Downloads

My new best friend — AutoHotkey

When 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.

Working forever, as it seems, in tech marketing, I feel like I’ve spent my career (an exaggeration) looking at image files like jpegs, sorting them, looking at them again — just trying to find the right image for the story I was trying to tell.

I’ve used tons (an exaggeration) of Windows image viewers.

I’m always on the lookout for new viewers, here’s one and I like very much. FastStone MaxView really is one of the fastest Windows Image Viewers I’ve ever used and fast is important when you’re flipping through large clip art collections or all of your digital pictures.

MaxViewer is free for non-commercial use — $19.95 for commercial use.

MaxViewer has more to recommend it besides just fast viewing. Here’s a partial Feature List from the FastStone site:

Full screen viewer with Select – Zoom support
Clear and customizable magnifier
View detailed image information including EXIF metadata
Slideshow with 150+ transitional effects and MP3/WAV/MIDI/WMA background music support
Lossless JPEG rotation and crop
Internal editor that adds texts, arrowed-lines, highlights to images
Undo, Redo and Mouse Wheel support
Common image formats support, including loading of JPEG, JPEG2000, GIF, BMP, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO, CUR, TGA and saving to JPEG, JPEG2000, TIFF, GIF, PCX, BMP, PNG, TGA
Digital camera RAW formats support, including CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF and DNG