Archive for windows-freeware tag
Icon and task-bar tools for Windows
A few things bug me about the Windows user interface and as I currently have no inclination to head over to Vista I thought it was about time I dug around and found some tools to address the job.
Icons blown away
Windows will often make a mess of your desktop by moving the icons around normally because the resolution switched.
I can understand this happening if I switch resolution but sometimes even an Alt-Tab from a game will be enough to open the Window and let your icons scatter to the wind.
WinTidy comes to the rescue and although it comes with source the licence is a little confusing as is the technique it uses to obtain the icon positions by sending messages to the ListView control inside the explorer.exe process.
Still, it works and even lets you choose icon positions per resolution if you so wish.
Taskbar reordering
Mac OS X lets you reorder the dock, Firefox and IE7 let you reorder tabs but Windows Explorer doesn’t want to know – it’ll just about give you the time of day.
TaskbarShuffle comes to the rescue and lets you just pick up those task-bar buttons and reorder them until your heart is content.
[)amien
Great Windows, Firefox and Web finds
Getting a new machine often spurs me to go out and find some new tools and utilities. Here’s some recent finds:
Windows
DiskMon – see disk activity
One of the great tools from SysInternals that provides low level disk i/o information but more importantly can minimize to the system tray and provide you with a disk activity in the absence of an LED.
John’s Background Switcher – brighten your desktop
Another desktop wallpaper changer but this one can head off to Flickr to grab the images. As Flickr contains photos of just about anything you might want to specify a couple of tags to get the sort of things you like. GrinGod suggests HDR as a good starting tag and I’m inclined to agree.
Firefox
Gmail Manager – don’t miss a message
This Firefox extension is essential if you want to use Gmail as your primary system. It provides the ability to switch between accounts as well as putting an unread count in the status bar and fixing all the mailto: links to head to Gmail compose. It can also pop up Outlook style new mail notifications trumping a sound of your choice if your co-workers don’t mind your laptop making odd sounds throughout the day.
Adblock Filterset.G Updater – keep ads at bay
Adblock is an essential tool to keep the distracting annoying advertisement pollution at bay. Setting up the rules however can be a boring and long affair but Filterset.G Updater will do that for you by downing a master list off the net. Nice.
Web sites
Rojo
I’ve been looking for an on-line news reader for some time and have been generally unimpressed with Google’s offering. Bloglines didn’t appeal to me but Rojo however looks pretty cool. Create an account, find the blogs you want (it knows about many of them already), tag them into categories if you like and off you go.
You can also Add Mojo to blog posts to get them noticed by others and tag individual stories if you like. The interface is pretty clear and easy to use and very Ajax.
Pandora
I’ve actually known about this for some time but never got round to mentioning it here. Pandora is like a personalised radio station – you tell it the names of a few bands you like and it uses it’s human-crafted database of artist techniques/styles/traits to build you a radio station of like music. At any point you can say you don’t want any more from this band or add additional artists in and the station will intelligently adjust again.
[)amien