Friday, August 12, 2005

Using ViewRank

It is like a virtual movie of your entire interaction with the computer. You can travel back in time to any day you choose and see what you had done. All the text that is visible will be actually copy-able. Any
hyperlinks identified in the images will be clickable etc. Remember this would include Email messages, Dialog boxes, Wizards, Folder navigation, interaction with IDEs, the command prompt, telnet sessions etc.

The information thus captured will enable your dashboard to give context sensitive help and advice. For Eg you might have worked on a defect called 23127. You might have info about this on your IM, Mail, and Code etc. When you encounter 23127 you could actually be presented with relevant info in your dashboard.

Your Desktop Search will now also be able to search within everything you have actually “seen” in the specified period. This is very different from whether the string is in the files whose last access date is within a certain range. Also the ordering would be in the order of the time and effort you spent with it.

The Screen Captures usually make it a lot easier to reproduce bugs. In fact one does not even need to redo the action. All one needs to do is to just copy the relevant screen shots and mail it forward.