Ace32

In this file ...

What’s new

Background & Feature Introduction

Files In the Package

Installation & Un-installation

1 Brief Introduction

User Manual

1 Alarm Schedule Configuration

1.1 Ms Access2 Not Installed

1.2 Ms Access2 Installed

1.3 How to

2 Using the Software

3 The Todo List

4 The ClipPad

5 Reboot

Future Features

Registration & Contacting the Author

The Legal Stuff

Something for programmers

What’s new

Version 2.1: Sunday, June 28, 1998

Mineral bug fixing.
Built-in thesaurus ability in Clip pad.
Built-in configuration.
Remember its location when started.
Introduced in the "none-temporary" schedule concept.
A simple installation interface.

Version 2.0:

32bit program.
Recompiled with VB5. Same code but much faster.
Use DAO now, no jet engine headaches any more.
Stays in "system tray", the lower-right corner of 95/NT.
Built-in spell checker for Clip Pad. Borrowed from MS Word. Applicable if MS Word installed.

Version 1.5:

Shut down window easily.
Todo list has import and export ability.
Todo list has a horizontal scroll bar.
If you leave the alarm window un-handled down in the overlapping windows, it will be prompted up to top ever 3 minutes.

Version 1.4:

There is a Clip Pad. I can't say too much how I need it. "A good way to save little notes, lists and URL 's that need to be handy while editing web pages, composing e-mail…". Often did I find myself go a long way clicking to launch the notepad just for holding those kind of information temporally. Now it is always within an easy reach and get launched almost instantly.
Can play wave sound for alarm now. Customizable.

Version 1.3:

May minor changes to make it more convenient to use.
The most significant improvement is the implementation of "Todo list".

Background & Feature Introduction

I’ve seen many reminders that can remind you of a certain event on a certain day in a year, But their abilities to remind you of daily activities are poor.

What are the daily activities actually? Why I need to be reminded of? As a programmer, I am so easy to devote in the programming that I forget everything. And my ACE ( "Alarm Clock for Everyday" ) will alarm me the regular "daily activities": remind me to drink some water, to twist my neck once a while and not to miss my lunch hour...

You can see two kinds of reminding here. One is the fixed schedules for every day, like the lunch time; and the other (and maybe more important) is activities that have to be performed regularly in a day. The best example for this is, if I fall sick, I have to take medicines every four hours. Needless to say, I always forget.

The most important thing for me is to easily input those unpredictable events, which can be postponed phone call, unscheduled guest visiting, hold backed tasks, or any trivial things you just want to be reminded of later. I do mean trivial things. Once you are accustomed to be reminded by the computer, you will find many many trivial things. Yes, I agree that if I had a secretary, I wouldn’t need my ACE at all. But what if I were the poor secretary? :-) Hope you like it.

My Ace was initially a simple time showing bar. Time has passed since, and my Ace has grown up. It is no longer merely a alarm clock any more. Now it is a must-have tool for me. The interface remains simple, though. But don't let the simplicity delude you. Powerful features hidden inside! Many efforts have been made to make it easier every day work.

There is a Todo list! Most of us have such experiences: when we are busy with something, an idea hit upon us and we say to ourselves: "yes, I’ll remember to do it later". When we are finally free, we can no longer recall the cleaver idea any more or simply forget all about it. The next time we are careful enough to write it down. But later we are sad to find out we lose it. That’s what my todo list is for. When an idea hit upon you, briefly write it down in the todo list. You will never lose it or forget it any more. You waste no time to reach it, the todo list is just a click away! What’s more, as programmers, we know the things to do recently, but we can’t fix them to certain hours or days. Just put them in the todo list, you won’t miss anything and won’t get into trouble of rescheduling after rescheduling.

There is a Clipad! Really a must-have for everyday work. Please refer to the what's news section for details.

Reboot easily. Why click a long way just for simple reboot? Why I have to press shift in conjunction of the click and hold it for a while just in order to merely reboot window?

Files In the Package

Ace.diz	The information file
Ace.exe	"Alarm Clock for Everyday" program
Ace.mdb	Database file
Ace.htm	This file
Ace.wav	Wave file for alarm message. Copy whatever you like over it to change to new sound
Ace?.wav	Alternative alarm sound for you to choose

Installation & Un-installation

1 Brief Introduction

1 Installation

1.1 One word: "standard"

1.2 Many words:

1.2.1 Ace32.exe is a self-extraction file,

1.2.2 when Ace32.exe launched, it will unzip itself to its working directory, I set C:\WINTOOLS as the default. Change it to the directory for your favorite windows' tool.

1.2.3 It also make a shortcut in startup program group, so that Ace gets started when Window starts.

2 Un-installation

2.1 One word: "delete"

2.2 Many words:

2.2.1 In DOS, go to your favorite tool directory where my Ace installed.

2.2.2 Run "del Ace*.*"

2.2.3 That’s every thing. I don’t know why so many shareware use same file names as READ.ME or FILE_ID.DIZ. For it always cause me trouble when I try to install many small tools in the same directory, or deleting them. I personally think one tool with one DIZ file is perfect.

2.2.4 Delete shortcut in startup program group.

3 Working Environment

3.1 VB5 runtime.

User Manual

1 Alarm Schedule Configuration

1.1 Ms Access2 Not Installed

From Ace version 2.1, the standalone configuration program AceCfg.exe has been merged into Ace. They were separate programs before because I want to make Ace as small as possible. However, the compile result of VB5 is much larger than that of VB3, so I decide to merge them together and it eventually does not increase the program size too much (13%). You can quickly and easily configure it from now on. To launch it, just click "Config Alarm Schedule..." from the menu.

1.2 Ms Access2 Installed

ACE comes with a standard Ms Access 2.0 database, so you can configure it easily in Access. Alarm Double click "ACE.MDB" in your file browser, you will be presented with "Configure Alarm Schedule" form.

1.3 How to

No matter Access2 is installed, the configuration is almost the same. The first form seen is the "Configure Alarm Schedule" form. Click "system option" command button will bring up the input form for 3 default system parameters. Don’t panic, information are all self-explaining and together with examples. And, modifying, adding and deleting are all straight forward. You can easily try it out even if Access is new to you. Please be noted, I have left the database open, so that you can actually do anything: from examining my algorithm to making adjustments. I do not suggest doing any modifications unless you entirely know what the result would be.

All the fields in the forms are self-explaining. Just one thing: leave the field "periodical" zero will make it a fixed time schedule. Any none-zero will be the minutes between each periodical alarm.

2 Using the Software

1 Left click in the Ace window will bring up the "alarm schedule list" window, listing all the scheduled alarms, with the next alarm indicated by an "*". Besides the command button "ok", which closed the window, there are two command buttons -- "add" and "del". You can use them to add or delete a certain alarm easily.

2 Right click in the Ace window will bring up a pop-up menu.

2.1 "Toggle Title Bar" will toggle ACE from titled or none-titled. You can move it around only when it has a title bar.

2.2 "Add New" will add new events to schedule list. You are prompted to input time and message. You can about by hitting ESC key or choose "cancel".

2.3 "Todo List" will bring up the "todo list". See below.

2.4 "Clip Pad" will bring up the "ClipPad". See below.

2.5 "Suspend" will suspend the alarm message to show up. When you choose the "suspend", the menu changes to "Resume", and you can resume ACE by it. In fact, when you choose the "suspend" the clock stops to go, thus no alarm message any more. But when you resume, all the pending alarms will come one by one. To bypass all the alarms elapsed, try the "Re-Initialize".

2.6 "About" will say something (nice) about my product.

2.7 "Re-Initialize" will build up all information from MDB, alarm settings and Todo list. It will clear all those temporary schedules input in 2.2. And it can make those elapsed schedules reappear if you didn’t turn your computer off yesterday.

2.8 "Exit" will bring the program to an end.

2.9 "Shut down the computer" will shut down the computer.

2.10 "Restart the computer" will issue a BIOS reboot of the computer, sure shutdown window first.

2.11 "Restart windows" will restart only the windows system, do not bother config.sys and autoexec.bat.

3 Misc.

3.1 Temporally schedules will be cleared each time on program starts up, normally only when Window starts.

3.2 When the alarm time comes, you can reschedule it to a later time. This is very useful if you are busy at the moment and don’t want to just forget it. The default reschedule time is ten minutes later from current time, so that you can be remind of again and again every ten minutes.

3 The Todo List

The "todo list" is for storing things you intend to do in the future. You can

input (in the input box) and store message in it.
pop out a message from the todo list (into the input box) and then submit to schedule list.
simply pop out it, modify it and store it again.
Export your selection to clip board, and, delete them form the Todo list also.
Import Todo lists from clipboard, store them line by line.

Actually you can put anything into it that you want to stay there for a while. But please do not use single quotation mark in the Todo list. As time goes by, I now will not use it only as a Todo list any more, :-). It is now the most convenient place for me to place various small pieces of information, like:

urls I want to visit later.
Highlight part of a piece of information (web or tools review most often, or a file name specification), so that I can recall what I have skimmed over. Whenever I have free time, I will know what to do. It is such a helpful clue that even I have forget where I have save the full story, I can do a search afterwards. My brain get much extended!

And even, when I come across new / useful word or expressions (English is my second language), I would store them in Todo list, so that I can do constant brush up upon them.

At times we would think the Todo input box is not big enough to show long information, well, try double click on it!

Tips:

If you want the multi-lined clipboard be stored into one entry of Todo list, first paste it into the input box.

To rearrange the order of the Todo list, we can export all of them to clip board, rearrange the order in my ClipPad, and finally import back.

My Todo list tends to be overfilled too easily. I don't mean there is any limit for the "Todos", I just mean that there are more and more of "Todos" I am depositing into it. When the Todo list be filled with many long term "todos", or useful information, I will put them away in Treepad -- a freeware I strongly recommend (from Henk Hagedoorn <hjh@usa.net> http://www.freebyte.com). Just use the export function.

Do you think the Todo list is just for what I've listed above? Think twice, think widely! Here is another way of using it: use it as a clipboard for useful information. Let me first begin with a tip from Troy Brophy, Assistant Online Editor, The Help Channel: "Did you know the connection Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer makes to an {FTP } server in order to download large files is often much slower than a good old FTP client? Instead of clicking the link to begin the download through your browser, look at where the link leads, then use your FTP client to retrieve the file. The bigger the file, the more time you save!" I store the following line in one Todo item: X:\...path...\CUTEFTP\CUTFTP32.EXE Local=d:\temp When I want to download something, I get it out and paste into DOS prompt, and then paste the ftp://... location afterwards... The cuteftp will fetch the file I want automatically. My last tip for using cuteftp on directory names: Adding a '\' to the end of the directory name will cause cuteftp to go to that directory, whereas leave it off, will cause cuteftp to fetch the whole directory.

Finally, I can’t help to reveal an undocumented feature -- try left click in the Ace window with shift key press at the same time!

4 The ClipPad

A handy tool that suit for all my needs.

Always stays right at my elbow
Launch instantly
List all command (I could imagine) that can be common used
Reach all common used command within a single click
Satisfy both mouse users and keyboard lovers
Well suit for information gathering and editing
There is even a stop watch

The ClipPad can hold up to 30K of text, and there is no difference in memory usage on how much information it holds. The whole program will take only 2% of my 32M memory load (Win95). Quite a good bargain. :-)

All the menu items and the command buttons are very clear by themselves:

"Setting"

"Always on Top"

"Edit"

"Select All"

"Cut"

"Copy"

"Paste"

"Font +"

"Font -"

"ClipBoard"

"Subjoin"

"Append Time"

"Close"

Something perhaps I need further explaining:

"ClipBoard"	It makes the "ClipPad" the same as the text that the Windows clip board holds. (You don't ever need the Clip board viewer anymore :->). It is actually represent four clicks: "Select All", "Copy", "Select All", "Paste". The side effect of this command, benefit actually, is that the Windows clipboard now holds text without word format any more.
"Subjoin"	Well, I mean "append". I choose this word just to let the keyboard shortcut close to those Ctrl-C, Ctrl-A... It will append the content of the clipboard at the end of the ClipPad (after a intended CR LF). It is maybe the best information collection tool with the "Always on Top" option on.
"Append Time"	It will append the current time at the end of the ClipPad (after a intended CR LF). It will be useful when you ask yourself "How long have I spent on that?" or "When did I start?"

I provide two kinds of controls. The command buttons is for mouse users. And the menu provides the shortcut keys for keyboard lovers, like me :-). I don't use bitmap toolbar but use plain text command buttons because I think the former is just a waste of space.

Besides using it as a temporary place for holding information, you will soon find many ways of your own to use it. Such as, use it as a tool to wipe off unnecessary words formats in M$ Exchange or Words, use it as an information collection tool, use it to edit and paste the right thing into your M$ DOS programs… Soon you would think my ClipPad is a must have for you!

5 Reboot

If you have obtained my previous version (version 1.4 or bellow), you will know why I add this feature. Here is the message that once goes to the "Something for Programmers" section:

My win95 hangs now and then when shutting down (I don't know why, but not a single time in my Ace). I normally terminate all programs in the start up group (including my Ace) the next time before shut down. I have done everything I could in the main form unload event to end gracefully -- stop the timer, unload the Todo and Clipad form… I really don't know whether my Ace would ever be a troublemaker when shutting down.

Now the shooting season (troubleshooting) is over. With my three nice choices, you can reboot quite at easy. I do not start a long clicking from "start" any more once I have this feature. And I think my "restart window only" is really a neat choice. Mind you, you will not be bothered with a silly confirm message box, asking whether you really want to reboot, or something. So, do be careful. You can always "cancel" the reboot if there are any pending jobs, though.

When I do things, I would do them perfectly. For some real gurus, maybe they want to control the shutdown procedure all by themselves. Maybe they want to shut down more tasks before shut down window. Yes, why not take fully control by ourselves! So here is the feature for them: You can terminate my Ace from DOS batch program. And you can shutdown window95 from batch also (a tip from the freeware "K/oS x-setup", which can configure dozens of win95 secrets to your content, at: http://www.kos.hwc.com).

Here is the batch file that I use to terminate my Ace and shutdown window95:

WinExit.bat

@Ace exit

@RUNDLL32 user,ExitWindows

Put it in the same directory of my Ace. Create a shortcut of it on the desktop. Choose a nice icon for the shortcut... I use, which is quite self-explaining, right? Finally, check the "Close on exit " in the program tab of the shortcut property. Now we're all set. Try click on it, ... boom ... :-)

Future Features

Have I said my ACE lacks the ability of long term reminding? Nooo waaayyy. It’s simple to implement. Just give me sometime... What’s important, we don’t want to be remind something like "Buy mon a birthday present" early in the morning when we have many other things in mind and forget it after several hours. My ACE will let you define the alarm time for the day for long term events. And there will be two choices: remind in the morning or in the afternoon.

Registration & Contacting the Author

This program is free, but not public domain, and is (c) 1997 by Sun Tong. I think most of you would like it. I am sure it can be a five-star freeware and want to prove it. Please tell you friends to download it from ZD net for it is so small. Feel free to distribute this program as much as you like, but you may not make any modifications to the program and this file. You are not required to pay any money to use this program; However as 'payment', I kindly and strongly request you to send me an email. I want to know where my program goes.

Email syntax:

To: suntong _at_ geocities -dot- com

Subject: Register Ace <Your Country> <Your state>

Body: <Maybe blank, Any comments, bug reports, etc, are

welcome>

Comments:

You are to key in the information that are underlined. Please note that those words do not have to be underlined in your email system. And you should substitute the information in the <>.

Your country: Please use your internet country code. For example, China is CN, America is US.

Your state: Please choose a common used name or initial.

And you are warmly welcome to my home page, where you may find other kinds of my free stuffs.

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/2659

The Legal Stuff

The author, Sun Tong, is not responsible for any side effects this program may cause. To the best of my knowledge, this program will not damage any data or hardware that is connected to your computer. However, you the user, by using this program, take full responsibility for any effects that may result.

Something for programmers

I write this program in VB5. There is still something I can't solve: I've set the App.TaskVisible = False to remove application from taskbar, but it still there... Any idea?