Taskbar Shuffle is a small program that does what it’s named – it allows you to shuffle your taskbar and arrange windows the way you want them. Not just that, it even allows you to drag and re-order system tray icons.

Install the 630KB app and it’s as easy as dragging and dropping. As you can see from the screenshot, dragging items in the taskbar and reordering them is a snap. An added feature is the ability to re-order your system tray as well. The only problem that I found was that the icon you drag from the system tray automatically opens. If you were for example, dragging the icon of the ‘remove hardware’, you would activate the ‘remove hardware’ wizard. A little annoying, but something that can be ignored perhaps for the bigger feature of drag and re-order.

Download Taskbar Shuffle for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Operating Systems.

WordPress.org just released the latest version of their popular blogging platform, WordPress. The new 2.8 version has quite a lot of new features compared to the previous 2.7.1 version.

WP 2.8 is a major update. It’s much faster than any of the previous versions because of a new way of scripting and lots of tweaks to the styling. One major update is the way themes can now be installed. Remember when WordPress 2.7 brought installation of plugins from within the admin menu? We can now install themes in pretty much the same way. Just browse or search for the theme, and hit install.

Here are a few highlights of the changes in the new version:

• New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
• Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
• Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
• Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
• Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment
• Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
• Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation

The full list can be viewed here. Download WordPress 2.8 here, or you can just upgrade from within the Admin menu by going to Tools->Upgrade.

Loading up a website just to check the WHOIS details or DNS details of a particular website can be annoying if you do so very often. With eToolz, you can perform DNS lookups, WHOIS lookups, ping a website, perform trace, check the header details and much more right from the desktop.

eToolz is a freeware that can be a very useful tool for webmasters, domainers, and for the rest of us too. It’s a handy portable software that can be useful for looking up the PageRank of a webpage besides performing DNS and WHOIS lookups, performing trace, pinging a website for a reply, and a lot more. Take a look at the screenshot.

Just download the software, no installation required. You might have to change the language to English. Do so from Extras -> Language.

Windows 7 comes with a few “ringtones” that are actually used to indicate an incoming call on VoIP, but these can still be used on your mobile phone.

The istartedsomething blog has the entire collection of ringtones uploaded and ready for download. You can get them here. The ringtones are available in convenient formats such as MP3 and even for the iPhone.

The popular Amar Chitra Katha Comics are now available on iRemedi’s ‘Ether Media’, a proprietary media content delivery solution for the iPhone platform.

Amar Chitra Katha (ACK), is an assortment of popular Indian myth, epics, history and fables. It follows an Indian version of story telling that presents a perfect combination of commentary, dialogue and illustration.

For now, the only free offering of the comics is ‘The Tale of Arjuna (Lite) – World’s Greatest Warrior‘ and ‘Tales of Saibaba (Preview)‘. Other comics such as the classic ‘Jatakas – The Tales of Courage’, ‘Birbal – The Clever Minister’, ‘Birbal – The Witty Minister’, ‘Ganga’, ‘Dhrona’, ‘Bheeshma’, ‘Dashavatar’, amongst many others, are all very nicely priced at $1.99 to $2.99. This is quite a treat. I still have fond memories of reading these comics (albeit picked up for a price of 10 cents at the time) through my childhood.

Sridhar Bhat, CEO and Founder of iRemedi, mentioned, “This is a historic moment for both ACK and iRemedi. At iRemedi, we are very thrilled to have ACK as our first media partner for our high quality intuitive media app for iPhones and iPods. We always strive to deliver the best experience for the iPhone user community and we are confident ACK’s fans will share our excitement in enjoying ACK comics on the go. For ACK this is a key milestone in bringing the classical Indian mythology and rich culture to the global community instantly in the amazing user experience with iPhones. The iPhone’s revolutionary platform brings limitless avenues for various dreams to become.”

The Amar Chitra Katha digital comics can be read in a panel by panel view, by page numbers, and navigated with the slider. A slide show mode is available for reading through the comics in a faster manner. The app also makes use of the iPhone’s landscape and portrait modes quite well. I would definitely recommend this to anybody, Indian or foreign, who would like to read some great Indian mythology, to download at least the free version.

Picture this, you’ve positioned all your icons on the desktop in a nice little manner that you like, say some icons on the left of the screen, on top of the screen and to the right. If Windows Explorer experiences a crash, or if you change your screen resolution, all your icon placement are lost. Frustrating right?

IconRestorer can help you in such situations by restoring all the icons to their respective positions before the crash, saving you of a boring and tedious job of restoring them manually. You can even have more than one profile (with different layouts). You can even choose to save the layouts automatically, say for instance, hourly backups. You can then restore any of the backups at anytime you want. With the free version however, you can only save two backups and you cannot save layouts automatically. It can even remember what wallpaper you were using with the saved icon layout!

With IconRestorer, you can also have your icons displayed as a list. Helpful if you’re into keeping a lot of desktop icons. =P

You can download the freeware from here. Available for 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems, and works with all versions of Windows including the new Win 7.

Google just launched a stand-alone Java app for mobile phones that now enables you to quickly use Orkut on your Internet-enabled mobile phones.

Some of the features of the mobile app are:

• Upload photos to orkut on-the-go, directly from your phone.
• View scraps, friends’ updates, and photo albums while you’re offline.
• Share your orkut albums with all of your friends whether they use orkut or not (via SMS).
• Easily call or SMS your orkut friends and address book contacts from within the app.
• Get automatic updates when your friends change their contact information or orkut profiles.

Below are some of the screenshots of the app from the Official Orkut Blog. The app should work for almost all the new phones out there with support for Java ME (J2ME), MIDP 2.0. Hope we can see an iPhone version come out soon. =)

To install the Orkut mobile app (available in English and Portuguese), head over to m.google.com/orkut on your phone browser.

How would you like to easily group a bunch of JPEG images into a single PDF that can then be shared with others? You could make your very own scrapbook from the pictures of your last trip and share it with your friends. =)

With JPEG to PDF, you can convert JPG images into a PDF file with the least effort. The free software can convert a hundred plus images into a single PDF or multiple PDF files in a matter of seconds. When I converted a few logos into PDF, the conversion process took less than a second!

Download JPEG to PDF free.

If you’ve worked on Mandriva Linux, you’ve probably played Frozen Bubble. I remember the first time I played it a few years ago; I decided to keep Linux just for this game. =P

The game features penguins shooting coloured frozen bubbles to form groups of the same colour so they disappear. The object is to clear the whole screen before a bubble passes the line at the bottom. The game features 100 levels and includes a level editor.

Originally for Linux, Frozen Bubble is now available for Windows, Symbian S60 mobile phones, and even Mac. Besides that, there’s also a browser version of the game that can be played on your browser provided you have the Java Applet installed.

Choose your Frozen Bubble:

• Linux (Mandriva, Slackware, Gentoo, OpenSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora Core)
• Frozen Bubble (v1.0.0) Windows port
• Mac OSX port
• Symbian S60 port (2nd Edition and 3rd Edition phones)
• Browser version (Java Applet needed)

Increasing productivity (or as some of us call it – becoming lazy) is always on the mind of anybody. We’ve already written about using keyboard shortcuts to launch programs, now with EscapeClose Pro you can use certain keys to do some trivial tasks like closing and minimizing windows.

EscapeClose Pro’s primary task is to close a window when the Escape key is closed. It can however, do a lot more than just that. Below is a list of shortcut keys that EscapeClose Pro has:

• Hitting the tilde (~) key will minimize the running app or all the apps. You choose.
• The ‘Escape’ key can be used to close a window.
• To select all files in Windows Explorer, the asterisk (*) key can be used.
• ‘+’ or ‘-’ can be used to select and deselect files respectively.
• Pressing ‘F11′ will make any application switch to Maximized view.

There are different “modes” for each task. For instance, selecting ‘Mode 1 (close Esc)’ will make the mouse pointer jump to the Close (X) button on the top right of a window when the Escape key is pressed. Under ‘Mode 2′, hitting the Escape key will directly close the application.

The best feature I liked about the software was that it made it easier for me to maximize and minimize applications by hitting the (~) and ‘F11′ keys respectively. Quite a time saver, given that my caption buttons are the size of an ant.

Other features include completely hiding a window (did not work with Firefox). Pressing the tilde and escape keys will completely hide a window or restore it to the system tray (based on what you choose). How’s that for hiding programs that don’t minimize to the system tray? =)

See the screenshot for more options and commands.

EscapeClose 1.5 (Free)

EscapeClose 2.1 (Trial)

(Thumbnail credits to Ukaaa’s The Great Escape)