature requests at codeplex.com under the name Shuriken.

http://www.codeplex.com/shuriken

QiiNinja 0.3.9.7 is out

admin — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:25:21 +0000

QiiNinja 0.3.9.1 is out

gyurisc — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 19:26:34 +0000

QiiNinja v.0.3.9.1 is out now. I recently switched from ClickOnce based deployment to .msi (Windows Installer and WiX) based installation and this release is focused on making the .msi installer working better. The short list of the changes:

Changed .msi to detect prerequisites, such as .NET Framework v.20
Changed .msi to add shortcut for QiiNinja in start menu.
Changed .msi to launch QiiNinja during the installation.
Changed .msi to add QiiNinja to the list of the auto starting application at system startup.
Fixed smaller cosmetic issue on the UI.

Unfortunately, the .msi installer is not perfect yet. When the installer is launched on a computer, where QiiNinja is already installed the following error message is displayed:

Another version of this product is already installed. Installation of this version cannot continue. To configure or remove the existing version of this product, use Add/Remove Programs on the Control Panel.

I still could not figure out what is the root behind this message, but I am working on it. Until then, the only workaround is to remove the old version first and then install the new one.

QiiNinja v0.3.8.2 is out

gyurisc — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:30:27 +0000

QiiNinja v.0.3.8.2 has been released today. I added some new features. Now it is possible to control Windows Media Player and iTunes. The new actions are Play/Pause, Next Song, Previous Song, Volume Down, Volume Up and Mute. And as always there are some bug fixed.

QiiNinja Release History

What is QiiNinja anyway?

gyurisc — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 20:12:58 +0000

QiiNinja is the tool I use in my work every day to launch and find applications and web pages quickly. It started out of frustration as I was spending more and more time trying to find things in my start menu on my Windows machine. I thought it would be nice to have a tool that would let me start things faster, so I can finish earlier. I started to write this tool in .NET and C# (I feel I need to mention this since I am a computer a geek), got to the working prototype in no time and I felt that this was really helping me.

Then I saw Quicksilver and it was love at first sight. I have never ever experienced something as seamless as this, never ever thought that an application could have had this great of an impact on my daily life. It was a Zen-like moment for me! It even made me to buy an iMac – purchase I will never regret – so I can get to know Quicksilver better. And while I am not hooked on OS X and the rest of the Mac things – I proudly run Windows on my machine – this perfect bond between me and Quicksilver has remained ever since. I thought that I needed to turn this tool of mine into something similar to Quicksilver, so I could experience the "act without doing" on Windows, too!

And here I am trying to fix a bug a day and add one more feature to QiiNinja, so it will be better and better each day, and in the meantime I am learning things that I would never have learnt without it.

This is an amazing journey for me and I am not quite where I want to be yet, but I am slowly getting there. It’s the tool I use every day.

Give it a try, and any feedback, positive or negative, would be appreciated.

QiiNinja v0.3.8 is out

admin — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 06:24:32 +0000

QiiNinja v0.3.8 is out. This version can do web searches now and ithas some bug fixes.

Download QiiNinja.