iSS Essentials Update

It was time for an update to iSS Essentials. This brings it to version 2.0.0.

The updates are:

iSS SciCalc 3.0:

This is the biggest update. Calc Pro 1.0 and SciCalc 2.3 have been merged and will now be known as SciCalc 3.0. This adds constants, unit conversions and graphing along with the easy to use interface of Calc Pro. The Calc Pro name will now be carried on by Panoramic Software which has done an impressive job of improving the look at feel of Calc Pro as well as adding a ton of features.

iSS Notepad 1.1.0:

Fixed the italic font bug
Added Document Info showing the word count, character count and full file name and path

iSS Task Manager 1.1.0:

Added "Smart Shut Down" and "Smart Soft Reset". These two features are almost the same and I've wanted them ever since we released Essentials. If you reset or turn off your device using these options in the menu - Task Manager will try to gracefully close all running applications first. What this means is - you won't lose changes to documents or settings of programs you left open. A much nicer way to reset your phone.

iSS Task Switcher 1.1.0:

I noticed a drawing error on my iMate JAQ3 on the menu. I couldn't reproduce it on any other devices but I thought it was worth fixing anyways.

I also added the above mentioned "Smart Soft Reset" to iSS Task Switcher on the quick launch bar (its the pretty new blue icon).

As always - you can buy iSS Essentials or any of the individual applications from Wireless-Apps: http://www.wireless-apps.net/

If you already have the full version and would like to upgrade - simply download the most recent trial version and re-install the software. It will retain the "full version" status along with your current settings.

Grab the latest demo from http://www.wireless-apps.net/ or http://www.implicitsoftware.com/

How to end a task in Vista without the Task Mananger

I had something happen today that I've never seen on any version of Windows that I can remember.

The Task Manager crashed. More specifically - it continued to run but was completely unresponsive. Now to be fair this sort of thing has happened in the past - however - it would always indicate a major failure and require a reboot. Strangely the rest of my system was happy and responsive so I didn't see any need to reboot.

This of course was a new challenge - how to kill the Task Manager without using the Task Manager. Well it turns out its quite simple and required very little effort.

I opened a command prompt, and typed in "help". It returned a list of commands and I spotted the two I needed quite quickly - TASKLIST & TASKKILL.

Tasklist gave a list of running tasks as you would expect and TaskKill allowed me to end a task.

To kill the Task Manager the command is "Taskkill /im taskmgr.exe"

I think the bigger lesson in this post is the command line help is remarkably useful (as least it is under Windows Vista). I haven't tested this under other flavors of Windows so your results may vary.

Or maybe the lesson is the Task Manager is less stable in Windows Vista compared to previous versions.