Saturday, December 29, 2007

Aerofoil 1.4.1 - Minor Graphical/Source Update


Apologies!
I should have held off release of the Aerofoil 1.4 a little longer - I couldn't help but tweak it for the following:

- Blue Hibernate option in system tray menu (was red - I didn't like it because it was too "in your face").
- Removed one of the system tray menu "separator" lines because the menu was getting too big.
- Made "About" window slightly transparent (looks more professional).
- Smaller executable (1.5K less at 29.5K, 30K on disk) by improving the Visual Studio solution and removing some method redirection in code.

Download and source code

Okay I'm now officially off the Aerofoil sidetrack and back on the Gesture Magic beaten path again...!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,

i found a small bug under Vista Business on my Thinkpad.
The Thinkpad Series comes with a grad software bundle, such as the Power Manager.
When i set my favorite profile, normally the profile will be hold on the next reboot. But since Aerofoil is installed, it will auto set to the standard profile. If I deactive the "Auto Power Plan" feature of Aerofoil, it won't save this and sets the standard Power Manager profile again (not my custom one).

Please make your response (if u want) here as a comment...

Benjamin said...

Hi Rohan,

Please remember the app was designed to be as minimalist as possible and only to switch two power profiles - high perf and power saver - both are hardcoded settings.
Code:
// Choose a new scheme to set based on whether we are on AC
Guid newScheme = (Guid)powerPlans[onAC ? GUID_MIN_POWER_SAVINGS : GUID_MAX_POWER_SAVINGS];

There is method in this madness - Nvidia graphics cards underclock only in the power saver profile (I think this is driver thing - i.e. a reason why there is no Nvidia powermizer option in Vista) and there may be other manufacturers that check the profile too to enable low power options as these are only default profiles. (Balanced profile imho is somewhat useless if you have Aerofoil - why compromise?)

I've customised these two profiles on my machine for Aerofoil use rather than add new custom named profiles - I can always restore the defaults in them if I need to. The readme FAQ with Aerofoil mentions that it does not save its settings but relies on hibernate behaviour to save your options as it assumes that you'd use hibernate power off instead of shutdown since it is significantly faster (x4 faster startup on my machine - 29 seconds including entering a password). When you power back on the settings will be as you left them.

If you really do want to alter the default load settings you can download the source and change the entries via the graphical editor in Visual Studio Express (free from Microsoft) and then click the rebuild. Alternatively you may prefer the more functional (and larger) "Vista Laptop Battery Saver" which was written around the same time by someone else - please google, I don't have the site URL to hand :)

Hope this helps,

Benjamin

Anonymous said...

Thanks for well written words. I've decided the customize ur code and set my custom power manager profiles. As u mentioned it, the very pro of Aerofoil is the minimalist build.

Thanks for decision to make it open source. Be well and smart ;)

Benjamin said...

Hi Rohan,

Please note the GPL 2 licence with the software which asks you to share your changed source code. If you don't want to host it I'll host it as a third party contibution (just include all your docs etc in with the zip) and link to it from the blog here? Personally I'm not too bothered about the source as I'm happy with the current build but other users or developers may come along and want your version instead :)

Thanks for your feedback and contribution!