What's new in Desk Drive 1.8.5
Nov 28, 2011
- This update fixes an occasional but persistent crash when removing drive media.
New in Desk Drive 1.8.2 (Dec 6, 2009)
- The default settings exclude the A: drive now. This change will only affect new installs. There are some older systems out there that have floppy drives that spin up whenever Desk Drive checks the state of the drive. I still get a surprising number of emails about this. Old hardware never dies or at least dies slowly. I shouldn't complain. I still have a desktop system here at home in service with a manufacture date of November 1998.
- Desk Drive is now localized in Vietnamese. That’s 21 languages and growing. It’s super easy to translate Desk Drive to a new language. Just open DeskDrive.exe.xml in Notepad (don’t use Wordpad, Word or other word processors because they add extra, private character sequences that Desk Drive won’t understand) and edit the default language as appropriate. Then restart the program. Once you get things looking the way you want, send me the file and I’ll add it to the next release
New in Desk Drive 1.8.1 (Nov 16, 2009)
- Version 1.8 introduced Windows 7 compatibility and version 1.8.1 tweaks it a little more. I’ve found a few minor issues that likely no one but myself would notice. But like any author, I know my program for all its faults and not its strengths. So if you notice the changes between 1.8 and 1.8.1, good for you and remember there’s therapy available for people like us.
- While I had to make some minor changes to Desk Drive to make it Windows 7 compatible, I’ve also gained a feature without any work what so ever. If you set Desk Drive to open Windows Explorer automatically, it also closes the open window when the USB drive is removed. That’s something I’ve wanted for a while and it just seems to work on Windows 7 (on my box at least).
- A couple of usage notes on “Remembered icon positions”. First off, it won’t work if your desktop is set to “Auto arrange”. Makes sense when you think about it but it’s not obvious when you first encounter the problem. Also, very occasionally, I get a report about remembered icon positions not working on multi-monitor setups. I’ve never been able to run down the issue since it doesn’t happen here. However, there is a work around.
- In the DeskDrive.exe.config file there is a setting called Monitor Offset. It’s an X,Y pair. If icons are appearing on the wrong screen you can usually just set the X offset to the width of the primary monitor. Sometimes it’s the negative width. The multi-monitor API is suppose to handle these details but it doesn’t seem to always work. Probably a bug on my part but I’ve never been able to corner it.
New in Desk Drive 1.8 (Nov 4, 2009)
- Automatic drive/media shortcuts for your desktop.
New in Desk Drive 1.7.2 (Mar 31, 2009)
- Desk Drive 1.7.2 includes two new translations. Korean and Traditional Chinese. Thanks to everyone for helping with the translations. Also some minor bug fixes. Enjoy.
New in Desk Drive 1.7.1 (Jan 13, 2009)
- Version 1.7 of Desk Drive introduced a bug. When enough files were added or deleted from a removable device (like a USB stick), Desk Drive would add another shortcut to the desktop. This bug was related to the 1.7 feature showing total/free space for removable devices. Version 1.7.1 fixes this (hopefully).
- I’ve also had reports that the “Locus effect” is not always in the correct location. When monitors are positioned so that the primary monitor is negatively offset from the secondary monitor (monitor 1 is right of monitor 2), the Locus effect can appear on the wrong screen. Turns out that there is no good way to detect this and even if I did, I likely would not get it right for all circumstances. So, I’ve added a MonitorOffset setting to DeskDrive.exe.config that allows you to add an offset to the X and Y positions to compensate.
New in Desk Drive 1.7 (Jan 5, 2009)
- Just in time to welcome in the new year, Desk Drive 1.7 adds three new translations and a cool little feature suggested by one of our users.
- Version 1.7 adds additional information to the shortcut label of removable drives (i.e. USB sticks) indicating the total size and free space available on that drive. The example image below shows a 1GB flash drive with 500MB of free space.
- Also, three new languages join this release thanks to friends in Russia, Hungary and Poland. That boosts the total number of supported languages to 18.
New in Desk Drive 1.6.8 (Oct 31, 2008)
- Desk Drive 1.6.7 introduced a bug that makes logging off/shutdown take longer than it normally does. I didn’t notice it on my system because I almost never shut my laptop down. Honestly, I didn’t notice a difference even after someone pointed it out, but I’m receiving enough reports to believe it’s a real problem. It probably has something to do with my running Vista and not Windows XP. Anyways, apologies to anyone who was inconvenienced. In theory it should be fixed in 1.6.8 although I really don’t have a good way to verify this. Let me if you find otherwise.