Recently in Usability Category
I happened to be browsing www.stardock.com, looking at their latest 4X gaming offerings, and ran across a product that they claim will help me "clean up my desktop clutter".
If you're anything like me, you keep a ton of links, documents, folders, and other stuff all over your windows desktop (not unlike your physical desktop). I have been manually organizing my clutter for a long time. PDFs here, Zip Files there, To-Dos up there in the right-hand corner. My "nightmare" scenario? Having to do a presentation with my laptop on a projector with less than the native 1920x1080 resolution of my screen. All of my desktop icons get re-arranged all over the place!
I installed Stardock's Fences about three days ago, and it really has changed the way I interact with my desktop. For the better! Here's a look at my desktop with Fences, followed by my favorite feature: double-click on any empty space on your desktop and all your icons are automatically hidden.
I wish I had a picture of my desktop *before* installing Fences, but I never want to go back! It's free for personal use (at least for now). Here's a short video giving you a demo of the product.
Any other nifty desktop productivity apps you want to recommend? Shout out in the comments!
I was tooling around with my Brother's home computer over the holidays, and noticed that there may have been a good bit of malware installed (thank you BearShare!).
I was about to run a scan using Symantec, then my other brother piped up and said:
Why don't you use Windows OneCare? It's online and free!
I was confused, befuddled, and intrigued! There's a free scanning tool from Microsoft? And my little bro' knew about it and I didn't? Something isn't right with the world.
Turns out it's quite useful and pretty effective; check it out:
I showed this off to Kurt K. and he didn't know about it, so said to myself, "Self? Why not blog about it in case anyone else might think it's like super cool"?
So, pretty much anywhere there's a place you can put in a date (Task or Calendar start dates and end dates, deferred delivery dates, etc.), you can put in "plain English" and Outlook will look up that date automatically.
So, phrases like "Next Monday" or "Three weeks from now" or "Second Sunday in October" will automatically fill in the date.
I think that feature has been there since Outlook 2000. I have yet to find a phrase that it couldn't understand!
Not exactly "new hotness", but still pretty cool.
