If you've ever used a keyboard app launcher like Launchy, Executor, Quicksilver, or Gnome Do you've probably asked yourself, why doesn't Microsoft build something like this into Windows? Now Microsoft Office Labs has released a free keyboard launcher called Speed Launch.
Speed Launch adds a little bull's eyee to your desktop. To add a frequently used program, file, or document, to Speed Launch, just drag it to the target. You can then activate Speed Launch by hitting Win+C to bring up the program window. You can either hit the buttons to perform specified actions or type into the box. In other words, it does pretty much what you'd expect any keyboard launcher to do.
But Speed Launch has a few quirks. First, the program doesn't lose focus or go away unless you hit the X button in the upper right. Second, there doesn't seem to be a way to change the hotkeys that bring up the Speed Launch window. So if, like me, you happen to have a computer with an awkwardly-placed Windows key, there's no way to change the hotkeys.
The program is also a bit of a memory hog, using as much as 30MB of RAM, which is far more than similar programs like Launchy or Executor use. That seems strange, especially considering the fact that Speed Launch doesn't index your program files or start menu items automatically, something which both of those other programs do.
Overall, Speed Launch doesn't stack up particularly well against the competition. But it's worth keeping in mind that this is an experimental project that's still under development.
Executor is an application that lets you launch programs open URLs, or perform other actions with just a few keystrokes. At first glance, it looks a lot like Launchy. Both programs are free utilities for Windows that let you run programs without reaching for the mouse. And both will scan default and user-selected directories looking for a list of programs. But Executor wins hands down when it comes to customization options.
Probably the coolest feature in Executor is the ability to assign global hotkeys. You can add keywords for any program by dragging and dropping a shortcut or executable file into the kewyord section under the settings tab. And then you can select a global hotkey to press to bring up that application without even pulling up the Executor window. For example, I can now luanch the Irfanview image viewer either by hitting Ctrl+Z to bring up Executor and typing in "irfanview," or I can just hit Ctrl+I.
Here are a few other features that make Executor stand out:
Supports keyword "find [text]| for using Windows Vista search or Windows Desktop Search
You can configure a drop down menu to display additional results or to stay hidden
You can customize the heck out of the layout by changing the skin, fonts, dimensions, position, and transparency
Use a single keyword to start multiple programs/documents/etc
YouGetSignal provides a bunch of tools for looking things up. You can find the location of a phone number on a Google Map, find open ports on your internet connection, or perform a visual trace route (which traces the route packets of data make on the internet when traveling from your computer to another destination).
We recently discovered a new YouGetSignal tool: a reverse IP domain check. Just type a URL in the box, and YouGetSignal will attempt to discover other web sites using the same server. This comes in handy if you want to find URLs registered to a certain company, or if you have a shared hosting plan for your own web site and you want to see what other sites are sharing your server space.
For example, I discovered that there are 856 domains hosted on the same server as www.google.com, and 841 hosted on the same server as www.downloadsquad.com.
While I know there are plenty of good replacements out there for Windows Explorer, I'm not ready to jump ship just yet. I don't really need any really advanced functionality, but there are a few things I'd like to add. Vista-style breadcrumbs and tabbed browsing, for example.
QuizoApps has coded two small extensions that do the job quite well with a minimal impact on resources. Both addons are activated by clicking view -> toolbars in any Explorer window.
The Breadcrumbs addon (QtAddressBar) is extremely responsive and even displays links to subfolders (you can see the arrow off the Adobe folder above).
Brad blogged about using QTTabBar to add an up button in Vista a while back, but it also adds several other tabbed browsing functions. You can create groups to open several tabs at once, clone a tab, merge tabs from another window, undo tab closing, use hotkeys, and it even includes enhanced replacements for Explorer's standard buttons. It even maintains a list of recently closed folders for quick resurrection.
Customization offers tons of enhancements, like grid lines, alternating row colors, minimizing to tray, and a lot more. If you want, QTTabBar will restore your tab previous tab layout on launch - I use it to keep the Control Panel and my Printers close at hand.
These are two great addons for any Windows XP. .NET 2.0 Framework is required.
If you're a heavy Twitter user, you've no doubt accumulated a huge collection of tiny text messages. Losing all that information would be a giant pain, but how do you save a copy for yourself? Have a look at Tweetake!
The interface is dead simple: enter your Twitter username and password, select what you want to back up, and press Get 'em! to release the hounds.
Within a few seconds Tweetake presents you with a CSV file containing all your valuable messages. Tweetake grabs the sender's name and screen name, their location and description, timestamp, and the tweet text, along with just about all the other info that Twitter stores.
How many of you back up the files on your PC regularly? I'd wager the number backing up online data (like Twitter) is even lower. Play it safe, and back up your tweets!
There are plenty of dock-styleapplications launchers for Windows. But most have one thing in common: You anchor them to the top, bottom, or side of the screen and then scroll your mouse over that portion of the screen to bring up a list of applications. Circle Dock is different, because this free application launcher it appears where your mouse already is instead of making you move your mouse.
Like most application launches, Circle Dock comes with a list of icons for frequently used programs, like the Control Panel, your default browser, and the recycling bin. You can add shortcuts by dragging them from your desktop or quick launch bar and customize to your heart's content.
Circle Dock has a ton of visual customization options as well. You can either display your icons in concentric circles, or as a spiral. You can add a rotating animation effect to the spiral to make yourself dizzy. There are a more than 30 skins to choose from. And you can decide whether the dock is always visible or if it disappears when the program loses focus or when you click an application icon. One other feature which I wish every application launcher had (and which many, but not all, do have) is the ability to select from a handful of keyboard shortcuts to show or hide the dock.
I've used plenty of hotkey applications, but none is as visually appealing or easy to configure as QLiner.
Download and install QLiner, launch it, and then press win + z to open the main window (above). New hotkeys can be added by simply dragging a shortcut from your desktop onto a key - it even works with URLs from your browser.
More than just a launcher, QLiner first tries to match your hotkey with a running application. If it finds a match, it'll bring that window to the front instead of spawning a new process. You can add runtime arguments to your hotkeys as well: for example, /auto on CCleaner to add a one-key system cleanup.
QLiner also has built-in layouts that are tailored for Sony, IBM, Toshiba, and Dell laptop keyboards. Dvorak keyboards are supported, and international users will be thrilled by the massive number of languages available.
Its 45mb memory footprint is a tad on the bulky side, but it's easy to overlook because of QLiner's ease-of-use and flexibility. QLiner is freeware, Windows only.
For those of you charged with the unenviable task of malware removal and defense, keeping your toolbox current can be a lot of work. Lunarsoft's Anti-Malware Toolkit simplifies the process by providing an easy way to handle downloading.
The Toolkit is really just a downloader which fetches the current versions of programs like Super Antispyware, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, HijackThis, Spybot, Autoruns, CCleaner, and LSP Fix. It also grabs programs that you'll want to install to prevent further issues: Avast, Firefox, Comodo Firewall.
Point it to your USB flash drive or network share, hit the download button and grab yourself a cup of coffee.
While you could do this with just about any decent download manager, why bother? Anti-Malware toolkit already targets most of the tools you're going to need and it's as simple to maintain them as clicking a single button.
If installing a program like Trust No Exe isn't your style, you can always use registry edits and policy changes to lock down PCs. That can be a little tiresome, but Nawras PC Supervisor makes it as simple as checking a few boxes.
PC Supervisor gives you control over just about everything you might want to restrict. Control panel access can either be blocked completely or limited to only those options you want displayed. Hide drive letters and features like "run as," network connections, and the places bar.
Use it to disable everything from registry editing and task manager to display settings changes. Set up privacy tweaks like auto-clearing the recent files list and hiding the last logged on username.
Granted, most of these changes can be made using gpedit.msc and secpol.msc (built-in controls in Windows XP Pro), but PC supervisor's interface is easier to get around and it can make changes on XP Home installs as well.
PC Supervisor doesn't require installation, and is completely free. Right now there's no help file, but it's still a nice addition to your admin toolbox.
Rising energy costs and environmental concerns have caused just about all of use to take a good hard look at our usage habits. Verdiem's Edison helps your conservation efforts by picking up where your Windows power saving features leave off.
You may already be familiar with Local Cooling, another similar application. Edison won't hibernate or shut your PC off like Local Cooling will, but it will turn off your screen and hard drive, and suspend your PC to achieve savings.
Set up your work schedule and choose your power savings plan. Edison lets you create different plans for work and non-work times, and you can either use one of nine preset savings plans or customize your own.
While scheduling is a great feature, I'm not convinced it makes Edison a better option than Local Cooling. Edison is a much bigger download, consumes almost four times as much memory, and requires activation.
Either way, grab one of these apps and make your PC a little more environmentally friendly. Every little bit helps!
Wikipedia is a great source of information, and it's getting bigger every day. If you're like me, you'd be hard pressed to go a day without looking something up on Wikipedia. But sometimes you might not have Internet access -- devastating, I know! -- and you still need to know whether there's a grammatically correct sentence made up entirely of the word "buffalo." Well, it's a good thing there's Wikitaxi, an offline Wikipedia app.
With Wikitaxi, you can snag the entire database of Wikipedia -- or, if you're pressed for bandwidth, the Simple English version is a lot smaller -- and read it offline on your Windows machine. It comes with a separate importer app that you can point at a database, and then you can use the main Wikitaxi app to run searches on it. Those clever people at Lifehacker suggest that you carry it around on a USB drive: then you can prove that buffalo thing to your friends at a moment's notice!
If you use iPhoto, and you have a Flickr account, but you don't have a way of getting your pictures from one to the other, you might want to give FFXporter a look. It's a free iPhoto plugin that -- just as the name would indicate -- exports files from your iPhoto library to Flickr. Although there are other ways of getting this done, I have yet to find another free one that works as well.
FFXporter preserves a lot of the data that iPhoto and Flickr can both use, like keywords (tags on Flickr) and EXIF info. Since it's a plugin, you won't have to open another app to get the job done, you can upload pictures right from iPhoto. Probably the most useful feature is set support, so you can batch upload a bunch of photos at once, and add them all to the same set on Flickr.
While I'm sure you're responsible with the programs you run on your computer, what about the other people you work and live with? If you're an administrator or share your computer with anyone else, you might want to check out Trust-No-Exe.
What does it do? It installs as a service and can block any executable process: exe, dll, sys, com, etc. Set up allow and deny folders, start the service, and programs just won't launch anymore. It'll block attempted launches from anything - floppy or USB drives, network shares, wherever. Theoretically, you could even use it as a basic malware defense by adding your temporary internet files to the denied list.
Since it's a service, it's always protecting your PC. Just be sure you lock down access to services.msc and your control panel, since there's no password option to keep users out.
It's an oldie, but a goodie, and definitely a good, simple way to prevent annoying installs and inappropriate use.
Vyew My PC is a flash-based instant desktop sharing product with a lot of fun features.
Basically, go to the Vyew My PC web page and click start sharing my desktop. You will be given a unique, unguessable URL. You can then share that URL with anyone you'd like to share your desktop with. There are some features you need an account to use, but the basics are usable by anyone.
You can upload files to be shown on the Vyew My PC desktop, use the whiteboard features, chat and with registration, use audio/video features. You cannot however, view anything outside the Vyew My PC desktop area. So, if you want to switch to a new window and show a web page you are viewing, it's not going to show up unless you take screenshots and present those.
It moves smoothly and all the features seem to work. Now, I didn't go in and have a full-fledged sales presentation to a CEO or anything but I did show a powerpoint to two of my friends who logged in from two seperate locations.
My main concern was about security. Showing a powerpoint to my friends is quite a bit different than important company information. So, this is what I found out; the packet data for your session is not encrypted but the URLs seem to be unique enough that someone wouldn't just stumble into your meeting without being invited. SSL encryption is not offered publicly but could be a possibility for some clients.
You can use Windows Explorer to sort files by name, size, file type, or date modified. But for some reason Microsoft doesn't give you the option to sort by file extension. CPExt does.
In order to install CPExt, you need to download and unzip the installer to a temporary folder. Right click on the file marked CPExt.inf and select install. Once you reboot your system you'll be able to add an Ext column by right-clicking on a column in Windows Explorer and choosing "more" from the drop down menu. And then you can proceed to systematically delete every EXE file on your hard drive and make your computer practically unusable. So umm... proceed with caution.
