TarTool is a tiny windows command line tool to extract tar gzip (tar.gz or tgz extension) files.

You can download TarTool , unzip and run TarTool.exe as a command line executable.

You can also download TarTool from this alternate download location if the link above is down or does not work for you.

The source code  for TarTool is now hosted on codeplex.

I wanted to play around with the Microsoft Shared Source CLI SSCLI. The download is only available as a tgz extension. Imagine that

After searching the interwebs for tools that would extract tar gzip files , I was disappointed since there was no simple tool to extract tar gzip files on my windows machine.

There are a few tools out there like WinRAR etc., but I found them too bloated for my task.

So I wrote a little tool using SharpZipLib, the open source Zip, GZip, Tar and BZip2 library (great job guys, BTW).

SharpZipLib does most of the heavy lifting so the core of TarTool  is less than ten lines of C#. I can host the source code if there is enough interest.

The source is now hosted on codeplex.

Enjoy!

 Update (05/06/2009 17:00 CST) :

TarTool now has an addtional option to untar tar file formats.

TarTool -x sample.tar temp

will untar the sample.tar contents into the temp folder.

I found this excellent post Toward a better UI programing model with pointers to various UI programming models.

Web designers are forced to think within the constraints of the web browser when it comes to user interaction design.

The post above discusses more general approaches to user interaction design and not just within the context of the web browser.

Since I am mostly involved in web UI interactions these days this post was very refreshing as it brought a new perspective to me.

While developing the UI for a web app recently I realized that the web design world is in the search-discovery cycle of  “patterns” that guide user interactions.  Patterns in user interactions has the dual benefit of helping both designers and users. Much like the “guidelines” on Windows ( Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines ) or Mac (Apple Human Interface Guidelines ) development platforms that help Windows or Mac application developers respectively while standardizing the user interactions of the applications developed on those platforms. These guidelines ensure strict quality, improves user experience and makes the life of designers easier.

There are plenty of resources that discuss “web ui interaction patterns” .

Designing Interfaces is a good resource if you are designing web user interactions. Rob Adams one of the core developers of Adobe’s Flex  has an excellent set of introductory articles which not only apply to designing user interfaces using Adobe’s Flex but applies to user interface design in general. I especially liked the Structuring your Application part.

Everyone loves the web, even if there are a few frustrations that we still have to overcome

Happy Surfing !