It has been over... 18 months since my last post! Sadly, as life gets more busy, couple of my projects will have to be discontinued or put on hold indefinitely. This is the official status summary:

Menu Inventor

While there are still many users out there, unfortunately it will no longer developed. The program is still available for download on the internet, so feel free to continue using it. Make sure to apply the latest patch.

Chemix

Chemix gets a thousand hits each month and there has been a regular stream of user feedback. Although I wasn't able to work on it since release of 2.0, I really appreciate all your comments and will take your suggestions on board once I work on it again. Chemix will continue to be developed in future.

Fudge

I originally intended to grow this quick proof-of-concept into a proper game/graphics engine for my own first-person gravity-based logic puzzle game. Due to lack of time, I cannot continue working on it in near future, though I will soon be publishing the source code on github for those who are interested, along with instructions on how to make it all work.

New projects

I have recently started a couple of interesting projects. news of which I will be publishing soon. Stay tuned!

Menu Inventor 1.2 is progressing slowly, but it will take a long time before it is finally released. In the meantime, small patches to Menu Inventor 1.1 will be released, fixing some of the most annoying bugs and implementing most requested small features.

Today comes the first patch, which adds these:

• Minify feature: By default, the Trigger takes 48x48 pixels of your screen. Double click it to reduce it to 16x16.
• Start up position: Select one of the presets, or set your own custom one.
• Always on top: Trigger always floats above all applications, which can annoy in many situations. An option has been added to disable this and force Menu Inventor to appear in the taskbar.
• Retain menus after launching an item: Menus automatically hide when an item has been launched. An option has been added to disable this.This feature has been reported to be broken! Discuss here

Batch Add (Add from folder) feature allows you to add executable and shortcut files from a specified folder. This feature has been available in Menu Inventor from version 1.0a and has been enhanced in 1.1.

How to access this feature

1.1

Right-click anywhere on a pane and select "Add from folder..."

After three years, we have finally broken the 10 000 visitors barrier, thanks to the move to a new server, able to accommodate for a larger traffic. Also, thanks to recent mention of Menu Inventor on fileforum.betanews.com and the Spanish forum taringa.net, more than 500 users have visited micron in one week.

Menu Inventor is now officially being rewritten in C++!. The new tree system from the current development in VB6 has been successfully ported (though not yet extensively tested) and all of Menu Inventor system is undergoing re-design in proper OO fashion!

After some quick research and experimentation, most GUI toolkits were rejected, in favour of wxWidgets, chosen mostly for it's mature development and design paradigms. And because it's the only one I managed to get running under Visual C++ 9.0 . Also, some tests have been carried out: the click-drag-anywhere Trigger feature is already implemented with success!

Having learnt new stuff over the term this year, I sat down to rethink the development of Menu Inventor. With Visual Basic 6.0's crippled implementation of OOP, is there any point re-writing it in the same language? I have already pushed the limits of the language by being able to e.g. implement callbacks through a sub-classing procedure. If flexibility and future development are to be desired, I am seriously thinking about switching to C++, making use of the wxWidgets GUI toolkit.

Development of Menu Inventor 1.2 is now officially under way! Though it has been referred to as version 2.0 in some of my posts and pages, I decided to revert to a more "modest" number. However, in the same way as 1.1 was a great improvement compared to 1.0, 1.2 will bring the same advancement in technology and feature set.. Most notably, 1.2 is being rewritten completely from scratch, with more robust and flexible code.

Menu Inventor is now capable of changing skins. Look in the Showcase section to see the screenshots, then download the one you want or wait for the Skinning Guide to teach yourself how to create a skin! If you are bold enough, try editing an existing skin on your own - it is not at all difficult!

Installing a skin
Firstly make sure that you got Menu Inventor 1.1 installed (a dumb remark, I know). Download a skin and then unzip its contents into the same folder as you installed Menu Inventor. Do NOT put it into a separate folder, Menu Inventor won't be able to load the skin. Change the skin from the Extended Trigger.

Showcase:

Download

zip	Mac OSX 28.8.2007 | 453 kB A Mac OSX-like skin
zip	Orange 9.9.2007 | 432 kB Modern, tech-looking skin, based on the Blender 3D Orange color scheme.

Hi!

Time is pressing me, so I finished version 1.1 and I am really glad that after such a long time the sharp version of 1.1 si now finally released!

Honestly, I am quite tired - getting the whole thing done 6 days ahead than planned, but I needed to move onto other things. So, ENJOY! .

Menu Inventor 1.1

11.9 Update Sorry about the broken links, especially on the Skins page, they are now fixed. Shame on me!