Whew! It’s been a long weekend! I’ve been working most of the weekend to put the finishing touches on version 2, and it’s ready!

Version 1 was released to the public three weeks ago today, and there have been over 6300 downloads since then. That’s way more than I expected. I smashed through my web hosting bandwidth limit, and had to increase it. I received some great suggestions from the users, and I’ve been working on version 2 since version 1 went beta.

I have posted a preview of version 2 with screenshots, but here is a list of the new features/bugs fixed.

Some of the new features include:

• Mouse/Keyboard support
• Page scrolling/Link navigation improvements
• URL Entry
• Form Support (fill out edit boxes, combo boxes, list boxes, select buttons, etc.)
• Favorites improvements (navigate subfolders)
• Multilanguage support (English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, German, Spanish, Dutch)

There were also a couple of bugs in version 1 that will be fixed in this version:

• Was not able to use anything but the default installation directory
• Languages that use the comma as a decimal separator cause zooming problems

This new version represents alot of work on my part. I hope you enjoy it. This will be available to the public in about two weeks (after the beta testing). Beta testers are selected by me. If you would like to be a beta tester for version 2, please send me an email.

A local user group that I run, Arizona Software Developers Group, just announced an upcoming meeting about Ruby.

James Britt, a local software developer and author, will give the group a brief introduction to Ruby and Rails.

If you’re local, come check it out.

I’ve received several requests for multi-language support in MCEBrowser, so I’ve decided to implement this feature in the next version.



I have modified the code in MCEBrowser to seperate out the text into a language-specific XML file, but I need volunteers to translate this XML file into different languages. If you are able to and willing to translate about 40 simple phrases from English to another language, please contact me via email.



This is strictly on a volunteer basis. I will give you credit on the About page for your language, but no other rights, ownership, or compensation will be provided for this service.

I have been getting a few emails asking various questions, so I decided to start an FAQ page.

I received an email from an MCEBrowser user today who said that MCEBrowser would not open for him. It would just hang when he clicked on the icon in More Programs. After further discussion, I learned that he had over 1200 IE favorites in over 100 folders!

Unfortunately, I failed to design MCEBrowser to handle this many favorites. The problem has bugging me enough that I have spent the last couple of hours coding a solution.

In the next version of MCEBrowser, favorites will be displayed in the same directory structure as they are in the file system. This means that you will be able to navigate the subfolders.

I added MCEBrowser to MoreMCE. You can rate it and add comments here.

There seems to be a little bit of confusion around the remote control button usage in MCEBrowser. I’m actually a little bummed out about this because it is an indication that the user interface is not as intuitive as it could be. I might be able to clean this up a little bit in the next version.

So, I have decided to write up some instructions around the “browser lock” feature of MCEBrowser. I will work on something a litle more official tomorrow, but I wanted to get this out today to alleviate some of the confusion.

MCEBrowser has a feature called “browser lock”. Browser lock mode is activated by hilighting the browser control in MCEBrowser and pressing the “OK” remote control button. The border around the browser will turn red, indicating that browser lock mode is active. While in this mode, some of the remote control buttons are reassigned to control the browser. The following remote control buttons are active in this mode:

Pressing the Back button on the remote control exits browser lock mode, and restores the remote control buttons to their normal functions. You will notice that the red border around the browser is removed when this happens.

An abbreviated version of these instructions is also available on the About screen in MCEBrowser.