It is now 4 weeks ago that the initial AutoStart.exe was released, so I thought it was time for an update. Here is the short list of what has changed:
- USB Hard Drives now have a tray icon.
- TrueCrypt volumes, now also get a tray icon.
- TrueCrypt volumes stored on a flash drive are automatically dismounted when that flash drive is ejected.
- Selecting 'Eject/Unplug' on a TrueCrypt volume itself will dismount it.
- Code to eject a drive has been rewritten from scratch and now supports more exotic device trees.
- I improved the code that scans the flash drive for portable applications to handle PortableApps directories better.
- Made a -eject [drivenum] switch so you can eject from the command line.
- If you rename AutoStart.exe to AutoEject.exe and put it on a flash drive, you can then eject that drive by running the AutoEject.exe
- A newer AutoStart will shutdown the previous AutoStart with a lower version number and keep on running itself.
Update: October 18, 2006 - 1:00pm
An update is available that fixes a bug where AutoStart would put the contents of your Recycle Bin in the list of applications during install on a flash drive.
Update: October 19, 2006 - 9:00pm
When the dust settles around this release, I'm going to be focusing on the following stuff:
- Implement a mechanism that allows you to tell the application scanner where to look for applications. This is to prevent unwanted stuff appearing in your menu.
- Go fully unicode, so Asian languages get handled correctly.
- Rewrite the notification area icon code. Support for balloon popups will be added so I can popup transient messages telling you things like autostart ejected your drive and such. (I'll have a quiet mode too if you get irritated by balloon popups)
- Rewrite the menu building/handling code. I'm going to investigate whether the following stuff is doable:
- icons in the menu items
- drag and drop reordering of menu items
- Implement the extension API that will give access to the internals of AutoStart so extensions can be written. The idea is to give acces to all information that AutoStart collected about your attached removable drives. Also event registration so extensions can respond to drive insertion and such. Give access via the API to the contents of the autorun.inf files. So anything that may be of interest to an extension will be available via the API.
I can't give guarantees how much of this I manage to get working for the next release.
Update: October 21, 2006 - 4:00am
I've made available a new version that fixes the device eject problems on U3 devices mentioned in this thread.
Here is a direct link to Download Liberta AutoStart