NeverAway v1.0 released

So I wrote a simple program I called NeverAway that will prevent your computer from showing ‘Away’ in Microsoft Office Communicator. ( Or any other program that tracks keyboard activity I would imagine. 😛 )

You can download the install, program, and the source code at http://neveraway.codeplex.com/ (click on downloads, then the recommended download that creatively is named ‘Extract to somewhere and install this’).

From my release notes:

Basic Usage Instructions: Simple, just download, extract, install. It will start up automatically. Right click the little shield icon and click ‘Never Away’ and you won’t show up as Away in MOC anymore.

This was mostly a result of my irritation with many corporate pc policies that would lock my screen after 15 minutes of inactivity even though I would have my MOC set to not show me as away unless I hadn’t done anything for an hour. I originally just used a LINQPad (http://www.linqpad.net/) program that made the appropriate call, but I decided I wanted to make an application so others could use it easily. Certainly not curing cancer, but it was something fun to do. I hadn’t written a traymenu application for probably 10 years so I thought this would be as good as any. 😀

I know if someone would have shown me one when I was dealing with this irritation while on tons of conference calls, I would probably have paid 50 bucks for it on the spot. but here it is for free!

While I was working on this, I went to download stickies (http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/stickies/) and I decided to look through the other software on there. Lo and behold, there was caffeine (http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/caffeine/) which seems to do the same thing. I initially chose ‘mute’ (because everyone has a mute button) instead of F15 (as caffeine does), but then later picked F24 after testing some other items just because it seemed non-intrusive. I also added a config to where you could press a key more than once (because I initially pressed mute twice). Anyway, the point is caffeine from zhorn software is another option for this kind of thing. And Stickies is awesome. 😛