Two months ago Microsoft released a new version of Windows.  It doesn’t matter if we love it or not, but we have to support it. Therefore now Zentimo has passed compatibility tests with Windows 8, furthermore we have added a nice Metro UI-style skin, you can see it in the begin of the post. On Windows 8 it’s set by default, however you can choose it in the settings on other versions of Windows.

Per many requests we have added an ability to fix a drive letter not only to a one drive but to the several drives on the condition that you connect them at different times. This feature might be used for backup purposes.

When you connect two or more drives with the same fixed drive letter Zentimo handles this case and displays a dialog that allows you to choose a temporary drive letter for the drives that weren’t fixed to a letter. Read more on setup here

A small but useful improvement for those who use fixing drive letters feature. Now when a drive is fixed to a letter a small lock sign is displayed in the row of the drive.

• Folder mount points are now displayed in a full size (not truncated)
• Card reader drives are displayed even when the option “Display storage device
• volumes” is disabled
• Card reader drives are displayed even when the option “Display storage device volumes” is disabled
• Skin scheme file now has usual web format of the colors
• Fixed: Verbose logging was enabled by default
• Fixed: Autorun programs called before changing drive letters (e.g. for fixed  drive letters). This caused double calling of the autorun programs.
• Fixed: and some other minor bugs

Be happy and have fun in new coming year!

How to upgrade? Just download using the blue “Download” button and run the installer, it will do the upgrade automagically. If your upgrade subscription is over feel free to extend it.

We are happy to announce immediate availability of Zentimo 1.6! This version mainly contains speed improvements and fix for critical bugs so it’s highly recommended to upgrade.

Note! Due to importance of this release license keys with the  update period expired between December 26th, 2011 and May 29th, 2012 are still eligible for this upgrade.

We are more than happy to announce the new release of Zentimo 1.5 just five days before New Year’s day! The new version includes improved user interface, unicode support, lots of new options to configure the device menu, added help file and minor bug fix.  Download now or read more below.

The stopping menu was significantly reworked to give you more convenience, especially when you have many devices. Now it’s less cluttered and better focused on main details – drive letters and volume labels. You’ll never lost your drive in the list! Compare the old and the new menus below and tell us if you find the newer more convenient for you.

Its behavior was also became more convenient and smart: there’s no “stop” button anymore, and you can stop a device clicking to its row (earlier it was available through the option). Moreover the device will be removed safely even if you click its drive row, of course when you click the card reader’s drive the card will be ejected rather than the card reader.

Now you can choose any language supported by the program and it will be displayed correctly even if your system language is different. It’s a great news for people who are using non-Latin characters on their computers since they will never have issues with garbled texts in the program. If you are an English-speaking user you get no benefits from this feature… apart from you may have fun changing the program language to Arabic or Chinese. They look so cool

Using this button in the device properties or program options dialogs you can apply the changed settings and see how they influence the program without closing the options dialog

Despite we strongly believe our program is intuitive and user-friendly… per your many requests we created the detailed user manual The manual is integrated into the program and accessible via F1 button. Also there’s online version of the manual.

We analyzed your requests and added many options to configure the menu you asked us about. Now you can change the device icon size, hide storage device names or volume rows and etc. Those who have many storage devices perhaps will like these options since they let them reduce  the space that the menu occupies on the screen.

E.g. by disabling the “Display storage device name” option and using “Large” images you can make your menu significantly more compact, which is  useful if you have lots of external drives:

or even more compact if you also disable the “Display storage device volume” option:

Or just so ascetically simple, with no control buttons at all (the “Simple menu” option):

Note that the control buttons are still available from the context system tray menu (available via right click to the system tray icon):

Another improvement is device sorting in the menu. The devices are now sorted by drive letter by default, but you can set sorting by device name or volume label as well.

Be happy and have fun in new coming year!

How to upgrade? Just download using the blue “Download” button and run the installer, it will do the upgrade automagically. If your upgrade subscription is over feel free to extend it.

We are glad to announce the new release of Zentimo 1.4! The new version includes some minor UI improvements and critical bug fixes so it’s highly recommended to upgrade. Download now or read more below.

Option to install for all users

Just choose this option on installation of the program and it will be automatically launched for all users on your computer and you do not need to enter the license key under other user accounts

Close button was added to our balloon notifications

The ability to clear all settings on uninstall

After uninstalling the program lets you choose whether you wish to delete all its settings from the registry and the log files.

Automatic device icon assigning improved

In most cases the device icon for non storage devices were assigned to a flash drive icon. Now that’s fixed and the program tries to recognize type of the device and assign a proper icon.

Bug fixes

• In some cases the device settings cannot be stored on the device.
• The command line tool didn’t work.
• The program might display “cannot connect to service” error after its installation on Win 7 64 bit.
• The option “Power off the device after device stopping” was reset to default state after the program reinstalling.
• Some program settings weren’t transferred from USB Safely Remove into Zentimo during installation.
• Devices connected to external USB hubs might get duplicated in the device menu.
• The program shows an awkward message on attempt to load the icon for device in an unsupported format.
• The tray icon can be hidden when the option to hide icon was enabled even though there was devices to be stopped.
• A few autorun bugs were fixed:
  • Autorun after insertion of media card into card reader didn’t work if the option “Hide drives without media” is enabled.
  • When autorun process is launched with “Close/Kill process before device remove” flag the process couldn’t be closed/killed if it’s launched for a card reader’s memory card.
  • In some cases the program cannot be unloaded if there is a process launched by its autorun feature.
  • The program displayed an error after closing manually an auto launched before device stopping process.
  • The Autorun feature. The %PhysicalDriveName% command line parameter was given a wrong value.
• The program recognized some external drives as “Composite USB device” and didn’t see their drive letters.
• The program didn’t remember the selected language during the installation.
• An error displayed on attempt to load non existent settings file

***

The program is under constant development so if you have any ideas, notes or found bugs feel free to let us know!

New Features

Skins support

New ability to fully customize the program user unterface is added. You can choose your preferable skin for the stopping menu (and some other frequently displayed windows) conforming to your choice or your selected Windows theme. The installation pack contains four predefined skins: “Default”, “Classic”, “Black Contrast”, “Black Velvet”. Furthermore you can create your own skin and share it with others.

Improved TrueCrypt Integration

• Now TrueCrypt volume can be launched from a drive mounted as a folder. It’s useful for those who prefer to mount their external drives as NTFS folders rather than drive letters.
• Portable TrueCrypt.exe support added. Zentimo can launch TrueCrypt from a portable drive disregarding what drive letter or even folder mount point it has, thus you do not need to install TrueCrypt onto a computer.
• Fixed bug: TrueCrypt volume cannot be mounted after you changed its host drive letter.

Improved user interface

• Now Zentimo displays the notifications about the changes in a special notification window that doesn’t overlap the device menu and contains more information.
  
• Another little enhancement – a special window that animates the stopping process. Useful when the device stopping is delayed for unknown reason – in this case you’ll see that it’s still under stopping.
  
• Earlier the “Menu” button was displayed over the device icon in the stopping menu and might overlap a part  icon. This didn’t look nice therefore we made this button to be a half transparent in order to make the icon visible even if it’s overlapped by the “Menu” button.
  
• The device menu is now displaying on mouse hover over the system tray icon more smartly. Earlier the device menu appeared every time when you hovered the mouse over the system tray icon even if you moved the mouse to the icon of another application. We fixed this rather annoying behavior and now the menu is displayed only if the mouse cursor hangs for some time over the icon.
• Vertical scroll bar now appears if there are too much devices on the menu.
• If you check the option “Stop device by clicking device Item in stopping menu” you don’t need to use the stopping device button. So, now the program hides the button when this option is chosen thus making the stopping menu less overloaded.

Fixed bugs

• Quick Launch Menu hid immediately after adding an app to it and didn’t allow you adding an additional app.
• The program recognized some external drives as “Composite USB device” and didn’t see their drive letters.
• “Browse drive” feature in the device menu didn’t work for drives mounted as folders.
• The stopping menu became too wide when there was a drive mounted as a folder. Now the folder name is displaying clipped in the device menu.
• The program made excessive requests to its assistant service under Windows XP even if it wasn’t necessary.
• The device menu sometimes unexpectedly hid when a user trying to do an action in it, even if the mouse was above the menu.
• Zentimo cannot be closed if there is a TrueCrypt dialog (launched by Zentimo) asking for a password to the mounted volume.
• Memory leaks could be caused after long work of the program which might cause increasing of memory usage and even program hanging.
• Command line tool “list” parameter didn’t work properly.
• All previous versions of the program have a problem working on a multi-monitor system. Program’s windows were displayed on a wrong monitor instead of displaying on a primary one. Now it’s fixed.
• The program locked a folder used for saving program’s settings, thus preventing to delete it.
• There was a problem with loading program settings if “Decimal symbol” in “Region and Language” options of Windows settings was changed.

See the full list of changes below or Download Zentimo 1.3 beta 2 now.

New Features

Improved TrueCrypt Integration

• Now TrueCrypt volume can be launched from a drive mounted as a folder. It’s useful for those who prefer to mount their external drives as NTFS folders rather than drive letters.
• Added support of portable TrueCrypt.exe. Zentimo can launch it from a portable drive disregarding what drive letter or even folder mount point it has, thus you do not need to install TrueCrypt onto a computer.
• Fixed bug: TrueCrypt volume cannot be mounted after you changed its host drive letter.

Improved user interface

• Now Zentimo displays the notifications about the changes in a special notification window that doesn’t overlap the device menu and contains more information.
  
• Another little enhancement – a special window that animates the stopping process. Useful when the device stopping is delayed for unknown reason – in this case you’ll see that it’s still under stopping.
  
• Earlier the “Menu” button was displayed over the device icon in the stopping menu and might overlap a part  icon. This didn’t look nice therefore we made this button to be a half transparent in order to make the icon visible even if it’s overlapped by the “Menu” button.
  
• New “Black Velvet” skin is added and “Black” skin is renamed to “Black Contrast”. While the “Black Contrast” skin is mainly intended for the visually impaired the new skin has less contrast color scheme and therefore is more nice looking for the normal eye
• Manual on how to create your own skin is added
• The device menu is now displaying on mouse hover over the system tray icon more smartly. Earlier the device menu appeared every time when you hovering the mouse over the systray icon even if you moved the mouse to the icon of another application. We fixed this rather annoying behavior and now the menu is displayed only if the mouse cursor hangs for some time over the icon.

Fixed bugs

• Quick Launch Menu hid immediately after adding an app to it and didn’t allow you adding an additional app.
• The program recognized some external drives as “Composite USB device” and didn’t see their drive letters.
• “Browse drive” feature in the device menu didn’t work for drives mounted as folders.
• The stopping menu became too wide when there were a drive mounted as a folder. Now the folder name is displaying clipped in the device menu.
• The program made excessive requests to its assistant service under Windows XP even if it wasn’t necessary.
• The device menu sometimes unexpectedly closed when a user trying to do an action in it, even if the mouse was over the menu.
• Zentimo cannot be closed if there are launched (by Zentimo) TrueCrypt dialog asking for a password to the mounted volume.
• Some memory leaks fixed. After long work there were memory leaks in the program that might cause increasing memory usage and even program hanging.

Please feel free to download this beta and give us your notes, suggestions or bug reports!

Download Zentimo 1.3 beta 2

We are pleased to present the new beta version of Zentimo. As always we have fixed some of the most annoying bugs and made some significant interface improvements. In this version we’ve added skins supporting. Now you have the ability to choose your preferable skin for Stopping Menu – something to match your system color scheme. The installation pack contains two additional predefined skins, such as “Classic” and “Black” color schemes. How to choose a predefined skin you can see on the following screenshot:

How to create your own skin? It’s easy… Just open one of predefined skin folders (e.g. “C:/Program Files/Zentimo/Skins/Black”) and do the same using your favorite graphic and text editors.

Other changes:

• We’ve added a scroll bar, which became very useful when you connect a lot of devices.
• Quick Launch Menu closed immediately after launching an app or adding a new one. Now we made Quick Launch Menu more user friendly. It hangs on the display for a couple of seconds before closing, so you can add numbers of apps for once.
• If you check the option “Stop device by clicking device Item in stopping menu” you don’t need to use the stopping device button. So, now the button hides when you choose that behavior that makes stopping menu less overloaded.

Fixed bugs:

• The command “list” of the command line didn’t work properly.
• All previous versions of the program have a problem working on a multi-monitor system. Program’s windows were displayed on a wrong monitor instead of to be displayed on the primary one. We changed that behavior in this version.
• Sometimes when the program tries to read a DWord parameter from Windows Registry it appears not DWord, as expected, but String, which led to wrong program behavior.
• Sometimes a device speed test finished with error.
• The program locked a folder, which used for saving program’s settings, preventing to delete it.
• There was a problem with loading program settings if “Decimal symbol” in “Region and Language” options of Windows settings was changed.

Please feel free to download this beta and give us your notes, suggestions or bug reports!

Download Zentimo 1.3 beta 1

We are happy to announce the availability of Zentimo 1.2. In this version we have added some not big but frequently requested features such as the ability to save\restore program settings, the option to automatically close autorun processes, the ability to hide the program icon and we have improved the device icon library. See the full list of changes below or just download the program right now.

Program Settings Saving & Restoring

Beginning from this version you can store all settings of the program to a file and restore them with a few clicks in the program. This is useful if you wish to replicate program settings on another computer or if you decided to reinstall your OS. The feature is accessible from the Options dialog:

Hotkey To Stop All Devices At Once

There is already a button to stop all visible on the menu devices at once. Now, following your requests we added a hotkey to this feature. The hotkey can be specified in the program Options:

Ability To Auto Close Autorun Processes

Since this version Zentimo can not only run programs automatically on device connection, but it may close them before device safe removal. Very useful feature if you setup Zentimo to auto launch your portable applications. The option is available from process settings dialog in both global & local autorun:

Option To Stop Device By Simply Clicking It

Some users were not happy to stop device by clicking to the stop icon that is displayed when you hover mouse over the device item in the menu (especially those ones who came from USB Safely Remove). For these users we added a correspondent option so that now you can stop devices the same way as in USB Safely Remove.

Hiding Systray Icon

Another option that is transferred from USB Safely Remove. By enabling this option the program will hide the systray icon when there are no drives to be stopped in the menu. After you insert a drive you will see the systray icon again. In order to display the stopping menu while there are no devices to be stopped you can  either use a hotkey (Win+S by default) or just go to Windows Start menu -> All Programs -> Zentimo and run it.

Device Icon Library Improved & Extended

The device icon library was significantly renewed: we improved old icons, added lots of new icons – more colors and models of flash drives, memory cards and external hard drives, also we added some new devices. Find below some of new icons:

We are constantly improving the program so feel free to send us any your comments, suggestions or bugs that you found.

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What’s new in this version since Zentimo 1.0?

Disabling of Windows Autorun & Autoplay

One of the most requested features for Zentimo was an ability to fight with Autorun viruses. We do not want to compete with antivirus software so we decided to add a dumb but a hundred-percent guaranteed way to get rid of autorun viruses on your computer: option to fully disable native Windows autorun & autoplay features.  Autorun viruses infect your computer through windows autorun & autoplay so by disabling them fully the autorun viruses just won’t run.

You can disable Windows autorun & autoplay through the Local or Global Autorun settings.

See the following articles to read more about native Windows Autorun & Autoplay:

• What is Autorun and how to disable it?
• What is Autoplay?
• What are autorun-viruses?

Reworked main icon

We have redesigned Zentimo’s main icon making it more attractive and cheerful.

Improved device menu

Now device menu has much more pleasant behavior when you hover mouse over it. It doesn’t blink as the menu of v.1.0 when you hover mouse over it and the controls aren’t overlapped by their hints.

Ability to power off drives on stopping

When you safely remove the device in Windows XP it powers the device off – in case of a flash drive its led was switched off and in case of a portable hard drive it was spun down. But Microsoft changed this behavior in Vista and it still exists in Win 7: after you stop the device on these OSes the hard drive continue spinning and flash drive continue lighting. All modern hard drives park theirs heads automatically when you unplug them so in theory this behavior shouldn’t lead to data looses or drive damages. But in practice the hard drive usually sound strangely when you unplug them on run and this makes a hard drive owner being a bit nervous when he hears that.

If you wish to power off your drives after their stopping go to the Program Options and enable the “Power off the device after the device stopping” option:

Then reboot the computer and enjoy the desired behavior of your drives.

Bunch of other new features:

• Possibility to unfix drive letters for not connected devices
• TrueCrypt integration improvements: mounting from the menu, custom parameters for mounting the volumes
• Quick Settings Wizard for new users
• Settings import from ‘USB Safely Remove’ on installation
• Changing the license key if one is expired
• ClearType and system font support
• “Copy to clipboard” button was added to Speed Test Results window
• Predefined templates to run Total Commander and Explorer were added to the Global Autorun
• Ability to eject\return CD\DVD-ROM tray

And a lot of bug-fixes:

As usually we are constantly improving Zentimo so feel free to send us any your notes or suggestions for future development.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

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Zentimo 1.1 beta 5 is available. Mainly it’s a bug fix release – we fixed more than a dozen of bugs and now we feel that this version is stable enough, so it’s quite likely that the next version will be the final release.

Also we made Zentimo to support ClearType fonts and display all its dialogs in the native font of the OS it’s working under (e.g. under Windows Vista and 7 Zentimo will display dialogs in Segoe UI).

And here’s the list of fixed bugs:

• Sometimes Zentimo may not connect to its service on system startup
• Hints in the device menu overlapped the controls
• Some dialogs can be displayed behind the device menu
• Some options didn’t import correctly from USB Safely Remove
• The program didn’t fix the drive letter of card-reader cards
• …and more than ten other small fixes and improvements

Feel free to download this beta and give us your notes or bug-reports!

Download Zentimo 1.1 beta 5