NinjaBox -- A Dictionary In Your System Tray

I was having one of those nights last night where you're working late on refactoring a module and debugging the results, and it's tedious, and difficult, and your mind just finally rebels and says "I've had enough of this.  I'm not going to work anymore on this problem.  You're going to have to find something else for me to do."

Sometimes I can wrestle with my brain in those moments, and make it focus in submission to my will, but it was just not one of those nights.  After fighting the rebellion for an hour or so, I finally just gave in and decided to do something that actually felt interesting instead.

Through PopURLs, I'd come across Phil Crosby's Ninjawords site, and while using it I thought to myself, (after thinking "This is really nicely done!"): "Wouldn't it be cool to have this in my system tray, ready and waiting all the time?"

That did it. 

I shifted gears, my brain immediately kicked back into gear and started eating new problems like candy (funny how that works...), and together finally again, my brain and I enjoyed winding down for the night, building something I thought would be really cool to have.  It was a refreshing end to a long day of slogging through a lot of not-fun stuff.

I decided to call it NinjaBox, since it's basically just a container for Ninjawords.com.  When I finished it, I found myself thinking there might be a few other folks out there who might appreciate having this little app in their system tray.  SO... if that's you, here it is:

NinjaBox -- a desktop application / system tray container for quick and easy access to Ninjawords.com:

For the techies out there: It's a standalone EXE file with a little mini web browser in it.  It also writes its form state settings to an INI file, and doesn't make any registry entries at all... so it's a pretty clean install.  If for whatever reason you decide you want to drop it on a USB drive and run it from there, that should work fine too.  It doesn't contain any spyware, doesn't report back to the mother ship... blah blah blah.  That said, it's freeware, so you're on your own if it gives you any trouble.

If you find NinjaBox useful, or see some little bug that I overlooked while building it (quite likely), feel to leave a comment here to let me know.  Thanks. 

NinjaBox:

Full Install, in a ZIP file.
Just the EXE, in a ZIP file.

Comments

[Phil Crosby]

Cass,

Very cool! I'll add a link to it. Can you also publish the source code?

[Cass McNutt]

Phil -

Glad you like it. : ) A link w/b great!

re: Source code, unfortunately I can't publish it; it uses a number of third-party components that are part of my dev library (Delphi) which I don't have the rights to release the source code for. (On the upside, those nifty components are part of why I was able to write it so fast...).

Thanks for dropping by, and for giving your blessing. Nice to have on both counts. : )

Cass

[dotlizard]

this is way cool, the only way it could be cooler if it was a vista sidebar gadget.

hmmmmm...

[jrickmar]

How about a version for Linux, preferably for the Gnome panel?