(Codename ClickStop is my project within the 30 day product challenge. With ClickStop, you can let small children play on your PC without them damaging anything. It puts a “click-proof membrane” across areas of the screen you don’t want them to click.)

ClickStop needs a proper name. Something engaging, descriptive, appealing to parents, and clearly to do with protecting your PC, rather than protecting your kids. And the .com domain needs to be available. So how about this:

For parents, I think that’s very suitable. Fun, informal, memorable, descriptive. For schools, tradeshows… maybe less so. “Don’t Wreck My PC! (Enterprise Edition)”? Probably not. But I’d rather start small and target one vertical market successfully than have a product that tries to be a jack of all trades and ends up master of none.

Honest opinions are gratefully received. I’ve invested 10 minutes of thought, a few dollars for the domain, and an hours’ fun time with Paint Shop Pro so far – finding out now that it sucks badly is almost cost-free. Finding out 3 months after releasing it would be painful. Help me catch bugs early – what do you think of the name?

Note to Americans: A question for you, if you don’t mind: do you use the word “wreck” in this context? I’m British and I don’t want to pick a name that only sounds right in British English.

Note to Emmylou Harris: You’ve been in my heading singing “Meet me at the wrecking ball” ever since I thought up this name almost 24 hours ago. It’s time for you to stop now. Seriously.

(Codename ClickStop is my project within the 30 day product challenge. With ClickStop, you can let small children play on your PC without them damaging anything. It puts a “click-proof membrane” across areas of the screen you don’t want them to click.)

I was thinking about the ClickStop UI, and as it turned out, so was commenter Bracken. Once ClickStop is up and running, it needs to present some sort of UI so that you can control it. But it mustn’t take up any significant amount of screen real estate, because it might get in the way of what your child is doing.

This is exactly the problem faced by Remote Desktop (and VNC, and any other remote access product). The same solution applies, as shown in this (slightly rough, forgive me) mockup:

Cool. It could do the same slide-up-out-of-the-way thing that Remote Desktop does as well, but that’s probably overkill.

When Sohail and Patrick proposed the 30 day product challenge, I thought “Bad timing – with Entrian Source Search only just out on Beta, I can’t get involved with this right now.” I had the perfect project already lined up, but taking that on during this Beta seemed crazy.

Well, call me crazy, but I’ve changed my mind. I’ll take on the 30-day challenge, and manage the Beta at the same time. At the very least, I’ll prove to myself if no-one else that Source Search makes me more productive. 🙂

The Product: Codename ClickStop

One of my 4-year-old daughter Jenny’s favourite toys is Paint Shop Pro. She loves to sit and paint bizarre and random pictures with it. Sadly, the moment I turn my back she commits bizarre and random acts of damage to my PC – not through malice, but through being clumsy and poorly trained. I’ve been developing Windows software for about a dozen years, and she’s got the PC into states that I wouldn’t believe possible without kernel-level hackery, just by jiggling the mouse the wrong way.

What I need is a way to allow her to click in Paint Shop Pro’s picture, and the tools and colours, but not on the taskbar, the desktop, the “Print” button, and so on.

Imagine mounting a click-proof barrier over some parts of the screen. That’s what ClickStop is – you decide which screen areas can be clicked, and which can’t. It also prevents certain keys and key combinations, like Alt+Tab, Ctrl+P, Ctrl+Alt+Delete, and the Windows key. The only way out is to enter a password.

Who needs it?

Jenny and Paint Shop Pro is just an example – any situation where you have someone who could accidentally mess up a PC is a candidate for ClickStop. Who needs it?:

• Parents of small children, like me. But also:
• Schools with computer labs frequented by small children
• Companies running demo PCs at trade shows
• Anyone with a PC in a public place (although I’m sure they’re already running a vertical solution)

(Note that I said “accidentally”. I don’t want to pitch this as a PC security product, to keep your teenage son out of your files. Your teenage son could undoubtedly break it in a heartbeat. This is for untrained, non-malicious users.)

The biggest problem I can see with this idea is that no-one knows they need it. I don’t know much about marketing, and what little I do know applies only to the internet. This will require offline marketing – parenting magazines, PC magazines, etc. Do I really want to take that on?

What’s in a name?

“ClickStop” could mean anything, and there’s no chance of getting the domain. Suggestions on a postcard (or a blog comment) for a good name would be gratefully received. Anything that doesn’t sound like an Internet Security product would be good…

Where I am

I already have a (very) early prototype of ClickStop. It’s just enough to stop Jenny wreaking havoc when my back’s turned. But it has exactly no user interface – you run it, your screen goes dark. It needs a user interface, lots of testing with different applications on different versions of Windows, and a website that somehow attracts people who didn’t know they were looking for it. Um.

PS.

As I was typing this blog post, Jenny turned 5. Happy birthday, Jenny!

I’m very pleased to announce the first public Beta release of Entrian Source Search.  Entrian Source Search is a Visual Studio Addin that indexes your source code and gives you instant search results, even across millions of lines of code.  The key features are:

• Seamless integration with Visual Studio 2005/2008.
• Syntax-coloured search results – so much easier to read than Find In Files!
• Searches everything: code, comments, strings, resources, documentation, changelogs, everything.
• You can filter the results by filename, directory, file extension or text.
• Autocomplete and configurable keyboard shortcuts make everything really quick to use.

I’ve been using it myself for months, and it’s been worth its weight in gold.  One of the projects I work on has many millions of lines of code, and searching it was a royal pain.  But Source Search has also been really valuable for small projects too, which came as a bit of a surprise – the syntax coloured results and keyboard shortcuts make it so much more pleasant and productive to use than Find In Files.

I’ve also found myself using it in preference to some of Visual Studio’s other tools, like “Find All References”.  The fact that it searches in comments, ChangeLogs, and so on gives you a much better picture of what you’re searching for.

So, please download the free trial and tell me what you think!