A while back, I looked around the internet for a simple one button mouse that my 3 year old could use to play the games on PBSKids.org.  I was surprised that there was no cheap mice like this available.  My kid was young and having a hard time clicking only the left mouse button, so I decided to write a small program that would allow me to easily switch so that all the mouse buttons functioned as the left mouse button.

Now I simply fire up one exe and then I can launch IE in kiosk mode (via "c:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" -k http://www.pbskids.org ) and I can walk away and let my kids have relatively safe fun playing games on the computer.

Here is a link to the program:  SingleButtonMouse.exe

When run, it will automatically go into single button mode and add a notification icon to your task bar (click on this to toggle back to multi button mode).  It has been tested to work in Windows 2000, XP, and 2008.  (It should work in Vista too.)

For those interested, the source code is available here.  It is written in C# (requires .Net 2.0 runtime) and uses windows api hooking.

Here is a simple little stop watch program that I wrote as my first Smart Device application some time ago.  It works on XP/Vista too.  Maybe somebody will find it useful.

Screen shot:

Download the source code:  StopWatch.zip (33.89 kb)

The other day my daughter played on my buddy's iPhone and absolutely loved this simple drum kit program.  I thought it was cool too, and since I don't have an iPhone, I did the next best thing a computer geek could do: I wrote a simplified clone for my Windows Mobile PDA

Ok... here is the link for the download.

It requires .Net 2.0 be installed and it has been written to work in both regular Windows as well as for Windows Mobile.

Click on a drum to play it or you can use your numeric keypad to play the drums too.

Here is a screenshot: 

Here is the VS 2008 C# source code for those interested:  BeatBox.zip (1.78 mb)