The system tray, also called the Notification Area, is the little area of icons next to your system clock. Certain programs, espeically those that are designed to run in the background all the time, look much better minimized to the system tray rather than taking up space in the windows taskbar. Here's a .bas module I created for Visual Basic which allows you to easily minimize your program to the system tray with only a few lines of code. You simply add the module to your project, then copy and paste the code below into your form.

Download SystemTray.bas (March 28, 2009)

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I was recently looking online for a complete list of Virtual Key Codes I could use in Visual Basic (these are used with the keybd_event, MapVirtualKey, GetKeyState, and GetAsyncKeyState functions). I couldn't find one so I decided to make my own. Since most of the lists I found online were incomplete I went straight to the source, winuser.h, and converted these line-by-line from their original C declarations. Some additional comments and key descriptions I included are from the MSDN.

Download VirtualKeyCodes.bas (March 25, 2009)

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I recently received a e-mail from a person asking if I knew of any program that could count how many times per day a certain key on the keyboard was pressed. In her case she wanted to know how many times per day she pressed the F9 key. I told her I didn't know of one off-hand but that I could make one in Visual Basic in about 15 minutes. And so I did, and here is the result. I call it "Key Counter" and I decided to release it publically in case anyone else wants it or can learn something from it.

As you can see from the screenshot below it's a very simple and small program. You simply tell it what key you want to watch (F9 is the default), then you minimize it and go about your work, then when you come back to it it will tell you how many times you pressed that key. There's also a "reset" button you can click to reset the count back to 0. This program will not "record" your keystrokes in any way, it will simply count them. You can download both the Visual Basic source code and the program below to see for yourself.

In the future I may make another program that counts all keystrokes made, not just those from an individual key if there's enough interest.

Download keycounter.zip (March 21, 2009)

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I updated my eBay Motors Fee Calculator today. As I was looking over the fees page for eBay Motors I noticed that the fees you pay for vehicle listings are always fixed amounts and not percentages like on eBay.com, it's only in the Parts & Accessories category that percentages come into play. Since I get the feeling that most of the people who use my eBay Motors calculator use it for Parts & Accessories and not for vehicles, I changed it so that "Parts & Accessories" is now selected by default when you first load up the calculator.

I also made a few other minor changes to the calculator. I made sure my fee rates were up-to-date, I disabled the appropriate listing upgrades for Parts & Accessories (for example Motors Pro Pack and Listing Icon are for vehicles only, so they'll get greyed out if you select Parts & Accessories as your category), and I changed my "For Deposit Only" Paypal sub-option to become un-checked when you select Parts & Accessories. I also made it so that whatever price you type as your "Buy It Now" price gets mirrored into your Opening and Closing Price fields so you can more easily see the difference in fees between a Fixed Price Format listing and an Auction Style listing.

I updated 2 of my calculators today, my Half.com Fee Calculator and my Amazon Marketplace Fee Calculator. On my Half.com calculator I rearranged the user interface to make it a bit more streamlined and I added in a new field for "Actual Shipping Cost". On my Amazon Marketplace calculator, I also streamlined the interface a bit and I improved the "Edit Fees" section. Now "Actual Shipping Cost" and "Amazon Shipping Credit" are visible at all times, it's easier to turn on and off the $0.99 per-transaction fee (if you're a Pro Merchant Subscriber) and it's easier to edit your Closing Fee and Shipping Credit amounts (by default, the calculator will fill these in for you based on your category and shipping method).