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.
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.
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!
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)
Adobe Photoshop costs a bomb, and while some people find it easier to crack it rather than buying it, it still takes up a lot of system resources. How about using an alternative that’s just under 700KB and comes free to use?
Fotografix is a nice little free alternative to the mighty Photoshop. It has a lot of features, brushes, and built in scripts allowing you to start editing right away. Although it is no real alternative to a graphic designer, the rest of us who like to use Photoshop for some trivial tasks such as working with Layers or resizing/adjusting images, this software should just about be enough. It’s an excellent Microsoft Paint alternative as well, standing in at just about 700KB in size and consuming less than 4MB of memory. Pretty cool right?
DirHTML is a free portable program that creates a list of the content in a folder and saves it as an HTML page.
You can choose what type of files to include, which folders to exclude, the sorting of the output, the format of the output (XHTML 1.0, HTML 4.01, etc.), file date, file size, and lots more. You can also choose to save all these settings as a batch file so you can run it later in one click.
The HTML file output is pretty old school, but we’re not complaining. It does what it’s supposed to do. Check out the screenshot below.
How would you like to create a .exe video file that executes in any Windows operating system without the need for an additional codec to be installed? Sounds good for distributing videos right?
Create. Click. Watch.
MakeInstantPlayer is a little software that converts any given video file into a .exe (executable) file with all the necessary codecs installed. Just choose the video, press the button, and you have a file that can be run without the need for any additional media players. It’s that simple.
Additional features include the ability to open a webpage at the end of the video, choose a splash image (this is seen while the player initializes), and set an icon for the executable file. Check out the screenshot for more features and options.
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