Create Ribbon UI for Applications with Visual Ribbon Creator

Ribbon was one of the feature introduced by Microsoft in their applications. Office 2007 had ribbon feature and now many of the in build tools in Windows 7 like Paint, WordPad etc feature ribbon. Visual Ribbon Creator (VRC) is a flexible tool for Windows 7 Applications Developers to create a Windows 7 Ribbon visually for their applications. With this tool, you can easily build the ribbon feature for applications. The interface of application is simple and easy to use.

Features;

• Supports Ribbon Elements: Commands, Application Menu, Tabs, Contextual Tabs, Groups, Buttons, Drop Down Buttons, Font Controls, Colour Selection Controls
• Unlimited undo/redo
• Automatically converts supported image files (BMP,JPG,PNG,GIF) to 32-bit Ribbon BMP files.
• Generates a ready-to-be-used DLL (Supports both x86 and x64 DLL generation).
• Command-Line build for scripting/batch file usage.
• Automatic updates

VRC basic edition is free, and it generates a ready-to-use Ribbon DLL and includes a tab with copyright information. VRC needs Visual Studio 2005, 2008, 2010 or VC++ Express to be installed. Windows 7 SDK is also required. However you are not forced to use it from C++, as it generates a DLL that can be used by any other programming language.

Download Visual Ribbon Creator

Office 2010 Box Art

Polish site CentrumXP has revealed the official box art for Office 2010.

Download Microsoft Office 2010 Beta : http://windowsvj.com/wpblog/2009/11/download-microsoft-office-2010-beta/

Most popular email clients

If you have ever wanted to know which are the most popular email clients that people worldwide are using to read /open their emails, take a look at this graph.

Microsoft Outlook (including Outlook Express) is the most popular desktop email software followed by web-based email services from Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Hotmail.

These stats are based on the email client usage of more than 300 million people that was done by Campaign Monitor for some six months.

The company embeds a tracking image into their email messages and uses the referral information to determine the email client that was used to open that particular email.

That means if a person is reading his emails in offline mode or has turned off automatic image downloads (like in Gmail) or is using an email client that cannot display images (like older BlackBerry phones), his email client will go undetected.

It is also important to note that the above graph represents popularity of email clients and not email services. For instance, one could be using POP or IMAP to read his Gmail messages inside Outlook so that will increase the share of Outlook and not that of Gmail.

There’s little doubt that Yahoo! Mail is the more popular email service out there but another reason why its ranking so high in the list of email clients is because the free version of Yahoo Mail doesn’t offer POP functionality and therefore most people are using web browsers to check emails.

[VIA Digital Inspiration]

Google Image Swirhl

Google has released an interactive similar images explorer. The app is called Google Image Swirl, and it’s using the wonder wheel Flash visualization you might know from web search results.

Here’s how it works: you enter a query, like “lion”. After a bit of loading, and if your keyword is supported (not all queries are), you’ll be presented with some visual base categories Google could find:

Opening a category by clicking on it will start the star exploration, with your image in centre, surrounded by similar images. Clicking on a surrounding image will put it in focus, and new surrounding images are loaded dynamically:

Once you reached a final image with no more new neighbours, a click on it will take you to the original source site it’s crawled from:

In all of this, even due to its scripted Flash nature, the back button will take you to your last focus image. The app is fast, accessible, scaling pretty well to many keywords (not all – Google mentions there’s 200,000 at the moment), and on first glance it looks useful, too.