Minimizr

Microsoft Windows XP for a long time and trying Windows Vista for a while, I realized it’s time to move on… Move on to Apple Mac OS X. There are couple reasons to get away from Windows:

• Windows XP was taking way too much time to administer it
• after a clean install Windows XP was working like a charm for a while, but after installing some applications it was getting slower and slower…
• Windows Vista was too slow in my old PC, I would have needed some new hardware
• Visual appearance in Windows Vista is in my opinion terrible, sure there are something glamorus in Aero, but the combination of green and blue everywhere…
• …

So, what were and are overall goals for the switch?

• To minimize the needed hardware and software to do all the required tasks
• To minimize needed administration time, both hardware and software
• To have a visually appealing environment, both hardware and software

I admit I didn’t know that much about Mac OS X, but it was looking promising. It’s based on Unix, it’s visual appearance is clean, administration should be easy… And now after couple of weeks, I must say things are looking good. At the moment I’m exploring ways to migrate from Windows applications Mac applications. I’ll get into details later on…

Norton Ghost GDisk

Pros:

• can be used from Windows command line
• can be used also for USB connected disks

Cons:

• Slow?

Usage example:

gdisk32
gdisk32 [disk number] /diskwipe /dod

Other disk wiping solutions: Disk Wiping Utilities: How to Get Rid of Your Data Permanently

FastStone Capture is one of many screen capture programs. It is for Windows and free for home users. It can capture windows, objects, full screen, rectangle regions, freehand-selected regions and scrolling windows/web pages. It has some integrated functions like resizing, cropping, text annotation, printing and more. You can save the captured images in many different image formats. Capture has also a screen magnifier and a screen color capture.

What makes FastStone Capture an excellent program is it’s good features, very clean, minimal and easy interface.

Use your web applications, like Gmail and Google Calendar, just like desktop applications.

Bubbles is simply but clever way to use web applications or sites just like desktop applications. You just add your favorite web sites in Bubbles settings and after that you can use them in their own windows and they sit in the system tray. Bubbles has some web applications pre-configured and they have some extra functionality. There are Google Calendar, Gmail, 30 Boxes, Yahoo Mail and Flickr. You can for example upload photos by dragging them into Flickr.

Some applications just work so naturally as desktop applications in Bubbles. My favorites is to use SlimTimer with Bubbles.

Automate you software installation by making software list and let the InstallPad do the work for you.

InstallPad is an easy and smart program. It is a little like apt for Windows. You just make a list of your favorite programs with InstallPad or straight in xml format and InstallPad will download and install silently the ones you choose. Yoy’ll get time for more important things.

InstallPad can resume cancelled downloads and can try to find the latest version of the programs. It is still in an early stage, but it is very promising and there are coming features.

Keeping Windows taskbar buttons always in a same order helps to minimize the effort needed to find the right button.

Lifehacker mentioned Windows program Taskbar Shuffle. I Downloaded and installed it and it’s great. It is easy to use and it it feels a natural way to order buttons just by dragging them.

I have been using TaskArrange for ages and it is also working quit well. Nice thing about it is that you can even order the buttons inside groups. You have to open the program in order to arrange buttons so if you place the program shortcut in the Windows quick launch area it is near the taskbar buttons and rather handy to use. On the other hand, there is no need for running background process. Taskbar Shuffle process seems to have about 6 MB memory usage.

I think Taskbar button ordering should be an option in Windows, but these programs fill the gap. Well, nice feature would be an option to save the preferred order. Are there any?

There is also a japanese Taskbar++.

For web development testing purposes it would be very handy to have multiple verisions of Internet Explorer (IE) on Windows. Luckily it is possible.

It is possible to run multible versions of Internet Explorer in standalone mode. First Joe Maddalone introduced this in Multiple Version of IE in Windows XP Pro. Manfred Staudinger perfected the standalone versions in Taming Your Multiple IE Standalones by adding IE version numbers to the title bar of the standalone browser window.

Now there are two options to install different versions. You can download readily packaged versions separately from Evolt’s archive. You just have to unzip the packages into your hard drive. Or you can use TredoSoft’s installer which contains IE3 IE4.01 IE5 IE5.5 and IE6.

While Flickr is lackin the fullscreen slideshow, luckily there are other programs to do that.

Flickr’s own slideshow is fine, but it definately lacks the fullscreen option. It is quite a diffrence between 500 pix and fullscreen slideshow. After noticing that Safari is having a plug in for that (Windows version coming soon) and browsing through the Flickr Tools, there seems to be some web page services and programs to replace this lack. One of them is Flickr AutoDownloadr.

Being a Windows desktop program Flickr AutoDownloadr does a pretty good job as a online service’s “add on”. It downloads the selected fotos to your computer and and displays them as a windowed or fullscreen slideshow. You can select one users or everyones potos by dates, tags, favourites, set and groups and order them as you like. The best thing is that you can make a shortcut to open almost any open page on Flickr as a slideshow. You can also use the program to download photos to your computer without showing slideshow.

Downloading and installing the program is straitforward and the user interface looks clear. Running the program first time it asks if you want to associate the ‘flickrss’ protocol with this program. You’d better to answer yes in order to be able to use the clever option to open the slideshow from the Flickr web page. All you have to do is to bookmark the following link in your web browser: javascript:void(location.href=’flickrss:’+location.href).

Now when you navigate to a page on Flickr and then select this bookmark, those photos will be displayed in a fullscreen slideshow. Slideshow opened this way uses the program settings from last time. Flickr AutoDownloadr can be also used from the command line.

Being an excellent program, there where also some problems during the test run. Sometimes some couldn’t be seen in a slideshow and program only showed the error message: Failed to set image to… Actually selecting sets did this every time. There could also be a button to just save the settings without starting a slideshow.

But anyway, while Flickr is lacking the fullscreen slideshow, this program is an excellent replace for that. And here is the tip: Chage the photo quality setting to high, go to Flickr Last 7 Days Interesting page and start the fullscreen slideshow from the bookmark, sit back and enjoy the show…

Microsoft has released the final version of Internet Explorer 7. It is available now as a manual download or on November via Windows Automatic Update.

Microsoft has officially released the final version of Internet Explorer 7.0 (IE7) for Windows XP SP2 with build 7.0.5730.11. IE7 is available for free download at Internet Explorer Home. Though IE7 will be pushed via Automatic Windows Updates on November, it can be disabled from auto-installing. Some localised language edition of IE 7 will be released within the next few weeks and others later.

Internet Explorer 7 features tabbed browsing, web search widget from the toolbar, advanced printing options such as shrink-to-fit printing, anti-phishing filter, ability to discover, read and subscribe to RSS feeds directly from IE7. More importantly, IE7 has improved security features such as ActiveX opt-in and improved support for web standards and CSS.

Mozilla is also expected to release final Firefox 2 anytime this month. So you would better hurry up to test IE before that…

With this tip you can make Windows boot up to feel a little faster.

If you wait couple minutes after turning your computer on to log in Windows and after log in you wait still some more minutes before Windows is ready to go, this tip is for you and it will save you minutes every day. After booting up to login screen Windows will login automatically and lock the desktop right after that.

So, you boot up your computer and next you unlock the desktop and can start surfing the web right away. Note that for security reasons, which are saving password as plaintext into Windows registry and desktop being unlock for a little moment during the booting up, this really probably suitable only for home computer with singel user.