My new best friend — AutoHotkey

June 18, 2009 By Leave a Comment

autohotkey-logoWhen you’re like me, a natural time waster, you need to be as productive as possible when you are working. That’s why I have recently learned to love AutoHotkey, a free Windows download that allows you to automate repitive actions, create hotkey and scripts and at its most basic is really easy to use.

Some of AutHotkey’s key features include (their words):

  • Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder.
  • Create hotkeys for keyboard, joystick, and mouse. Virtually any key, button, or combination can become a hotkey.
  • Expand abbreviations as you type them. For example, typing “btw” can automatically produce “by the way”.
  • Remap keys and buttons on your keyboard, joystick, and mouse.
  • Convert any script into an EXE file that can be run on computers that don’t have AutoHotkey installed.

The basic idea is you create text file scripts with small coded fragments that can replace text as you write, perform simple actions or perform more complicated actions.  The script needs to run once to be put into memory and then each time you need it, it’ll be there.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: freeware, Productivity, Windows Tagged With: , , , ,

Tabbed Windows File Handler Hits the Spot

June 10, 2009 By Leave a Comment

nomad-logoRegardless the level or age of your Microsoft Windows configuration, the one built piece of functionality that can always stand a helping hand is the Windows File Explorer.

Nomad.NET is a free Windows Explorer replacement with plenty of useful features.

Features include -

  • Tabbed interface.   This is our favorite feature, you can open tabs, like a browser for directories with which you’re working and keep them open.
  • Bookmarks system. You can bookmark you favorite folders, ftp sites or even searches.
  • You can create very complex search rules, with ability to search in different encoding (complete encodings auto detect), use IFilter filters, apply custom text search rules (including regular expressions), search in hex, duplicates search and so on and for mortals there is a simplified search that is not scary.
  • Filtering system, based on the same core as search.

nomad-screen

Normally we recommend FreeCommander as our favorite free alternative file handler, but Nomad.NET is a worthy competitor and well worth a try.

Download Nomad.NET [via lifehacker.com]

If you haven’t installed Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0, it will need to be installed first, there’s a link for the free download from the Nomad.NET download page.

Filed Under: freeware, Technology, Utilities, Windows

Wow, hasn’t Hulu gotten all fancy?

June 1, 2009 By Leave a Comment

hulu-logoHulu, if you’re not using it, is a website that allows you to watch some of your favorite television shows and movies on you Windows or Mac computer for free.  That’s simple enough.  There are a “limited” number of commercials, certainly less than commercial television. Hulu’s content is all professionally produced with none of the YouTube-type amateur stuff.

Sometimes when I either need a break at my desk, or it’s late and I want a little non-challenging entertainment before bed and don’t want to have all the noise associated with turning on the TV and the risk of waking the family, for this I use Hulu.

The big recent news for Hulu is that they have created a set of experimental projects and are offering them for use to the public À la Gmail labs.  The coolest of the new offerings is a desktop Hulu video player that let’s you watch Hulu content without a browser.  The picture is sharp and clear and will look on your computer monitor or laptop.

hulu-desktop-screen

If you’d like to give Hulu Desktop a try, visit Hulu Labs and download it.  Or just stop by in an idle moment and watch a show in your browser.  I just watched Jay Leno’s last Tonight show episode.

If you’re interested in the background of the company, it’s owned by NBC Universal, News Corporation, and Disney.

You can even use Hulu to watch a little something while your working, like I did here.

Oh, yeah, this site is supposed to be about productivity.  Never mind.

hulu-chrome

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Filed Under: Desktop Apps, Mac, New features, Windows Tagged With:

Five more ways to supercharge your new PC

April 29, 2009 By Leave a Comment

greatfalls

Last week I posted Got a new PC? Supercharge it fast with 11 free apps.  That explained when you get a new PC, inexpensive as they are now, what free apps you needed to get productive.  Today 5 more free apps that you ought to consider.  This list is for more advanced users.

  • Paint.NET –  A lightweight graphic and image editor that has most of the functionality most people would ever use from the very heavy and expensive Adobe Photoshop.
  • FileZilla – FTP may be old and creaky but it doesn’t go away and someday you’re going need to up/download files.  This open source FTP client is full-featured.
  • Fastone Image Viewer – A fast image viewer that dispays digital images in a zillion grahic formats.
  • Seesmic Desktop – Do you use Twitter?  Seesmic Desktop is the best of the current crop of Twitter Clients.
  • Windows Live Writer –  Do you blog either for yourself or your company?  Windows Live Writer is  by far the best client for writing blog entries from your PC.  If you don’t use the online interface for your blog, use Windows Live Writer.

Go ahead now, make yourself productive.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Filed Under: freeware, Windows, Windows Vista Tagged With: , , , , ,

Got a new PC? Supercharge it fast with 11 free apps

April 23, 2009 By 3 Comments
George Washington's Teeth

George Washington's Teeth

Even in our excremental economy, PCs are cheap.  Microsoft wants to run their entire advertising campaign on that basis, but whatever.  I often use a well-loved MacBook, but in the last year have had occasion to buy two PCs.  Bought a Desktop PC for about $400 and a netbook, mini-laptop for about $300.

After the immediate glow of geek happiness wears off (new PCs always seem fast), the question becomes how to become productive fast.  (I actually had to buy the netbook because we went away for the weekend and I forgot my laptop and needed to do some work).

What I do is connect to Internet and download these 11 apps, and I’m ready to go in about 20 minutes in a productive work environment.

Let me explain.

  • AVG Antivirus – Sure you need anti-virus, the world is weird, but AVG Free does a great job and it’s, well, free.
  • Google Chrome – Sorry, Microsoft Internet Exporer doesn’t work for me.  I can’t be productive with such a slow browser.  I install the new-ish Google Chrome, which isn’t yet full-featured but is extremely fast.
  • Firefox – I also install Firefox, the major open source competitor to IE.  Firefox becomes very full-featured by use of plug-in technology.
  • FreeCommander – You owe yourself something better than Windows Explorer.  FreeCommander has plenty of features for making your file and PC management easier.   The dual-interface alone is worth the download.
  • Evernote – I store all my information in Evernote (and so should you).  Download the PC desktop version to sync to your web based data.
  • Picasa - The best way of managing and editing digital images and videos.
  • Skype – For free phone calls to other PCs, conference calls and video calls to other team members.  I also use it for video calling my family.
  • Foxit Reader – A lightweight PDF reader, to replace the slow and heavy Adobe Reader
  • notepad++ – A hardy open source replacement for Notepad.  Use it for any text editing work that you can get by doing without a word processor.
  • Videolan – An open source video player that plays just about any videos you’ve got.
  • Revo Unistaller – Finally install this utility to uninstall some of the crap that is often pre-installed on new consumer PC’s.  What comes quickly to mind is the trial version of Symantec Internet Security which is probably already installed on your new PC.  If you activate it, you’ll get it free for a couple of months and then will be nagged to death by the program trying to get you to buy the full version — just saying.

The rest of the apps I use:

Okay, you’re ready to work.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Filed Under: Desktop applications, freeware, Productivity, Windows, Windows Vista Tagged With: , , , , , ,
« Older Posts

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.