The latest DJTechTools-controller called MidiFighter finally arrived in my frowsty cave. It’s made for people (like me) in mind for whom all electrical devices are like rocket surgery.
I’m going to describe in this post how I assembled it. It won’t be the last post about the nifty device as the creator also thought about its extensibility. But therefore you should have a clue about what you’re doing.
Native Instruments surely takes its time to officially support Numark’s NS7. While most users are content with Serato Itch in the meantime, others strive for the ability to use their beloved Controller in Traktor Pro. DJ Quartz is one of them and he has been working hard to create the best Mapping-File out there.
Although it has lots of flaws and shouldn’t be used in a live environment, I’ve created a small video to show you what is possible as of now. Please note that the plattern-support is broken in Traktor Version 1.24. I’m using version 1.23 in the video. I recommend to view it in HD.
plattern-related
I received several questions about the mysterious 4th button in the title-bar of my screenshots. It is time to shed some light on it.
I’ve been suffering under Microsoft’s non-existant window-management while using only one screen for nearly a decade so I decided it was time to look for some tool which puts a window always on top. After trying a gazillion who all promised relief, it was the open-source-tool Filebox eXtender, which helped me to sleep straight through the nights again. It helps you cluttering your title-bars even more, by (optionally) adding buttons with the following functions to it:
There is a load of options for each of these functions, so you can spice it up to your taste.
Only the always on top thing appealed to me, because Windows 7 already comes with the folder-stuff on board and I’m not a big fan of the roll-up-feature.
Attention: The additional icons might be misplaced in some applications like the Office 2007-Suite, but overall they’re most of the time at the right spot.
I would like to pin a window via keyboard-shortcut, but am too not willing time to include that feature on my own. So if anyone knows a tool which can do this AND displays a nice always-on-top-icon in the title-bar I would be all for it.
This entry is rather for German readers, but maybe someone of you finds it…god knows why…helpful as well.
The droid sadly has no umlaut-keys. There are 2 alternative ways to type these in using the keyboard.
If you press the key corresponding to its umlaut longer than 1 second, you will see this menu:
As you can see it contains a lot of funny characters.
Either press the one of your choice on the screen or navigate to it using the 5-way d-pad and finally press on its middle button.
There is however a second way to achieve this a little faster
Press either Shift or ALT, then to one of them you didn’t press. The textmarker changes after pressing ‘u’ into two dots:
If you press a,o or u the corresponding umlaut will appear. Writing ‘ß’ is even easier. Just press Shift, Alt, then ’s’
I doubt that this will work on Droid’s. It would be nice if anyone could confirm this.
I’m likely to build an app soon making the whole process a bit easier because umlauts are needed fairly often in the German language.
Microsoft started a few months ago a contest for Windows 7-specific programs called Code7Contest.
The task was to submit a 3 minute or shorted video presenting that program. Since I already had a video of the Jumplist-Launcher which was 2:57 minutes long, I decided to give it a try.
It hit me like a ton of bricks when I received an e-mail in december saying that Jumplist-Launcher is one of the winner-applications of the category ‘Early Bird’. YEAAAAH! The count of submissions must’ve been pretty low for this category because entries had to be submitted in August 2009, which was ca. 2 months before the regular end of the contest, but who cares about that.
Today the prize finally arrived and is going to be a good paperweight, reminding me that there’s still a lot to do for the Jumplist Launcher.
Next week, I’ll post an entry about the Jumplist Launcher-plans for 2010.
I also want to thank Hans Christian Løberg for allowing me to use his icon for the Jumplist Launcher.
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