Monday, October 30, 2006

Essential Programs 1: Nifties

These are applications I love... but I guess I could live without. They make my life easier and help keep my eyes, brain, and wrists happy. For me, they are necessary applications for convenience.

() Unlocker
I organize (read: cut and paste) my directories a lot and use external drives frequently. Windows is pretty stupid sometimes (read: very often) and annoyingly locks files so that they can't be moved or deleted and the external drive can not be stopped. Using this program, it's very easy to free things up (right click and click unlock over any file or folder.) Now you can delete and move stuff or stop your external drive.

() TaskSwitch XP
Much desired (by me anyway) improvement to alt-tab. It allows the window to be "stickied" and it will not close unless the enter or escape key is pressed. Also, it allows you to exclude programs from the list, move minimized windows to the end, and all kinds of other convenient things. Download it, play with it, and if you don't like it remove it. But you'll probably like it.

() EjectMedia / RemoveMedia
To safely remove external disks (like an external hard drive or a USB drive), you normally have to right click some icon, double click another, right click again, and finally tell windows to stop the disk. These programs allow you to do this in one step: "EjectMedia.exe E:". Tie it into your Super Smart Windows Input/Output Box and you get a much simpler way of stopping your devices. You could also script it together with Unlocker for better use.

() TweakUI
This allows you to tweak a bunch of stuff in windows. Like... it let's you remove the recycle bin from the desktop, customize displays... man, too many stuff. Just download it and play through the options. If you don't see anything useful, just uninstall it.

() More Firefox Extensions
() Statusbar Clock
Puts a clock in the status bar. I use dual screens, usually with firefox opened, so this allows me to see the time when I look at the bottom right no matter what. This is important to me, though it may not be for most people. I just really like to know the time.

() Clear Private Data Button
Adds a button to clear private data. It's useful when you need it.

() Mouseless Browsing
This is an extension that I love the concept of, but I still think needs a little work. Essentially, it assigns numeric ids to links so that you can quickly select the links without needing to use a mouse. However, sometimes it can take quite a while to assign all the numeric ids, which makes the whole thing pointless. I would like it a lot more if I could have it automatically be on for certain sites. Nevertheless, I like the extension a lot and I do use it when I really want to avoid the mouse.

() All-In-One Gesture
This allows you to do tasks (like back and forward and close) by using the mouse. I'm still undecided whether or not I really like this. I'm not quite sure how much it gets in my way and causes me to do stuff on accident. The only gestures I occasionally use are for back (left), forward (right), next page (>), previous page (<), and close (down) anyways. I dunno... I'm generally anti-mouse anyways also... but even though I rarely use it, it is really cool idea...

() Customize Google
Another one that I'm not quite sure if I really like or not. I don't want to block google ads and the customization doesn't really mean that much to me. Mostly, I like the google images links going directly to the real image. Is it worth having a whole extra extension for this? I don't really know.

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