viziblr

As 2012 reaches its conclusion and as I sit listening to Chuck Mangione's “Feels So Good” on Pandora, I thought it was time to reflect about the this blog's progress.

First, a very big thanks to everyone who reads and submits comments. I enjoy the lively discussion.

When I started this blog in late 2009, the blog had maybe 10 unique visitors per day. Take a look at the numbers below. You can see a massive growth over the last year with Unique Visitors going from 2K per month to just over 10K per month.

2012 has been a great year for the blog and I am looking forward to more in 2013.

Thanks again,
-Saveen

Often I need to explore an issue around using C# with the Visio COM automation classes. Invariably, I rebuild the same initial project each time and go through the same basic steps of having to remember exactly how to use Document.OpenEx to load a stencil.

To save myself, and you that time, I created a simple starter C# project. It builds a command line app that should get you started. The EXE simply starts Visio 2010, creates a new doc, loads the “basic” stencil, then draws a rectangle, and finally drops the “rounded rectangle master”.

You can get a ZIP file of the Visual Studio 2012 project on my SkyDrive.

Link: http://sdrv.ms/V7O0Iq

[Update on 2013–06–23] Please go here: The Windows and Wacom Tablet Nightmare is Over    

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Thanks to one of the readers of my previous post on the topic of Wacom tablets and Windows 8, there may be something that will remove the dynamic feedback effects.

Because I still do not believe this is the correct, long-term fix, I haven't incorporated into my Fix My Pen tool yet. Instead I've made a .REG file available that makes the changes.

The file is located here: http://sdrv.ms/ZW9CNG 

The name of the file is win8-disable-pen-dynamic-feedback.reg

Please download the .REG file, and run it. It will prompt you to make some registry changes, please let it do so. Once it is finished, you will probably have to reboot to see the effect. I can confirm it works on my system, but would like to see how well it works for others.

The contents of the .REG file are below

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\TabletPC]
"TurnOffPenFeedback"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Cursors]
"ContactVisualization"=dword:00000000

 

The .REG file is based on the comments found on this thread: http://forum.wacom.eu/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=11674 (see the comment made by Wacom on Mon 12. Nov 2012, 10:42)

More information concerning the registry keys this workaround uses:

Gesture Visualization (Windows)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh924310(v=vs.85).aspx

Contact Visualization (Windows)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh924309(v=vs.85).aspx

In Windows, you'll need to use special software, drivers, or use registry keys. In comparison, OS X comes with a built-in feature to banish this devil.

I wanted to create a programmatically-generated visualization showing how typefaces were related. Unfortunately, what I was missing was the raw data in a convenient format (for example an Excel file or CSV format).

So after a great deal of manual screen-scraping and looking through Wikipedia, I have my initial list stored here: (http://sdrv.ms/WlavyF)

Please feel free to use this data in your own projects. And certainly, if you have suggestions or corrections, please let me know.

The metadata stored includes:

• Typeface name
• Designer
• Year Created
• Designers
• Wikipedia Link

NOTE: The database does not contain any sample images of the typeface.

Here is a screenshot of what it looks like. (click on the image to see a larger version)