Archive | October, 2010

ScreenHunter – the best free screen capturing software

by on October 19, 2010 in Programs

ScreenHunter Logo

There are so many different programs to do one particularly thing that it’s so hard to choose from them. My list of programs come from long period of looking for the best and when I found one, I generally write about it. This is the same as it was with Open Hardware Monitor.

ScreenHunter Free 5 is very simple and easy to use screen capturing software that does not load your computer resources too.

Main features:

  • You can activate it by one hotkey which is F6 by the default. You can also choose a different one if you want to.
  • There is an option to choose whether to show mouse pointer or not.
  • You can use a simple timer when making your screenshots.
  • An ability to choose between rectangular area that you point with your mouse, active windows or full screen.

Great saving options:

  • You can save it automatically to the file and to your clipboard.
  • You can choose file format (Bitmap, GIF, JPEG) and it’s quality or colors.
  • The name of your screenshot will be generated automatically by your selections at filename options.

ScreenHunter filename settings

  • You can also choose where to save your files (default is on your desktop).

There are great advanced settings too, for example, hiding disabled buttons and so on. Truly, I did not use them much, but they might be definitely useful for some readers (see the screenshot below).

This program became my number one for a long time and I am still enjoying it after two years. It is just simple and easy to use which makes it perfect for everyday use.

Visit ScrenHunger Free 5

Take care of your hardware with simple tool

by on October 12, 2010 in Programs

I had some really annoying problems with my computer recently, so I was searching for informative and light tools to monitor my hardware’s performance to check if there were any discrepancy to normal values of temperature and so on. However, I could not find anything that meed my criteria.

At first I was using default motherboard’s monitoring tool that came with the drivers. As you can imagine this MSI Dual Core Center was not very informative or useful. Then I decided to try some programs for special monitoring, for example, HDD Sentinel (free and commercial versions) for my hard disks and so on.

HDD Sentinel was one of the biggest discovery, however its use is limited to only HDD and nothing more. By the way this software is licensed and  costs from 23 USD dollars for more capabilities.

And at last I found a very simple, easy to use and without need to install Open Hardware Monitor application. At the moment of writing this application is developed at fast pace which is good news for the users to get the most of it.

In addition, you can launch this on both Windows and Linux systems.

You can download this app from it’s official site at OpenHardwareMonitor.com

How to create custom PrestaShop hook

by on October 5, 2010 in PrestaShop

PrestaShop hooks are great way to insert or add data at the most important places or actions of this great e-commerce platform. However, I am not satisfied with the quantity of default hooks and I sometimes use custom hooks with my custom modules. So how to implement custom hook and why not hard code all code without it?

Why hook is the right choice?

There is one big problem in my opinion with custom hooks because you need to hard code their position into the files that might be affected by CMS updates or etc. So it is just more easier to add one line of code than to copy and paste a bunch of code or even all page of it.

Secondly, hooks are easy used in modules which lets you save time and avoid headaches. You do not need to think about default page code as you just add addition to it, for example, you will not delete necessary code by accident.

Thirdly, it is just a good practice and manner of good and professional programmer.

How to create custom hook?

All active hooks are hold in Prestashop database table called ps_hook (ps_ is default database prefix and it will be on this article too), so you have to add it on module installation.

After you added hook information to the database, you must register it for later you which you do by calling this method:

Now you can easily insert your hook anywhere in the code.

However, it depends if you want it to execute raw PHP code or it will return a template file. There are two options and both are shown below.

With Smarty:

If you use the example with smarty, you must add {$MY_HOOK} variable where you want into your .tpl file that gets this assign. That’s about it.

Now you can add whatever you want to hooks function which you write like this:

Try it yourself.