We're working hardly on a new release of our flagship product – KO Approach. This release is going to catch up with all the new things that occurred to the Windows desktop computing world so far. The product is finally compatible with Windows 7 which will enable the users of this new OS to open files and folders even quicker!

Approach Items is being redesigned to display user-selectable items. From now on, this feature will be fully extensible allowing developers to provide custom content to Approach Items. As an example, we've included a custom item displaying a list of recently used commands from the Run dialog box. With these new concepts, the user will be able to better organize most frequently accessed items, files and folders.

We've added new options into Titlebar Menus to improve user experience. Browse the entire folder hierarchy, from Desktop to the current folder, with CTRL+click on an Explorer window's title bar. Instruct Titlebar Menus to order items as you like: parent-to-child or child-to-parent. The current folder can also be automatically highlighted.

As usual, Scope and InstantWave, the two companions to KO Approach, allow for previewing graphics files as well as playing sound files, right from KO Approach menus! And there are more plugins coming soon!

Approach will consume even less resources thanks to advanced optimization techniques. But most importantly, upgrading to KO Approach 0.4.4 will be completely free!

Just recently I started using git and I'm pretty excited about it. Today I needed to obtain a ZIP archive containing only files that were changed or added between a known revision and the current head (I believe, that's roughly the same as trunk in SVN). The solution I came upon is not fully automated, but it's still a HUGE time saver:

1. Obtain a list of edited files:
   

   git diff --name-only HEAD __TAG_OR_REVISION__ > out.txt

   After running this command the file out.txt will contain the list of modified file names (including deleted ones), one per line.
2. Open the out.txt file in a text editor and merge the contents into one line (i.e. replace CR/LF with a space). I also had to manually remove a few files which I didn't need for the archive.
3. Copy this huge line to clipboard.
4. Finally, generate the archive:
   

   git archive --format=zip HEAD __PASTE_HERE__ > out.zip

I'm not a command line expert and I'd love to know a better way. I'm sure it's possible on Linux, but I primarily use Windows, so it might take a cmd.exe geek to sort things out.

This is a phrase that came to me after watching Seth Godin's inspiring video Ideas That Spread, Win:

Many ideas were born from sharing the idea that ideas can be shared.

A great place to help the children from Haiti is the Save the Children fund. They accept PayPal, Amazon payments, and Google checkout. Maybe it's more convenient that the direct link that Google shows.

Hi everybody,

It is our pleasure to announce a new version of our Web Site. We've added a more user-friendly design which we hope, you will like.

Generally, this whole Blog section is brand new. In order to integrate it into our Web Site, we used BlogEngine.NET, an open source .NET blogging engine with a ton of cool features. Here we'll cover software development topics as well as make announcements about new products (yes that's true) and existing product improvements.

But more importantly, our Web Site now lists a new product – a mind cracking game KODO Atumi. This board game occupies less than 1 megabyte, installs in seconds, and is a true brainteaser!

We hope to see you back soon. Please leave comments to share your opinion about this new Web Site, our products, or report a bug. We value your feedback. Thank you.

KO Software Developers