Back in December, approaching the end of the year and undoubtedly taken over by the holiday spirit, we were all wondering if there was something BinaryNights could come up with to surprise you all. Something that we could give you for being such excellent chaps to have as users.
Because it’s true, ForkLift has been out there for almost two years now, and you people have been there all along, reacting to the things we were doing, beta testing and tracking down bugs, sharing ideas and criticism, and not least importantly, paying our bills.
Although it took a couple of months to actually have it (more or less) right, I’m sure you will all enjoy this little surprise that we’re offering you:
Dikk! – the closest thing to telepathy
Dikk! is an application that was born very suddenly, playing about with Bonjour on a late summer evening.
You see, the three of us work in a small rented office space, where our desks are placed in such a way that no one can see the others’ screens. This is fine and all, but about 30 times a day, one of us will call out to the other, and ask them to take look at something on his screen to see if it’s any good. And although we are all very happy to share our wisdom with the others, and we know the value of good feedback, it can get a bit frustrating at about the 11th time when you have to get up from your chair and walk over to your mates’ desk.
We wished for some way to be able to just quickly show the window we’re working on to the other guys in the room.
And this little application here now does just that.
Just call: Hey, check this out! – and hit F1
Dikk! will send a screen capture of the active window to everybody in the room who has Dikk! running. (I hope the telepathy joke is not lost here)
In the three months that passed, we’ve got our good man Ben to work on adding a few things to make it an application worthy of BinaryNights. You can now hit F2 to send your window to selected users only, we’ve added a transmission history that you can browse, and we’ve added preferences and shortcut customization.
Oh, and here’s the download link: Dikk! 0.9b
Dikk! is 0.9 and a beta release, but it seems to be working well enough now. I’m sure you will all enjoy it enormously, and I hope that after having had your fun sending silly pictures to each other, you will eventually find out it’s a pretty handy tool if you work in an office similar to ours.
Thanks for sticking with us all this time
BinaryNights crew
ps. Dikk is an actual word in the Romanii language, spoken by most Gypsies around the world. The approximate translation is: “Hey, check this out!”
hey!
i think that is the coolest tool ever!
i hate those “eeeh! come over and have a look!” walks. this rocks!
thanks a lot!
Starting to testing…
Damn, the shortcut to quit Dikk is the same as Logout-without-confirmation – I wont even test if it works
Oh, yeah, the shortcuts…
we just left F1 and F2 because they were the first shortcut keys that popped into mind the first time we thought about this – fortunately, you can reassign them in Preferences.
F2 and F3 conflicted with my ForkLift shortcuts too, so I redefined dikk’s keys some while ago. I now use ctrl-1 and ctrl-2, etc
Well, I cannot test it – there’s no more macs around me
I knew that I can change the keys.
Wonderful program. Would be nice if one could remove a shortcut completly.
that would have been very handy in the office. (we used DropCopy at times, IM at others, but invariably had problems.) unfortunately i’m working from home now with nobody to share screenshots with.
i’m curious, what’s the story behind the name?
@nate
about the name: as I said in the post, this is a word in Romanii, meaning “Hey, check this out!”
BinaryNights was born and lives in Hungary, where about 8% of the population is made up of Gypsies, most of them speaking Romanii. So, Hungarian slang is full of words we borrowed from our Roma people. There are tons of these, and we do often use dikk (at least me and my mates) when we want to show something or call attention to something.
Well, that’s that really.
And I don’t know if I said that already, but I think this is the first instance in human history for a software product to be named in Romanii – I’m sure a fortune teller would say this is good omen
[...] rzucić okiem, jeśli macie Maki w pracy/domu. Więcej na stronie bloga Binarynights. Ci sami, których głównym programem jest menadżer FTP Forklift. [...]
hello,
Thank you for the great quality of your blog, every time i come here, i’m amazed.
black hattitude.