TimeSnapper for Mac has been updated to allow a custom directory to be selected for your captured screen images! If you're not already familiar with TimeSnapper, it's a utility that runs in the background on your Mac or PC and saves an image of your screen(s) (or just the active application window) every few seconds. This can be highly useful when, to take a few examples: - A piece of text you were composing got lost because your browser crashed, or because a web form submit failed. (Retrieve the text out of your screenshot history!)
- You want to search up information about a specific error message that you encountered a few minutes ago, for which you don't remember the exact wording. (Again, it'll be waiting for you in your screenshot history!)
- You want to remember what all you were working on the afternoon of two days ago. (Click and drag across the TimeSnapper timeline UI to pan through your screenshot history!)
Previously, the Mac version of TimeSnapper saved your screen images to subfolders of a particular "sandboxed" directory that the TimeSnapper app was by default permitted to access. This worked, but the target folder was in a fairly deep location on the MacOS filesystem, and thus was inconvenient to access by any means other than the "View in Finder" button in TimeSnapper's Preferences window. Now, starting in version 1.1.0, TimeSnapper for Mac has been enhanced to use security-scoped bookmarks to allow you to choose any folder on your local computer for TimeSnapper to use to save its screen images. To use the new feature, after updating your copy of TimeSnapper to the latest version via the Mac App Store, click on the TimeSnapper icon in your Mac's top menu bar, then select Preferences, then the Auto Cleanup tab in the Preferences window. You'll see a "Change folder..." button in that window. If you aren't already using TimeSnapper, take a look at the reviews and ratings (4.8 out of 5 stars as of today!) of TimeSnapper on the Mac App Store, and treat your personal productivity to a lifetime license for a quite reasonably low price!
To get this disclaimer out of the way right out front: I'm the author of TimeSnapper for MacOS. But like the guy in the 1980-something Hair Club for Men TV commercial: I'm not just the author, I'm also a client! A real event just happened where TimeSnapper enabled me to share a key bit of information with my team at work that I hadn't been able to come up with otherwise. About a month ago, I came across a mention from a co-worker of a book as being a great introduction to the FinTech space: "The Anatomy of the Swipe" (2020) by Admed Siddiqui. At the time, I checked my local public library for a copy, but they didn't have one; so I took advantage of an awesome feature of the library, and put in a request via the library's website for the library to purchase a physical copy! They did so, and automatically put the book on hold for me! I picked up the book yesterday. In a team meeting near the end of my work day yesterday, I mentioned the book, and promised to drop a link to the book in our Slack channel in the morning. I followed up on that this morning, intending to post the link along with the original post where I'd seen the book recommended internally. I searched Slack for the earlier mention of the book that I remembered, and... nothing. No search results for "anatomy of the swipe". Or for "anatomy" "swipe". Or for "ahmed siddiqui". Although I thought I'd seen the book recommendation via Slack, maybe it had actually been via shared Google Doc...? Or an email? I searched those places too, and... again, nothing. At this point, I was momentarily stumped. I wanted to provide credit where it was due and share the original book recommendation I had followed... but where was it? Obviously I hadn't just imagined it; I had gotten the name and author of this particular book, in order to request my local library to order a copy, from somewhere. And then, inspiration struck: I've got TimeSnapper! TimeSnapper, if you're not familiar with it, is a utility program that runs in the background on your computer, and saves a snapshot of the screen every few seconds. It also provides a "Play Your Day Like a Movie" feature, where you can rapidly scrub back and forth through an entire day's worth of these saved screenshots. To get the time window for my TimeSnapper search, I went to my library's website, logged in, and and viewed the page with the status of my past purchase requests. Sure enough, it showed that my request for "The Anatomy of the Swipe" had been originally made on July 26, 2022 -- one month ago today. I then fired up TimeSnapper's Play Your Day feature and navigated to July 26. Skimming through my day, I found the images of my visit to the library website where I'd initially keyed in my request for the book. Navigating a short way back in time from there, I saw myself visiting my company's Slack instance... and found the recommendation I had remembered -- not for the book itself, but a link to a blog article with a list of good FinTech introductory resources -- which is where the mention of the book has actually been located! Thanks to TimeSnapper, I was able to post a link that Slack post with the link to the FinTech blog post along with the link to the book itself. Obligatory closing promotional line: If this ability to go back in time and observe what you were seeing on your computer in the past sounds like a superpower you'd like to gain for yourself, you can read more about TimeSnapper, and buy a copy for Mac or for Windows, on the TimeSnapper website!
ClipEmoji.com now supports your choice of skin tone! Just select a tone from the dropdown in the page footer, and the selected tone will be applied to all supported emoji.
In the course of developing this update, I was admittedly surprised to realize that the basic "facial expression" emoji -- 😄, 😂, 🤔, and so forth -- aren't toneable! The emoji for which tone support has been added by the Unicode Consortium -- the ones in this list -- are mostly the "hand" emoji (e.g. 👋🏾, 👍🏼, 🙌🏿), plus the ones that depict people's activities or appearances (e.g. 👩🏽🦳, 👨🏻🏫, 🏄🏽♀️).
The only emoji not supported by ClipEmoji yet are the three "holding hands" emoji (👫, 👭, 👬), where the two people depicted have different skin tones. The main thing to be figured out there is an elegant UI to apply tones to that emoji, that doesn't "get in the way" of the other thousands of emoji!
The ClipEmoji site will remember your selection for future visits to the site, too (via a cookie).
I also added an About page to ClipEmoji.com, so check that out if you're in the mood for even more ClipEmoji-related reading.
Enjoy the updated ClipEmoji.com! 👍🏻👍🏼👍🏽👍🏾👍🏿
I've updated ClipEmoji.com with the new 2020 v13 Unicode emoji set. This is a new set of emoji, such as "smiling face with tear" (🥲), that will be added to various platforms -- iOS / MacOS, Android phones, Windows, and so forth -- later this year.
(So if you're reading this post just after it was published, you most likely cannot see that above emoji character quite yet! 😂 ClipEmoji is now ready to go, though, as soon as support does get added to your platform.)
ClipEmoji.com is a simple and lightweight web page that's designed in particular for desktop and laptop computers -- where the keyboard (obviously) doesn't include emoji characters -- to make it easy to get a particular emoji that you want to use in some message or text you're composing onto your clipboard, so that you can paste it into the text you're composing.
Since all the way back in 2008, during most of which Windows was my daily-use operating system for work and hobbies, I used, and was a big fan of, a utility called TimeSnapper. Billing itself as "The Automatic Screenshot Journal", TimeSnapper quietly would run in the system tray of my Windows computer, taking a screenshot of whatever application I was actively using every few seconds. TimeSnapper additionally came with a "Play Your Day Like a Movie" feature, where I could watch my entire day of work, or jump directly to the screenshot of any point in time of the day.
TimeSnapper saved me on multiple occasions where I would have otherwise lost work. A couple of examples of this:
- I'd been typing some long-form text into a form on a web page, only to have the browser crash and lose all of my work. Without TimeSnapper's most recent screenshot of my work-in-progress post, I'd have had to recreate the text from scratch, instead of simply having to retype it. (See my 2014 tweet about the incident!)
- I'd run into a problem with a program, where it displayed a particular error message in a dialog. A few minutes later, I wanted to Google the error to try to find a solution. I couldn't remember the exact text of the error in order to type it into Google... but TimeSnapper had captured an image of the error dialog, so there was no problem!
In early 2017, taking on an assignment with a new product at work, I switched to working on a Mac, making my primary daily-use operating system macOS instead of Windows. One of the first things I did, naturally, was to look for macOS equivalents of the essential utilities that I had come to rely on for software development and other work on Windows.
Although I was able to find many useful equivalents for utilities such as clipboard history saving, I wasn't able to find anything like TimeSnapper. Seemingly at least once every week after switching to Mac, I'd run into some situation like the ones described above where I wished I could look back in time to retrieve some important piece of information that I know I had on screen a short time earlier, but was now lost.
Fast-forward to the present day, and I'm super excited to announce: The official release of TimeSnapper for Mac is now available!
Why am I able to announce this? Because, in partnership with the original developers of TimeSnapper for Windows, Leon Bambrick and Atli Björgvin Oddsson, I am the developer of TimeSnapper for Mac!
By late 2017, I was frustrated enough with not having TimeSnapper or a similar utility in my day-to-day work that I reached out to Leon, asking if there was any news around a Mac release of TimeSnapper. Leon replied that there was not; but after some conversation, he offered me the opportunity to develop it!
After a long journey, starting with me not even knowing whether making a macOS version of TimeSnapper would be at all possible -- for example, whether macOS even had operating system hooks allowing an application to perform screen captures -- TimeSnapper for Mac is now complete, and is available on Apple's Mac Store as of today!
Some of the major milestones in TimeSnapper for Mac's development, using Objective-C and Xcode, included:
- Getting a simple, UI-less program working which successfully managed to take and save to disk a screen capture of the Mac desktop.
- Making the program "wake up" at regular intervals to take screen shots -- and continue to do so even if the computer is put to sleep.
- The ability to pause, and later resume, the capture of screen shots on command.
- Adding an option to reduce screen shots in size and/or quality before saving them to disk -- and adding a Preferences window for the user to control these options, as well as the delay between screenshots and the image format (.jpg or .png).
- An option to capture just the foreground application window, the entire monitor where the application is running, or all monitors (on a multi-monitor system). Due to the way the relevant macOS hooks work, just successfully identifying the foreground-most window was surprisingly challenging, but after lots of effort and testing, TimeSnapper is able to get it right for almost all applications.
- Adding a "preview image" of a screen shot to the Preferences window with the selected size and quality options applied, as well as an estimate for how large the screen shot would be on disk with the selected options.
- Adding "auto cleanup" of old screen shots to save disk space, along with Preferences window options for the user to specify a maximum age of saved screen shots, and/or maximum disk utilization for all screen shots.
- An option to open a new Finder window, navigated to the folder where TimeSnapper saves its images.
- Getting TimeSnapper to optionally start automatically after reboots. (This functionality on Mac was almost shockingly difficult to implement relative to what I expected, requiring quite a bit of code along with a whole "sub-application".)
- Getting TimeSnapper to appear as an icon and menu in the Mac's
top Menu Bar, and to display its larger Dock icon only when one of its
windows is open.
- An initial "Play Your Day Like a Movie" window, displaying one of the saved screen shots.
- Adding a timeline to the Play Your Day window, displaying a range of hours corresponding to the earliest and latest screenshot captured for a selected day, and a tick mark on the timeline for the time of every individual screenshot taken.
- Getting a mouse click -- and later, drag -- on the timeline to change the image display to the image taken nearest to the clicked time.
- Adding the eponymous ability for the window to play the selected
day's screenshots like a movie, with playback controls for
starting/pausing the playback and increasing or decreasing the playback
speed.
- Handling local time changes properly, so that "going back in time" by carrying the Mac across a time zone boundary from east to west, or at the end of Daylight Saving Time, doesn't cause screen shots to appear out-of-order in the Play Your Day window, or to potentially overwrite one another.
- Lots more polish and bug squashing!
It's been a genuine pleasure over the past few months, in the later phases of development, to once again have had TimeSnapper running on my daily-use computer -- now, a Mac -- affording me the ability to easily peer back in time and see exactly what text or activity I previously had on my screen!
Check out TimeSnapper on the Mac App Store! If you like it, I'd love it if you'd leave a nice review, or just drop me a line (here in the comments, or find me on Twitter) and let me know what you think!
Having used Visual Studio 2013 and 2015 as my primary coding IDE for the past 18 months or so, I haven’t been terribly happy with Visual Studio’s out-of-the-box support for the task of using the keyboard to open a file with a particular name (in a large solution). As detailed in this StackOverflow question, there are a few options, none of which work well for me: Ctrl+[comma], filename, Enter –This is frequently very sluggish on my (modern) PC, with a delay of 5-10 seconds between the search field appearing, and Visual Studio recovering from being unresponsive and actually allowing typing in the field. Worse, occasionally after typing the Ctrl+[comma] hotkey, the search term that I started typing while the application was still unresponsive (but after the search field appeared), the text I entered gets inserted into the active source code document instead of in the search field! Ctrl+[semicolon], filename, Enter, Enter – Aside from the drawback of having to hit Enter twice, this leaves the Solution Explorer window in a state of showing only the matches for the entered search term. To clear the search, either using the mouse or hitting Ctrl+[semicolon], Esc, Esc is needed – obviously not ideal. Ctrl+Alt+a, of, filename – The Ctrl+Alt+a keyboard shortcut to open the Command Window doesn’t work in my Visual Studio, for whatever reason, even though that shortcut is listed in the Edit menu. Additionally, the autocomplete in the Command Window frequently messes up my search term. For example, if I’m trying to search for a file named “property.aspx” in my solution, but my solution also has a file named “property-format.aspx”, as soon as I type “property.”, the autocomplete for some reason assumes I want “property-format” and replaces my typed search term with that. So, no good. Since none of the out-of-the-box solutions work for me, I resorted to trying a Visual Studio extension that provides this functionality, VSFileNav. 
VSFileNav is a Visual Studio extension that binds a customizable hotkey – I’m using Ctrl+[tilde] – to open a custom File Navigation dialog allowing quick search and open of all files in the current solution. Some reasons that VSFileNav is awesome enough that I felt compelled to blog about it: - It’s lightning fast. Opening the File Navigation dialog, typing in the dialog to filter filenames in the solution, seeing search results update in real-time as the search term is being typed, and jumping to the selected file upon a press of the Enter key all happen effectively instantly.
- It supports Pascal-case filename search. Typing “MCC” into the search field matches “MyCustomClass.cs” as a search result, for example.
- It just works. I didn’t have to fight with any bugs or configuration settings (beyond setting my preferred hotkey) to make the extension work; I just installed, and it worked great immediately.
VSFileNav, or something like it, really ought to be out-of-the-box functionality in Visual Studio. But since it isn’t, if you’re a developer using Visual Studio, do yourself a favor and start using VSFileNav.
After repeatedly being frustrated by a situation where an extra blank line was inserted between every other line when copying data from a particular program to the clipboard, I decided to write my own workaround. “crel” (“Clipboard Remove Empty Lines”) is a simple command-line utility for Windows that removes any empty/blank lines from the text data currently on the clipboard (if there is any). 
Now (after putting crel.exe in a folder on my PATH), when I copy text data to the clipboard where I know spurious empty lines are present, I can type Windows key, crel, Enter, and they’re gone. If this is something that would be useful to you, you can get it here: crel.exe v1.0.0 (4k) crel is also available from my Windows Utilities page.
I just posted a point release of PathFind, my Windows command-line utility which finds files located on the PATH (similar to the Unix/Linux which utility). This is a general maintenance release which fixes a minor bug where a spurious error message would be displayed when the PATH environment variable included an extra trailing “;” character. The utility’s output is also improved when multiple matching files and/or folders are found, including a display of total matches found. Download it from my utilities page, or directly from here: PathFind.exe 2.0.1 (6k)
A minor update to my “on-screen ruler” utility for Windows, Bounds Test, is now available. This update fixes a bug where the drag-to-move and drag-edge-to-resize mouse functions did not work when the cursor was positioned over the “Widescreen Resolutions” text label. Download it here: Bounds Test v2.1.2 (16k). It’s also available on my Windows utilities page.
I just posted a small update to my ccc (“Clipboard Character Count”) utility. ccc is a simple command-line utility for Windows that I originally wrote back in 2006, which returns the count of characters currently present on the system clipboard. (Useful these days to quickly see if a thought you’ve jotted down will fit in an SMS message or twitter update.) In this update, ccc now looks for HTML table data present on the clipboard (i.e. content copied to the clipboard from a table on a web page); if present, ccc additionally reports the number of rows present in the copied portion of the table (based on the count of <tr> tags present in the copied data). This is a slightly faster way to get a count of the number of rows in an HTML table than pasting the content into a fresh Excel sheet and looking at the row number of the bottom row of data. Share and Enjoy: ccc 1.0.2 (4k). You can also get it on my Windows utilities page.
At work, I have a particular folder on my Windows PC that I access many times per day to open and save various documents for the project that I’m working on. I have two conflicting needs for where in the filesystem that folder should be located": - C:\. As I prefer using the keyboard to the mouse for quick and easy tasks, the ideal location for this folder is directly off the root directory of the C: drive. It’s pretty easy to type, for example, “c:\proj\todo.txt” into an application’s Open dialog, or from the command prompt. I can do that more quickly than switching to the mouse, clicking “My Computer”, double-clicking “C:”, double-clicking the “proj” folder, scrolling “todo.txt” into view, and then double-clicking on that file.
- My Documents. My office’s automated backup policy only picks up documents that are located under the “My Documents” folder. While I could locate my “proj” folder under My Documents rather than under the C:\ root directory, typing “c:\documents and settings\jschneid\my documents\proj” 30 times a day rather than just “c:\proj” obviously becomes very inefficient very quickly.
So, to summarize the problem: I want my use-it-all-the-time “proj” folder to be at “c:\proj”, but I needed it to be under “My Documents” in order for it to be picked up by my office’s backup scheme. The solution: The Junction utility, part of Microsoft’s Sysinternals suite of tools. The Junction utility allows the creation of a folder at a particular location in the filesystem which is really a symbolic link (shortcut) to another folder, which the command prompt and Windows Explorer respect. In my case, I created my “proj” folder under My Documents (so it would be picked up by my office’s backup process). Then, I used Junction to create a symbolic link to that folder at “c:\proj” for easy access to that folder via the keyboard. This solution has worked out great for me. I type “c:\proj” many times every day – saving a couple of seconds over using the mouse to access that folder every time. I wanted to share this tip for anyone else out there who might be able to benefit from having an easy-to-access shortcut to a deeply-nested folder on their filesystem – and for those that might not have been aware that it’s possible to set up Unix-style folder symbolic links on Windows.
An update to my “on-screen ruler” utility for Windows, Bounds Test, is now available. This point release addresses an issue where if the Bounds Test window was resized to its minimum height (25px), it could no longer be resized by dragging the middle of the window. (The problem was that the regions along the top and bottom edges of the window that were defined to perform “resize” operations when dragged were so large that they left no room in the middle of the window for the “move” operation.) Download it here: Bounds Test v2.1.1 (16k). It’s also available on my Windows utilities page.
A new point release of my “on-screen ruler” utility for Windows, Bounds Test, is now available. Bounds Test displays a semi-transparent window on your screen which can be resized, and shows at all times its own current size. This is useful to: - Determine how much of a particular web page or other application page a user running at a particular screen resolution (say, 1024x768) would be able to view without scrolling;
- Quickly get a rough idea of the size in pixels of another window or other on-screen object.
Significant updates in this release: - Added an “Always On Top” feature (accessible from the right-click context menu).
- Added a set of size preset buttons for widescreen resolutions.
- Improved the draw algorithm, greatly reducing "flicker" of the tick marks along the edges as the window is being resized.
- Increased the “drag area” of the edges of the form, making the form easier to resize.
Download it here: Bounds Test 2.1.0 (16k). You can also always get the latest copy from my utilities page. Enjoy!
As I’ve previously posted for Windows XP, a user interface convention that I really wish would become a universal standard for applications that support multiple tabs (such as modern web browsers) is upon middle mouse button click on a tab, the application would close that tab. This is the standard behavior in Firefox, Internet Explorer 8, and Chrome (and probably other browsers, too). I also wish Microsoft would match the IE8 behavior and make “close application” the default behavior for a middle-click on an application taskbar button in Windows, since the Windows taskbar is essentially just a tab bar for open applications. Unfortunately, in Windows 7, middle-click on an application’s taskbar button is mapped to “launch new instance of application,” not to “close application.” Furthermore, there seems to be no out-of-the-box way to change this behavior. To the rescue: 7 Taskbar Tweaker by “RaMMicHaeL.” Among a few other available features, this utility does exactly what I’m looking for: On a PC running Windows 7, it remaps a middle-click on a taskbar application button to close that application. I’ve been using version 1.1 of the utility on my primary home PC running Windows 7 for months now, with no problems at all. Highly recommended if you’re a fan of the middle-click-to-close UI convention!
Although I am currently in the process of building a new PC for home, which will run 64-bit Vista and will become my new primary home PC, as of now (October 2008), I am still running Windows XP as my primary operating system both at home and at work. In recent years, I've accumulated a collection of software that in one way or another enhances the basic, low-level Windows XP user experience, and allows me to be more productive (or to just enjoy using my machines more!) This post details my Top 8 Windows XP customizations. Some of these may apply to Vista as well; once I have my new machine up and running with Vista for a while, I'll reprise this post and report which of these customizations are still useful under Vista, and which ones are no longer needed. There might also be some new additions to the list; time will tell! Note: Large applications such as Firefox are outside the scope of this list; I'm focusing in here on items that modify the behavior of Windows itself, or are otherwise basic utilities or tools that tweak the way that I use Windows. Homepage: http://www.ntwind.com/software/windowspace.html
Author: Alexander Avdonin
Supported Operating Systems: Vista, XP, 2000; 32-bit and 64-bit versions available
Price: US $34.90 (30-day free trial available)WindowSpace provides the cool feature of having windows "snap" to the edges of the screen, and to other windows, as you drag or resize windows using the mouse as you normally would. This is nice for taking advantage of the real estate of your screen area; before using WindowSpace, I would typically leave "dead space" between the borders of my non-maximized windows and the edges of my screen, because it was a nuisance to try to position a window exactly against an edge of the screen. Alexander really nailed the feel of how the "snap" behavior works; it feels very natural and intuitive. It also works just fine with multiple monitors. WindowSpace also provides some handy global hotkeys for resizing a window via the keyboard such that it is positioned against a desired edge of the current screen, and for other functionality related to window positioning and sizing, which can be remappend, and enabled or disabled. This is essentially the nice, fast desktop search built into Vista, back-ported to Windows XP. I have had an occasional issue with Windows Search 4 not finding an item that I know is present on my local hard drive (including items that have been around for a while, so it isn't an issue of the Windows Search indexer just not yet having added a newly-created document to its index); but for the most part, this is a great (and free!) improvement over the default local search functionality that ships with Windows XP. Note: Windows Search 4 does by default add a somewhat unsightly, screen-real-estate-consuming search field to the Windows Taskbar; I posted previously about how to hide the search field. I use the Win+F ("find") shortcut key to bring up Windows Search when I need it. #6: XP Black ("Zune") Style/ThemeHomepage: None; direct download link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=75078
Author: Microsoft
Supported Operating Systems: XP
Price: FreeRather than a utility or functionality enhancement, this just plain makes Windows XP look cooler. This Black (or "Zune") style gives you another alternative to the default blue XP style (and the built-in silver and olive alternative styles) and the gray "classic" style. It was apparently developed by Microsoft to promote their Zune portable media player (hence the name). Even if you're not a Zune fan (I'm not a Zune owner, myself), this black style makes Windows XP look a lot sharper.  The theme doesn't currently seem to have a homepage anywhere on the Microsoft site, but you can still download the file directly from the Microsoft site, here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=75078 (ZuneDesktopTheme.msi; 1.6 MB) Author: Suresh Online
Supported Operating Systems: XP, 2000, NT, ME, 98, 95
Price: FreewareClipPath adds an option to the right-click menu of Windows Explorer when a file or folder is clicked: "Clip Path" (to the clipboard). This is very useful to essentially get a reference to a filesystem file on the clipboard, which you can then paste directly into the "File | Open" dialog of another application (rather than using the dialog's GUI to drill all the way back through the filesystem to the file's location). I previously discussed ClipPath in a Utility of the Day post.  TaskSwitchXP is a great improvement to the default Alt+Tab interface provided in Windows XP. It supports several nice enhancements over the basic XP Alt+Tab interface: - Display of the full Titlebar text of all applications (not just the selected one), in addition to the application's icon;
- A preview of the appearance of the selected application's window;
- Allows an application to be selected via a mouse click (instead of only via Alt+Tab and Alt+Shift+Tab);
- Better support for many (22 or more) open applications.
Homepage: http://ditto-cp.sourceforge.net/
Author: Open Source (project admin: Maloney)
Supported Operating Systems: Vista(?), XP, 2000, NT, 98, 95
Price: FreewareDitto enhances the Windows clipboard such that when an item is placed on the clipboard, whatever was on the clipboard previously isn't lost, but is instead saved into a persistent storage area. A global Ditto Paste hotkey (I use Ctrl+Alt+V) can be set up to bring up Ditto's paste interface, which allows you to quickly paste an item that was stored to the clipboard recently, or even to do a search on older clipboard items and paste one of those. I didn't use Ditto heavily right after I installed it, but I've found that over time, I've come to rely on and take advantage of the productivity benefits of old clipboard items not being erased when something new gets saved to the clipboad. I previously posted about Ditto in a Utility of the Day post. Homepage: http://nerdcave.webs.com/
Author: Jay E.
Supported Operating Systems: Vista, XP, 2000, NT, 98, 95; 32-bit versions only
Price: FreewareI originally downloaded this utility for one reason: I wanted the ability to close applications from the Windows Taskbar by middle-clicking them (just like you can do in Firefox and other tabbed applications); after all, what is the Windows Taskbar if not a tabbed view of the system's open Windows applications? Taskbar Shuffle enables this middle-click-to-close behavior for taskbar tabs. Much easier than doing right-click | Close on many open applications (especially for those applications that put the "Close" option somewhere non-standard on the right-click menu). I've since started also Taskbar Shuffle for its primary purpose: Moving taskbar buttons around on the taskbar via drag-drop. The most obvious use case for this is moving my mail client back to its position at the top-left corner of the taskbar (where I always expect it to be!) after it crashes and I re-open it. Unfortunately, Taskbar Shuffle doesn't currenly support 64-bit versions of Windows. Taskix is an alternative which apparently has very similar functionality to Taskbar Shuffle and does support 64-bit Windows (including Vista), but I haven't tried it out yet myself. Update 7/1/2009: A 64-bit version is now available! Nice! Go check it out. I previously covered Taskbar Shuffle in a Utility of the Day post. Homepage: http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/
Author: Steve Miller
Supported Operating Systems: Vista, 2003, XP, 2000, NT, ME, 98, 95
Price: Freeware PureText does just one thing, and does it very well: It sets up a global hotkey for "Paste unformatted text." It takes the text that you previously copied to the clipboard and pastes it into the current application, but without any rich text markup that might be stored in the clipboard along with the text. I typically use this at least on a daily basis, sometimes many times per day. For example: - Paste some code from Visual Studio or Eclipse into MS Word, without getting the font and background color from the IDE.
- Paste text from Word into another document (such as an email, a Powerpoint presentation slide, or a cell in an Excel sheet) in the current font of the target document, instead of the font from the Word document.
PureText allows you to assign the hotkey that will be used for this operation. I use the default of Win+V. The net result of the operation is like pasting the text into a plain notepad.exe window, and then re-copying and pasting it from Notepad into the target document; or like the MS Office menu option Edit | Paste Special | As Unformatted Text; but in a single, easy, step. Also, unlike the MS Office solution, PureText works regardless of the target application of the Paste is. ConclusionIn my experience with these utilities, each of them has been rock-solid stable. I place a premium on stability of my system, and have had nothing but good experiences with each one of these customizations. I hope this list of utilities is useful; if a utility on this list is new to you and sounds interesting, I'd encourage you to "be bold" and go ahead and give it a try. If you end up seeing a net productivity benefit, great! If not, the uninstallers are there for a reason. :-)
File this one under "so obvious that I couldn't figure it out!" Earlier today, I installed the recently-released Windows Search 4 for Windows XP. I'm going to give it a try not so much as a search tool, but primarily as a means of opening documents more quickly in cases when I already know where the document I want is located, but the location is multiple levels deep in my filesystem hierarchy, and it takes a few seconds to drill all the way down to it; I'm hoping just typing a few characters of the document's name and then opening the document from the search results turns out to be faster. When I installed Windows Search 4, it placed a search bar on my Windows Taskbar. I didn't really want the search bar there; I like to have maximum real estate available on the Taskbar for my open applications' buttons. (I don't have the Quick Launch bar or any other widgets present on my Taskbar, either; I use SlickRun to launch apps quickly using only the keyboard.) I'm also currently running a black Windows theme and a black desktop background, and the bright white rectangle of the search field was a bit of an eyesore. Since I knew that I could also bring up the search field with the global Win+F keyboard shortcut (as Windows Search 4 replaces the default Windows search functionality, including the Win+F shortcut), I poked around in the Windows Search options for a way to hide the search field on the Taskbar. Not seeing any relevant options there, I Googled for an answer, and didn't come up with anything immediately, but eventually found the answer in a reader comment in a downloadsquad.com article comparing Windows Search 4 and Google Desktop 5.5. Commenter "Quikboy" on that article noted that it is possible to hide the Windows Search field on the Taskbar, not from within the Windows Search options, but in the same way that you can hide any other Taskbar widget: Right-click an empty portion of the Taskbar, then on the context menu that appears, open the Toolbars sub-menu, and uncheck Windows Search Deskbar. So, that problem is solved! It remains to be seen how useful Windows Search 4 turns out to be in my everyday work, but at least while I'm making that determination over the next few days, I won't have the search field cluttering up my Taskbar!
Have you ever wanted to know the specific color of something shown on your computer screen? Dropper by Brian Friesen is a lightweight Windows utility that will let you do just that. It will show you the color of any pixel on your screen, regardless of which running application the pixel is located in.
One limitation of Dropper is that it is an older application ("older" in this case meaning 2006!), and doesn't have multi-monitor support; it can only show the color of pixels in the primary monitor on multi-monitor systems.
You can download Dropper from its page on Brian's website.
In most of today's major operating systems, the built-in clipboard has a significant limitation: it can hold only a single item a time. If you cut or copy a second item onto the clipboard, the first item is gone, with no direct way to recover it. Jeff Atwood posted about this issue recently in more depth on his excellent Coding Horror blog.
From the comments on Jeff's post, I learned about an excellent Windows utility that addresses this problem: Ditto. Ditto allows you to use a configurable system-wide hotkey (I'm currently using Ctrl+Alt+v) which brings up a "history browser" with all items that had been recently copied to the clipboard. Ditto automatically takes care of saving clipboard items, so that older items are no longer lost when a new item is copied to the clipboard.
Since installing Ditto on my machine, I've found myself using it more and more. In addition to being able to easily paste items that I know that I had on the clipboard recently, avoiding having to re-copy or retype them, Ditto enables me to in some cases plan ahead and do things more efficiently. For example, say that I have a large text document open, and I want to copy two nearby (but not adjacent) snippets of text from a location near the beginning of the document, and paste each of them to a location near the end of the document. With just basic operating system clipboard functionality, I'd need to:
- Copy item 1;
- Scroll to the end of the document;
- Paste item 1;
- Scroll back to the beginning of the document;
- Copy item 2;
- Scroll back to the end of the document;
- Paste item 2.
With Ditto, I can achieve the same end result more quickly:
- Copy item 1;
- Copy item 2;
- Scroll to the end of the document;
- Paste item 2;
- (Using Ditto) Paste item 1.
Ditto is written in C++, and is free and open-source. You can download it from the Ditto Homepage.
ClipPath is a shell extension for Windows which adds an option to the right-click menu for files and folders to copy the location (fullly specified path and filename) of the file to the clipboard. It's a handy timesaver in lots of situations.
For example, after saving a file such as a Word document to some deeply-nester folder, you might want to attach that file to an email message. Normally, to do this, in your email program, after activating the "attach file" function, you'd then have to browse through the filesystem to the location to which you'd just saved the file.
With ClipPath, after saving the document, you can just bring up an Explorer window with the location of the saved file (by doing a File | Save As from the application where you were editing the document), right-click the saved file, and copy the file's location to the clipboard with the ClipPath option on the right-click menu. Then, cancel out of the Save As dialog, and in your email program, activate the "attach file" function, and just paste the full path to the file in the Open File dialog (instead of having to manually browse through the filesystem to the file's location).
I've been using ClipPath for well over a year now, and I've never had a problem with it. You can download ClipPath from the Essential Developer Resources page of the website of the utility's author, sureshms.
A user interface convention that is emerging as a standard for applications that support having multiple pages or documents open in tabs, such as web browsers (including Firefox, Internet Explorer 7, and Opera 9) and IDEs (including Visual Studio and, in an upcoming version, Eclipse), is the ability to click a tab with the middle mouse button to close the tab. This is useful for several reasons: (1) It's easier to position the mouse cursor over a tab than on a small button on the tab; (2) it prevents accidental closing of a tab with the left mouse button (when the close button on the tab is left-clicked inadvertently instead of on the remainder of the tab area); and (3) optionally, it allows the close button each tab to be removed (resulting in more available space on the tab for displaying the name of the tab's document).
I always thought it would be nice to be able to apply this same UI convention to Windows Taskbar buttons. After all, what is the Windows Taskbar but a tabbed view of all open applications? The ability to middle-click a Taskbar button to close it would be much nicer than having to right-click an application's Taskbar button and choose "Close" from the context menu that appears. (Trying to close many applications in quick succession in this way can be particularly aggravating when closing an application that doesn't follow the common convention of having the "Close" option as the bottom option in the context menu, such as cmd.exe command prompt windows – you end up having to hunt for the "Close" option among the other options, instead of just clicking the "Close" option immediately.)
I recently came across a free utility that allows a middle-click on a Taskbar button to close the application: Taskbar Shuffle by Jay E. The primary purpose of Taskbar Shuffle is, as its name implies, to allow Taskbar buttons to be reordered via a simple drag-drop. However, Taskbar Shuffle does also implement the middle-click-to-close functionality. Very cool!
I was initially a bit leery of installing a utility that hooks directly into Windows' explorer.exe (as I presume that Taskbar Shuffle must do in order to provide the functionality that it does), for fear that the utility could potentially bring down Explorer itself if something were to go wrong. However, I searched around for comments on the application, and found many very positive comments (including on the app's own forum) about the app, and no negative comments, so I took the plunge and installed it. I'm glad I did; on my machine (running 32-bit Windows XP Pro), Taskbar Shuffle is rock-solid stable! I've found it to be one of those extension-type applications that is just so useful, you wonder why its functionality isn't built into the base product itself (in this case, Windows).
One caveat: Apparently the current version (v2.2 as of this writing) doesn't support 64-bit versions of Windows yet. A 64-bit version might be on the way, though; the application appears to be actively developed, and some text near the download link notes "hold tight for 64-bit".
Update 7/1/2009: A 64-bit version is now available! Go check it out.
Go get Taskbar Shuffle from Jay E.'s website, here.
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