Desktop Delights

My desktops slowly undergoing a slow overhaul now i have returned to the Series of tubes

I felt like i should share some of the progress as the updates so far have been quite impressive when compared to my previous efforsts at improving my desktop.

First off we have a little gem out of the microsoft research department, an experiment with the concept of the taskbar that im sure many of you are familiar with GroupBar (now with a neat installer) is a nifty little program that you can position anywhere, and functions like a drag and drop taskbar with dynamic grouping, as well as the ability to save groups of programs and their arrangment for later use. Called "snapshots" theyre among the many uses of the little helper, but for me the sheer ease of use of having a second taskbar thats conveniently placed down the side of my second monitor is amazing.

Next up is a program that is obviously stealing some of the mac thunder, while i long for an Expose this little app is a major helper. Launchy as its known pops up whenever i hit alt+space and quickly lets me find a program after typing a few of the leters of its name. Both unclutering my desktop, and saving me from the terror of start menu scrounging spending a minute looking for that disused program 'conveniently' hidden from view.

Following hot on the heels of Launchy, is another peice of amazing graphical eyecandy that Ive totaly fallen for. Console version 2 is one hell of a program, if, like me, you spend plenty of time in the command line, working with remote shells, *nix, ssh, and command line network programs and tools. Youll love this little app for its true alpha blended transparency, tabs, multiple shell suport (so you can have say cygwin, and the MS windows shell as well in the one window in separate tabs) and overall clean simple style. At present, only a few minor flaws mar its excelence, such as lack of a maximise button (wtf?) and some minorly problematic default shortcut keys.

Onto the oddly named Qumana which has been used to draft this very post.
While its features arent entirely perfect, its quick and fully equiped for single topic posts, featuring multiple blog support and direct html editing. the UI isnt anything amazing and has a number of quirks that should be attended to, (resizing fo the right side pannel in the edit window, bad UI quirk) its a very useful tool for all those delving into the blogsphere.

And what desktop is without a good game!

Crack Attack courtesy of Daniel Nelson is an openGL Tetris Attack clone for windows and Linux that is both visualy gratifying and an excelent timewaster, as well as having all the addictive and fun gameplay of its inspiration.

This wraps up my latest and certainly not last set of changes to my desktop. Next thing that needs doing is cleaning out some more old files to recover some space for some experimenting with VMware ive been thinking of for some time.

Powered by Qumana