October 17, 2011
A POP Peeper user has discovered some free voices that can be used with POP Peeper. It should be noted that the user wanted non-English voices. Here’s the link, which has English, French and German voices available:
http://www.microsoft.com/reader/uk/downloads/tts.mspx
I just installed the English voices on Win7… and I have inconclusive results 
First, anybody who wants to install additional voices using this link will need to download and install MS Reader first (this is mentioned on the webpage above, but no link is provided):
http://www.microsoft.com/reader/downloads/pc.aspx
Versions of Reader are available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish; you’ll probably want to install the language that you plan on installing the voices for, but I’m not sure that it matters.
Note: After installing MS Reader, I did NOT activate it.
I then installed the voices, but before doing so, I checked the Control Panel’s Speech page to see what voices I had already installed (mistake: I should have checked what POP Peeper listed).
After installing the voices, I went back to Control Panel: no change, only Anna was listed. So I rebooted. Still only Anna. I then checked in POP Peeper and I do have 2 other voices besides Anna: “LH Michelle” and “LH Michael”. It’s possible I had installed these previosly, but I believe they came from the voice pack I just installed.
Personally, I think MS Anna’s quality is significantly better, but if you ever get tired of her voice, I suppose they’re something different. I suspect that these voices are SAPI4, whereas Anna is SAPI5 and hence the difference in quality.
Conclusion:
For English users on Vista/7: stick with Anna. Having to download and install 2 products to get these 2 voices is more trouble than they’re worth.
For non-English speakers: it’s probably worth it for the language-specific accents.
For English users on XP: probably not worth it; the voices are probably not too dissimilar from the Mike & Mary voices that I already provide a link for.
October 12, 2011
A release candidate for POP Peeper v3.8.1 is now available. The full changelog is available through the link.
This is primarily a maintenance release to fix some issues that were introduced and found after the release of v3.8. The one glaring exception is that support for Lycos webmail is back.
In 2010, Lycos went through several changes. First, they dumped their old interface and basically outsourced their email service to Zimbra. I decided to support the Zimbra interface. Some months later, in early 2011, they abandoned Zimbra and decided to go back to using their own, newly designed interface. At this point, I was pretty frustrated with Lycos and I had to decide whether I would continue supporting them. For quite a while — since at least the Zimbra-era — they were no longer allowing free accounts to be created. Not only does this drastically reduce the number of people that POP Peeper could be used for, but I had my doubts that Lycos’ email service would last for much longer with that strategy. For that reason, I decided to just wait-and-see and informally discontinue Lycos support.
Which brings us to today. I was recently told that Lycos had brought back free email service. You do need to provide a mobile phone # for verification, which can be a nuisance (there are free text-services available if you don’t have this capability, or more likely, don’t want to give your number to Lycos). With free accounts back on the table, I decided to support Lycos again. It’s certainly not the most popular webmail service that PP supports, but hopefully more than a few people will make use of it.
August 30, 2011
POP Peeper v3.8 has finally been released. And on its unofficial 2nd day of release, there has been a somewhat significant issue discovered. The good news is that if you know about it, there’s an easy workaround.
The problem is that Imap accounts may not use IDLE and it’s based on the value of the global polling interval (Tools / Options / Mail Check). If the polling interval is ODD, no problem; EVEN, oops. Fortunately, the default value is ODD (15), so many people may not be affected. If you’re wondering why the odd/even relevance — it’s due to the fact that 1&(even number) is false; “false” in this case means that AutoCheck is disabled and therefore IDLE should not be engaged. My forehead has been sufficiently self-slapped.
There are a couple other issues as well, so I’m contemplating a quick v3.8.1 release.
August 26, 2011
Recently, most — if not all — programs you download from download.com use a proprietary installer. This was NOT a choice given to the software developers. And, it should be no suprise, their installer wants you to install a toolbar (installed by default, you can disable it during the installation process). I am NOT a fan of “bundled software” and I certainly don’t appreciate it being imposed on people downloading my software.
Users CAN avoid the download.com installer — below the download button is a direct download link, but you must be logged in to use it. My advice: use the direct download link if you already have an account; otherwise, find another download site.
I have requested that download.com remove their installer from my software; I am awaiting their response.
Update: Within a few hours of emailing download.com, they have removed their installer from my products.
June 23, 2011
I recently added TrialPay as a payment option for Aeris Calendar. If you’re not familiar with TrialPay, it’s basically a “buy one service, get another service/program for free” offer. For example, when you click on the TrialPay offer, you’ll see a list of 60+ offers, including Netflix, book clubs, DVD clubs, etc. If you sign up for one of the services, then you get Aeris Calendar for free.
Let me know what you think about this offer, or your experiences with TrialPay if you’ve used it before. If there’s enough interest, I will use TrialPay with the POP Peeper Premium Add-on Pack, as well.
Relevant Links:
Download Aeris Calendar
Order Aeris Calendar (including TrialPay)
Aeris Calendar Home page
April 18, 2011
First, a definition: win9x refers to Win95, Win98 and WinME.
As of v4.0, POP Peeper will no longer be able to support these Operating Systems. This is not a conspiracy on my part, if I could continue to support win9x, I probably would; but I can’t say it’s not a relief to be able to let them go. The problem is that the the compiler I use (Microsoft’s Visual Studio) no longer creates executable files that run on win9x. PP v3.8 will be the final (knock on wood) release built using a compiler that supports win9x. Once PP v4 is released, this also means that webmail updates will cease for v3 users.
According to the webstats on poppeeper.com, about 1% of the people are still clinging to win9x. If one of you 1% are reading this blog and still want the latest of version of POP Peeper, let me know! It would still be possible to build a separate win9x compatible version, I just need to know if the inconvience would make it worthwhile.
March 3, 2011
This post has nothing to do with POP Peeper or Aeris Calendar, except that it explains why I have been somewhat absent for the past couple of weeks.
Several weeks ago, I started experiencing video driver crashes whilst wasting time playing games. Not to fret, the problem was cured by using RivaTuner to amp up the video card’s fan speed. But then one night, something went terribly wrong and my primary Hard Drive failed to load (I won’t describe my state of panic as this is the HDD that stores all my source code; suffice it to say I have now greatly improved my backup methods). The HDD eventually completely died, about a month after the 3-year warranty expired according to the sticker; to my relief, I found the receipt that said I had about 2 weeks left of said warranty (I received the replacement yesterday). While still using a temporary HDD, I was having problems with the video card and new problems with the BIOS not finding other devices (from the video card to another HDD to the DVD drive to a TV tuner card…). I thought the problem was with the motherboard, so I ran down to my favorite B&M, MicroCenter, to get a replacement. With the new mobo in, I was having problems getting the power to stay on. I tried switching back to the old mobo, and it, too, had power problems. So another run down to MicroCenter to pickup a new power supply. Well, that seemed to have cured the problem with the power. It didn’t fix the problems with the videocard, so I switched back to the old mobo and tested it for several days. With the exception of the vidcard, the problems seemed to be fixed, so I returned the mobo today (one of the many reasons I love MicroCenter).
Back home, I decided to press my luck with a game (Dungeons & Dragons Online, if you must know) and after about 3 minutes, my system completely hung (very unusual) and I hit the reset button. During POST, I was seeing really weird artifacts and, to make a long story short-ish, the video card is dead. It’s an eVGA which means that it would have a lifetime warrany… if I had registered it. I have an email in to see if that’s the case, but I doubt it. Thankfully, the mobo has integrated video (which I used to despise) so at least I can see what I’m typing.
And that’s where most of my time has been spent the last couple of weeks.
Death tally: 1 PSU, 1 HDD, 1 VidCard and possibly 1 DVD-RW (yeah, I didn’t get into that one…)
Lesson: Make sure you have a quality PSU that’s not underpowered (and has a working fan <cough>). The previous PSU was 600W, but apparently that wasn’t enough for all the peripherals (quad core, power-hungry GPU, 3 HDDs, etc.). And then there’s that fan thing…
February 16, 2011
As of right now, I don’t know if I will continue to support Lycos. Here are the outstanding reasons why:
1) They don’t provide free email addresses anymore; this severely limits the number of people for whom PP support would benefit. If I didn’t already support Lycos, I wouldn’t even consider supporting it due to this reason.
2) They have changed their interface 2 times recently. While this is not a major deal breaker (I’ve gotten used to it with Hotmail and Yahoo in years past), it’s certainly a contributing factor. But, to me, it smells of desperation. They were using Zimbra which is a well-organized and popular email platform. I had never heard of anyone complaining about the Lycos-Zimbra interface; well, no more than when any interface changes, and if you remember the MyWay->BlueTie debacle, and they’re STILL using BlueTie… well, it just makes me suspicious of Lycos’ reason. I suspect that the royalties they pay to Zimbra outweigh the money they’re making from premium subscriptions.
#2 is only speculation and is not enough on its own to justify terminating Lycos support. #1, on the other hand, is very relevant. It takes a lot of time to add support for a brand new interface and how many people are still using Lycos free accounts? A handful or two at most, I suspect. The time spent supporting something that benefits a very limited number of users could be better spent supporting features that benefit the masses.
This is not a final decision, nor an easy one to make; I don’t like the idea of ending support for an existing service. Feedback is welcome and appreciated.
February 14, 2011
RC4 has been released. Please see the previous blog for download information, etc.
RC3 had a problem with the key not opening messages in most cases. I’m using a different method (one that will be used more extensively in future versions) for message list keyboard shortcuts and this caused a conflict for this particular command.
February 11, 2011
The download link is available in this forum announcement.
Click here for v3.8 changes
An “RC” is a Release Candidate, it means that there are no known bugs and there likely won’t be any new features added. So what happened to RC1 and RC2? After building an RC, I give myself and testers 24 or so hours to make sure everything is good. Neither passed the 24-hour test, mostly because I realized certain things weren’t complete.
Archive: This new feature allows you to save the selected message(s) in the standard .eml format. Eventually, Sent Mail Viewer will be updated to display these messages; for now, you can simply archive them and view them with your favorite email client (which, obviously, is POP Peeper and you can make it the default .eml viewer). The archive command is located in several places: select a message (or multiple) in the message list and right-click to access archive; add the archive button to the main toolbar; when viewing a message, select Message / Archive or add it to the Message toolbar. If you want to access the folder that contains your archived messages, from the main menu, select Messages / Explore Archive folder.
Folder support: This has been a popular request that I put on temporary hold until recently. This feature requires an updated Add-on Pack installation which isn’t quite ready, so you won’t be able to use this feature yet. However, it’s addition did spur another popular request — the ability to copy an account. Right-click on an account and select “duplicate.”
Read Message (speech): This feature will allow the Add-on Pack’s voice notifier to read your message out loud (or just the header). The required update for the Add-on Pack isn’t available yet.