After a fresh XP install (and I’ve gone through a few lately with triple boot problems) I have to install almost all of the following.
Does it take a long time? Yes. Is it worth it? Hell yeah.
Posts Tagged freeware
Essential Windows Apps
May 27
Firefox Extensions revisited
Jul 13
Firefox (currently 3.5) is my favorite browser. I use it for hours every day, and I could barely manage without it. It has one big advantage over all the other browsers out there – extensions. No other browser has the same community, the same wealth of extensions that firefox has. If you need to do something that firefox doesn't do, chances are there's an extension out there for you.
I've listed my fave extensions before, but on re-reading it recently I realised that it does change a fair bit from year to year.
The Old Reliables:
- Adblock Plus & Adblock Filterset.G Updater
- Download Statusbar – puts progress indicators for downloads in the status bar.
- Firebug – debug javascript
- PDF Download – download PDF files instead of trying to open them.
I can't imagine ever not needing those four. Google basically included 2 & 3 in chrome, even tho the focus is on a stripped down browser. Absolutely essential.
The Fallen
- faviconize Tab - just don't find myself using it that often anymore. Prism has seen my most regular windows move to their own processes
- All-in-One Gestures – mouse gestures are cool, but once I became more laptop centric I found them very hard to do on a touchpad
- SmartBookmarks – I don't care about bookmarks anymore. I save some important work stuff at work, but I hardly ever use bookmarks at home, except for on the toolbar.
- Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer – see above.
- Piclens – Now called CoolIris I think. Still very cool but I never used it enough.
- All-in-One Sidebar – I used to do things in the sidebar but I can't for the life of me remember what they were anymore
- Web Developer – viewing CSS can be handy, but its one toolbar too many
The Newbs
- Downthemall – download manager which can't be beaten. Indispensible
- FoxTab – A cool graphic tab manager like safari is always bragging about. rarely used, I doubt i'll still have it come this time next year
- GoogleGears – More of a plugin really but it comes up as an extension
- Fission – turns the Location bar into a progress bar
- Growl/GNTP – extension to add growl (for windows) support to firefox
- LocationBar2 – linkifies sections of URLs in your location bar
- Personal Menu – hides the top menus (file view etc) and puts them in a button on the side of the location bar. with a custom menu
- Prism – The best thing since sliced bread. Turn oft used websites (hint – GMAIL) into separate web apps!
- Source Viewer Tab – view the source in a tab next to the window, chrome style
- Ubiquity – command line web stuff – my most common uses are defining, googling or wiki-ing words, or mapping things.
Rocketdock and Taskswitch
Jul 13
Two more productivity apps that I find very useful
RocketDock
http://www.rocketdock.com
A windows version of the dock application based on the Mac dock. Except its better because its on windows of course. =)
If you’ve ever seen the Mac dock you’ll know what to expect. You can add icons to the dock, and also folders of icons using the Stacks Docklet (a separate download, here). In fact there are all kinds of addons available on the site, although most are fairly simple stuff, usually just adding a shutdown button or some other trivial function.
Rocketdock also shows your minimized tasks, and I can happily report it works very well with previously blogged app miniMize.
Apple recently won a legal battle to patent the dock, so it may not be around forever, as they’ll no doubt try and keep it exclusive to macs. hopefully by that stage the geniuses behind XGL or Bumptop will have created some ingenious new way to interact with our PCs.
TaskSwitch XP
(http://www.ntwind.com/software/taskswitchxp/download.html)
Even with miniMize and RocketDock, you’ll still need to alt-tab occasionally (sometimes its just more instinctive). TaskSwitchXP replaces the default alt-tab menu with a much better one, which allows sticky mode (the menu stays on the screen until you pick something with the mouse) and is super-customisable.
I’ve blogged about some of the bits of this before, but just for convenience sake, here’s all the steps together.
1. Open up regedit and go to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics
Create a new String Value called MinWidth and set the value to -255.
2. Right click on the taskbar, and click properties, tick ‘Group Similar taskbar buttons’ and click OK
3. Install Visual Task Tips from http://www.visualtasktips.com/ and log off/on again.
Here’s a Screenshot of your resulting Windows XP Super Taskbar in action:
The Windows 7 bar also allows programs to show up little submenus with actions. This feature has been much talked about as a brilliant new addition to the taskbar in Windows 7, but it is already possible in XP. Not many apps seem to support it, but it can be done, as demonstrated by the lovely J River Media Jukebox:
One Missing Feature
The first screenshot above is showing two instances of chrome, rather than two tabs in chrome. This is one advantage windows 7 has over this. Until someone writes an XP util that duplicates this functionality (which, lets face it, will likely never happen) then we’re stuck with only showing window instances.
One Unfortunate Side Effect
Windows minimized in Photoshop CS3 (and probably other versions) seem to inherit the width from the MinWidth value, so you may come across this problem:
I can’t find a way around it except to access these windows via the window menu, if anyone comes across a fix let me know.
Windows 7 Taskbar Hack
May 6
This is a picture of my current taskbar.
As you can see I’ve applied a hack which removes the text from each item on the taskbar, similar to the Windows 7 super bar (or whatever its called). It’s a registry hack. The thing I love about registry hacks is that they’re overhead free. I didn’t have to install any extra program to make this work. Here’s what you do:
1. Go into Regedit and find the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics
2. Create a new String value, name it MinWidth and set it to -255
3. Restart (or log off and log on again)
Simple!
Although we’ve installed nothing, we could now install VisualTaskTips (http://www.visualtasktips.com), which would give us a windows 7 style preview of any item we hover over in the taskbar.
Coincidentally, I’ve been experimenting with using Taskbar Shuffle to colour code my taskbar icons during particularly long sessions.
I know it sounds daft, but I have this theory that when we look for an icon for a program, we identify by colour first. Thus, if we need firefox, our eye is drawn to the orange / red hues at the end of the taskbar, and we find it faster. It also looks way better:
Whenever I take a pic with my camera phone, transferring a file is as easy as right clicking on the bluetooth icon in the taskbar, sending the file and clicking 'next' on the Bluetooth dialog. Microsoft have made it wonderfully simple to transfer a file to your PC from a bluetooth device.
Transferring lots of files, however, is a different story. by the time your on the 5th or so file, you'll be getting fairly tired of right clicking on tray icons.
I put the following command in my autohotkey script, using WIN + SHIFT + B as the shortcut key.
%windir%\system32\fsquirt.exe -receive
Now if I want to transfer ten photos, I hit WIN+SHIFT+B ten times, ten dialogs spring up, and I can fire away all my photos from the phone end.
PS: fsquirt? Who thinks up the names for these things?
Mp3Split 0.9.1
Apr 25
http://www.merlinsoftware.com/free.htm
Sometimes you need to split a large mp3 file into parts. Sometimes. But you never remember the last program you used, and you end up downloading 5 things that don't do what you need them to.
This splits large mp3s into auto named files at a length of your choosing. That's it. No frills, its this easy.
step 1
drag mp3 to window
step 2
choose length of segments (I chose 10 minutes each)
step 2a. (optional)
have it stick all the files in the same folder, or pick a folder
step 3
click 'Split Files'
It'll even do multiple files in one go, to their respective folders. Go Mp3Split!
Rory
ProcessTamer
Jan 7
http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/proctamer/index.html
I used to use this app all the time a few years back, and I thought I no longer needed it until yesterday.
Picture the scene: You have a pile of windows open, working on lots of stuff, some saved, some not. Suddenly, your PC locks up. nothing will respond. The mouse barely moves. Windows will not redraw. CTRL + ALT + DEL seems to offer help, but once you click on 'Task Manager' the whole process just repeats, and we lock up again. So what do you do? Sit there and hope for the best? Restart?
Well if you've already installed ProcessTamer, this might not happen at all in the first place. Process Tamer simply watches for system processes (programs) which are hogging too much of the CPU and reduces their priority.
In the early days of Firefox memory leaks, I found this hugely useful. Ever since firefox 3, I haven't had a need for it. But yesterday, I downloaded a piece of software to interface with my Sony Ericsson phone which completely crapped out and hung my system. Only through patient clicking and waiting did I manage to kill the process, and even then it took over 10 minutes to do.
Process Tamer is a tiny piece of software, with a tiny memory footprint, which you may never have to use in your entire computing life. However, if you ever do need it, you'll be very thankful for it.
PS: Just an additional tip here, on the same subject. I've seen a lot of people complain that their system is running slow because something called 'System Idle Process' is at 99%. People wrongly assume that these are background windows tasks hogging all the resources. In fact, System Idle Process is a process who's only job is to keep the CPU running when nothing else needs it. I don't know the exact technical reasons, but the CPU needs to be kept working constantly, if not intensely. If you ever see System Idle Process running at close to 99%,
it means that your system resources are almost 100% available, and nothing else is using them.
Update:
Looks like I already posted about ProcessTamer back when I started this blog! Whoops…
Even though you probably don't use Windows Media Player (especially now that you've found J River Media Jukebox and Songbird ) you'll no doubt have those shell extensions every time you right click on a media file. You know the ones. Play this with media player. Add this to media player playlist.
Want to get rid of them? Its this easy
Start > Run > regsvr32 /u wmpshell.dll
Yes. Really.
Songbird 0.7
Aug 22
http://www.songbirdnest.com
Windows/Linux/OSX
Windows/Linux/OSX
SongBird is the mediaplayer that I would be using if I hadn't found J River Media Jukebox. In fact, if I had been just a few months late finding it, I might have stopped looking for media players altogether.
SongBird is a unique media player based on the firefox codebase. It's biggest claim to fame is the inbuilt web-browser and related functions it includes. It utilises the mozilla model of add-ons and skins which can be downloaded from within the player itself. These include everything from ad-blockers to lyrics downloaders. It can also connect to a variety of free (legal) music sites and allows you to download files.
This is the key feature that sets SongBird apart from other media players, and an advantage it holds even over Media Jukebox. If you visit a music blog in SongBird, a bar popups along the bottom listing all the media files that this site directly links to. Think of it as a pre-emptive version of firefox download manager. It prompts you to show you what you can download, letting you visit your fave music sites and pull down the new content with the greatest of ease. This could be a very useful feature, and it's something I'd love to be using regularly, but alas I'm fairly static in my music tastes these days. The more adventurous amongst you will like it.
SongBird is in beta (version 0.7) and the design has been overhauled from the last iteration. It's now much cleaner and clearer than before, and models itself on a sort of industrial version of iTunes. It's also a boatload faster, which is very important as one of the big drawbacks of the early versions was the sluggish feel to things and the tendency to crash.
It's not perfect, in that it lacks the custom views of JukeBox, it doesn't (to my knowledge) sync to any devices, and it's got no equaliser of any kind, although one is apparently in the pipeline. Having said that, it's a lot better than most of the media players out there, and it's still only in beta. Its also available to linux and OSX users, which Jukebox is not. This fact pushes it in to that growing mass of essential apps which are available cross platform.
If you're on linux or OSx, if for some reason you didn't like Media Jukebox, or if you're just curious, check out SongBird 0.7