Sort your taskbar buttons

Finally, a really simple app to sort your taskbar buttons.

Taskbar++

Just hover ove your button, press "alt" and move the taskbar button to the right place.

Simple. Free. Great

I'm getting very sick of firefox

What exactly is the deal with firefox? I got the new 1.5 version, expecting it to be better. It's supposed to be the next great thing right?

 

Ugh. It crashes about once every two days for me. It's such a massive ram hog that it completely bogs down my entire system

 

Like just a  little while ago. This isn't even heavy browsing, just checking a few forums

 

It's completely nuts! 200,000k + for a web browser?

 

That's it, no more firefox for me. It's opera for me from now on

 

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Opera is now completly FREE!!!!!

With the new 8.5 release of opera the makers of Opera dropped a huge bombshell. Opera is now free. No more banners, no more registering, you can now get opera for free.

Now there's no reason not to give it a try!




On a side note: I've given up on the blogger addin for word. It's just much too limted. Qumana is a far better product

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iTunes 5 for windows oddities and gripes

Here’s a screenshot of the new iTunes 5 for windows

Now, notice the oddities of that window? It’s not very windows-like in many areas

• The menu bar is inside of the titlebar
• The titlebar is completely hidden. Between the menu and the window controls is the titlebar. Double click switches window states like it does in windows, and a right click brings up the system menu
• The various columns of the playlist are left and right justified. It seems almost random what one is which justification
• The “search bar”, which is right above the browser and has those lists of options, is quite odd. I had to really look at it to figure out what it does.
• A scroll bar disappears and leaves a blank space instead of removing all of it
• Under the source columns there’s a gripper bar. You can use that to resize the column. Oddly you can still use the column divider also

Now just some general gripes (not pictured)

• Menu items change. Instead of a checkmark, the actual wording of the item changes. It’s jarring to look at a menu that a toggle causes the wording to change
• Too much garbage loaded. I don’t have an iPod, so why is the iPod service loaded? I don’t want to use bonjour, so why does it try to force you to load it?
• You need to install quicktime also. Ugh, that’s just a way to try and get you to use the quicktime player. Just installing quicktime alternative is enough to get iTunes working, so why include the player?
• The store is still extremely sluggish. It’s like web surfing on my old 486sx all over again.
• There’s still a “close” and “exit” in the same menu. Mainly because it still has the odd habit of spawning child windows of itself. What does that mean? Get iTunes to open up two windows, and closing the first window, even with “close window”, exits the program.

iTunes did however make some big improvements:

• Startup is a lot faster. If you get rid of the entire helper program, iTunes does start quicker. That was a huge deal for me, because I don’t use library function, but instead I click on a mp3 and play
• Resize is much faster
• It doesn’t steal your file associations. At one time when you installed iTunes it would take your file associations, even if you told it not to when installing
• Preferences look like they are from windows. They dumped those oddball osx-looking dialogs for the most part

Testing (again!)

Testing out the nifty new blogger for word plugin

Testing out Qumana....

 

 

 

 

 

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Opera 8 (part 1)

I keep hearing all over the place about how firefox is the best browser out there. I would like to make the point that opera is far better and (almost) the best browser out there today

Why do I make that claim?

Opera is fast. It starts up quickly and breezes through web pages far faster then anything else out there

Memory requirmnts are low. Heavy usage with many tabs opened I peaked memory wise at about 30,000K. Under firefox it would be easily over 90,000K and Maxthon round 50,000K. Just

Click and drag tabs. Yes I know you can do that with other browsers, but opera does it really nicely. Shows the tab as a "ghost" where you can drag and drop to whatever order you want your tabs in

You can tear off tabs. You can take a tab, drag it off the program and it becomes it's own browser window. Just how cool is that?

I'll go into some more reasons tomorrow. There's just too many to do in one sitting

Cool new game

I've been playing alien shooter.

What a great little game! Tons of alien hordes. Neat weapons. Piles and piles of dead aliens. What more could you want?


Oddly it reminds me a lot of the old dos classic freeware game cyberdogs
I do wish someone would make a windows port of that game. i know I would download that instantly!

I think I'll stay off that site eh? 

Very usefull windows utilities

There's a massive amount of software out here for windows. usually it's cluttered with about 50 apps that do the same exact thing. Take WinZip for instance. Why in the world would a home user buy WinZip when they could get identical functionality out of tugzip?

There are the occasional few utilities that make one step back and think "wow, why didn't anyone else do this?"

One these apps is called resize enabler. It's available from www.digitallis.co.uk.What it does is simply allow any window to be resized and when you resize, elements on the page resize in real time along with it. Ever get a dialog you can't quite see it all? use this. How about an old windows program with a open/save dialog you can't resize? Use this.

Another one that deserves mention is Windows enabler. That's available from Steven's home page. This one is a real life saver. What it does is simply enable any grayed out control in windows. Have a program with some options grayed out? Simply use this program. The recently released gold version of windows desktop search has a bug that some options are grayed out and it complains that the desktop search is not loaded. You can't change many options. Using windows enabler you can use those grayed out options. Came in quite useful

Bryce 5.5

I got a Chance to play with the new Bryce 5.5 that Daz3D put out.

It's quite a bit faster in rendering then before. That alone is worth the upgrade

There's also a new feature. Full integration with Daz Studio, meaning you can finally import poser figure without any hassle. you can even edit the figures after they have been imported. That's a life saver. It was always a royal pain to get poser figures imported correctly, this does all the work.

Even includes the ability to show an openGL preview of your scene while you are working in it :)

http://bryce.daz3d.com/55index.php

MSN desktop search goes Gold!

All I can say is...wow!

New UI
Preview pane is pretty incredible
faster
Works like it should

and in a few weeks.. tabbed browsing for IE

If you had the beta, dumpt it and get this ASAP, You will not be dissapointed

http://toolbar.msn.com

See the little kitty upper top left?

Click it and have fun ;-)

Thanks to the webneko homepage ;)
http://webneko.net/

Doesn't Mario look like Saddam Huessein? 

MSN web search goes gold

The MSN search site just went gold the other day
http://search.msn.com/

I have to admit, I'm really starting to like it. I used to be a die hard google fan, but it seems that msn search find better results for what I'm looking for

Plus, it has a rather neat feature in full text search


Try "who shot Kennedy" and it comes up with the answer

Plus like google it does math. Try entering "3+3*(2)="


There's a complete feature list here

Daz3D releases vicky 3, mike 3 and aiko 3 for free

I know this is old news, but I don't think everyone has heard this yet.

Daz3d makes of widely popular poser firgure released their flagship titles for free. The only catch though it's just th models and basic morphs.

Still, these are of a higher quality then what's included in poser

You'll need to on an account with Daz3d (it's free)

http://www.daz3d.com/

Now the product pages

Victoria 3.o

Michael 3.0

Aiko 3

Don't have poser? Well Daz3D also gives away their daz studio program, which is another poser like program that can read all existing poser files

http://www.daz3d.com/studio/index.php?

Paint.net just keeps getting better

I've noticed lately that paint.net is becoming quite a powerful little program.

In case you do not know of it, it's a GPL'ed paint program written in .net

What makes this so good are the features they add it that no one else seems to have.

One of those features is semi-transparent toolboxes. That's simply brilliant. I'm not joking here, that's one of the best things I ever saw in any sort of graphics program in years. Why doesn't photoshop do that?

Another really great feature is that the tool windows dock to the side of the screen. they don't change shape or form, but simply "sticks" to the side of the window. Seems kinda useless right? They stay docked while resizing the window. That's rather useful. Most apps (all?) with a tool window you can resize the main app, and the tool windows stay exactly where they are before the move. This ends all the problem with tool windows

Of course since this is a paint app it has all the basic painting tools, plus things like layers and filters. Currently it's a much better MS paint. It's no photoshop contender, but for simpler jobs this is a great tool

Get the 2.1 milestone build (or later) here
http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/

Testing..with a pic of chloe
Posted by Hello

Picasa 2

For awhile now I've been using the great little photo organizer called picasa. It was nice. Not exactly the best thing ever, but I could easily sort though and view all my pictures form my digital camera


Now google came out with picasa 2.

All I can say is..wow

This new version is really amazing. Toms of features and more I keep discovering. It's very simple to use, and very powerfully!. I can even organize movies, just how cool is that?

So how much does this program cost? Nothing! It's free and beats any other image organizer IMHO

http://www.picasa.com/