Archive for January, 2009

A few days ago the official Gmail blog had some great new about a new feature in labs named Send & Archive. This is an extremely simple, but very handy feature, it enables you to automatically send a message to the archives once you’ve sent it.

This is a great time saver and inbox cleaner for me, as many times I want to do this anyway. Whenever someone send you a reply you get a new unread and unarchived message anyway, so in a sense you can clear your inbox with this method safely. If you need a message to hang around after sending you can always just send normally.Great feature, I recommend this one to everyone out there!

Ah, everyone is writing about it, so let me get in on all the fun too! After downloading the free copy and key, I installed the system and I immediately had some trouble getting my external monitor properly hooked up and setting the resoltuion, but instead of the 4 hour troubleshooting I usualy get there was just like 15 minutes. Overall the beta wes quite stable, I think hibernation was the only thing that gave me a blue screen of death, not a biggie in a beta.

What I can see about the system is that it is what Vista should have been. It looks and handles extremely well, I think it will be the first OS I will buy that won’t comne with my laptop (unless I buy a Windows 7 laptop). The main changes I like most are the ones that aid user experience. I was so amazed that the little rectangle portion on the very right of the taskbar shows the desktop. Not a super complicated feature, but very handy.

I also hated the way the taskbar looks from screeshots, but actually using it is completely different, and I have to say I pretty much hate the XP and Vista taskbars now. At first the icons were hard to get used to, but finally they are built contextualy, so you don’t get the exact same menu anywhere you click. If create a sticky note for example, you will get an icon on the tray. Right-clicking doesn’t give you the same boring menu, you get options to create a new sticky, and so on.

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If you read gHacks, you know I pretty much love icons, I sometimes change them to suit my wallpaper or my mood, so while not a hugely important part of my work routine, I do use them to create atmosphere, and a better working morale.

I just found the ultimate icon packages, especially for file types. Since I do a lot of coding I have many php, css, js files and so on, and the usual icon lineup stops at doc files, or psd at the most. Take a look at the icon portfolio of Jordan Michael, who was nice enough to release these free for non-commercial use. These are all beautiful icons, and when you get to the file types you can get packages of 100 – 120, very useful if you actively use many file types!

Take a look at all the other parts of the portfolio, some very awesome works of art in there and goodies such as wallpapers, more icons, icon packages, web design previews, etc., a great body of work!

I’ve never really had the need to hide the taskbar, but since I tried Enigma Desktop which I covered in a gHacks post not long ago, I have been searching for a good solution. There are plenty of ways to hide it natively in Windows, you can right click the taskbar, make sure “Lock the taskbar” is not selected and then just drag it down. However this is not the best because it leaves a thick line on the bottom of your screen. Also, I use WindowBlinds, which, for some reason, won’t allow me to drag my taskbar to hide it.

Option number two is to right click the taskbar, hit properties, select autohide and save. This is better, but there is still a thin line, and if you get near it, the taskbar pops up, which would mess with my Enigma theme.

After much searching, the best application I found to do this is a 20kb file which hides the taskbar without any registry hacks. The file is called Hide and Unhide Taskbar and you can download it by just clicking the link. If you are the author of the file let me know and I will link to your site instead, but I can’t remember where I got this from!

Operation is quite easy, there are only three things to press. The top most button will hide or unhide the taskbar. The bottom button will quit the application. The checkbox can be used to keep the taskbar hidden even if you quit the app. In this case you will have to run it again to unhide the taskbar. I found that using Launchy in conjunction is best, since I can run the app with a few keystrokes.

The result is that my taskbar is completely gone, so I can replace it by my Enigma desktop, which is modded a bit, I’ll post my specific setup with some instructions in a bit, I’m still tweaking it for best performance.

It seems Microsoft has misjudged the demand for the free beta and their servers are taking a beating, meaning it’s quite hard to get a validation key. This is a bit perplexing, since download of the iso file is fine, wizzing down at a not awefully fast, but constant, 250kb/s. Windows7News gives a good tip on how to get your key, it basically involves continuous page refreshes, they show you a nice little Firefox extension for getting the job done.

I got my security key by having the same page open in 3 tabs and refreshing them manually. I worked on the side, meaning whenever I saw the pages loaded, I quickly went and refreshed them. I almost refreshed the page which finally showed me the key, I managed to press ESC just in time!

Anyways, while this is a bit of a bother it took me 30 minutes to get a key without really needing to actually turn my attention toward it too much. Anyway, let’s at least be thankful that Microsoft is heading in the right direction, I mean would you seriously have thought they would release a public beta 2 years ago?

I’m a bit surprised I haven’t shared this superb app with you guys yet! CDBurnerXP is a great freeware solution for all your burning needs, be it audio CD, data DVD, iso burning and so on. I very rarely have the need to do this anymore, but these remote occurences are no longer cause for some hair pulling.

I am by no means a power user here, so all you hardcore burners may not like this one, but for the average Joe, I1m sure CDBurnerXP is perfect. All you need to do is run the app and select what you want to do. Depending on your choice you will be directed to the relevant parts of the application.

If you want to write an audio disc the interface will change slightly, you can drag and drop songs, total runtime and size is calculated, so you can see exactly how much space you have left. If you want to burn an iso image you just select the iso file, click burn and off you go.

There are a number of advanced options like converting to iso, choosing gaps between tracks, command line version, lightscribe integration, and best of all, you can write HD-DVD and Blueray discs with it! All in all this is a simple, but highly effective application I have been using for years and I have never tried to find a different app for this task.