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Category Archives: Software

Software Review: Mouse Without Borders

Mouse Without Borders

Mouse Without Borders is a program recently released by Microsoft’s The Garage that allows your keyboard and mouse to travel between two networked computers. It’s a simple install process and once you enter the verification code and name of the computer you are connecting to, you simply setup what direction each of the computers are in relation to one another and you are all set. It also enables copy/paste and file transfer across computers.

There are a few downsides as it appears to be Windows only, highly persistent (you can’t kill the process unless you run task manager in administration mode), and completely incompatible with gaming because the program thinks you are trying to move your mouse off-screen even though you are in a full-screen application. Memory usage is fairly reasonable for a KVM program.

Overall, it’s a sweet app, and if you need to use multiple computers at a single desk regularly (and you don’t care about gaming) give it a shot or read more.

Software Review: inSSIDer

inSSIDer Channels

inSSIDer is a WiFi analysis program that visually displays all of the wireless networks in your area including channel and signal strength. It’s a geek’s dream-come-true software that graphically shows which channels each wireless router is utilizing and that allows you to quickly solve any interference issues. You can also leave it running and check the signal strength history tab to see if and how long your network(s) went down.

It also has the ability to interface with your GPS (onboard or via USB) to map WiFi networks and their signal strengths. Unfortunately I don’t have a GPS to test this feature, but if it’s anything like the rest of the program it is probably pretty awesome.

inSSIDer Signal Strength Graph

Memory usage is a mere 30 Mb so there are zero performance issues. Go ahead and try it out: inSSIDer

In case any of you are wondering about the name of this program, SSID stands for Service Set Identifier. If you still don’t get it, just call it lame geek humor.

Software Review: MetroTwit & MetroTwit Show

Yep, more Metro! :) I think I need to add a Metro category…

MetroTwit

MetroTwit

MetroTwit is an elegant Twitter client that follows the Metro guidlines. It is easily customizable to your color tastes (light/dark + highlight color). Configuration is as simple as it can be seeing how it has to use the Twitter Authentication API. You can add or remove columns to follow specific users or hashtags as well as your main Twitter feed. The buttons all have simple iconography to represent their function, but in case you get confused, hovering over the button displays a textual representation.

If you use Twitter, this is the desktop client I recommend. Download it from the MetroTwit website.

MetroTwit Show

MetroTwit Show

MetroTwit Show is a recent addition to MetroTwit’s offerings. This program also follows the Metro guidlines but rather than showing your Twitter Feed it displays Twitter searches. You can configure many searches and set how long you want each topic to be displayed. It will flip through the most recent tweets about the topic you searched for until the time you set is reached and then it flips over to the next topic. You’ll get the most out of this program in fullscreen mode and the only real applications I can think of would be to display recent tweets about your product at a trade show or tweets about your company in your office. However, if you can think of any other applications for this software, speak up in the comments!

Even if you don’t think you’ll use it, go ahead and download it, the animations are cool if nothing else. ;) Download it from the MetroTwit Show page.

Software Review: HTC Home & Metro Home

HTC Home

HTC Home

As some of you may know, HTC built their own, custom, skin for Windows Mobile 6.5 called HTC Sense. The most prominent feature of this skin was the large clock & weather app on the default home screen. Although Windows Mobile 6.5 was never widely distributed, the HTC Sense skin was widely publicized and praised. Because of it’s popularity, HTC decided to port the clock and weather widget to Windows (desktop). It creates a nice, large clock with current weather and a 5 day forecast. On the downside, it uses a ridiculous amount of memory for such a simple widget, taking up roughly 3/4ths of a MB of ram. While not the end of the world for those of you using powerhouse computers, it could quickly become annoying for those of you with slower computers. Visit their website to download or learn more.

Metro Home

Metro Home

While looking for the download link for the HTC Home widget I discovered that HTC had quietly released a similar widget that copies the Windows Phone 7 Metro design styles. It’s a cool clock and weather app, similar to HTC home, but it’s more alive due to the live tiles. All of the tiles are constantly moving and updating, which could be distracting for some users, but I think most users will not mind. One feature HTC has included in this widget that is not available on Windows Phone 7 (yet) is the ability to choose any color for the tiles. Memory usage is more reasonable with this widget at 1/2 MB of ram (keep in mind this widget is doing a lot more movement than the HTC Home widget, so the standard of “reasonable” is slightly different). Visit their website to download or learn more.

Software Review: Windows Live Mesh

Windows Live Mesh

Many of you are familiar with Windows Live Messenger and a few of the other products from the Windows Live series, but in my experience, one of the best – and the most often overlooked – of these products is Windows Live Mesh. I participated in the beta back when it was simply known as “Mesh (Beta)” and I loved it then, but they have made it even better since then!

Mesh is a file-syncing service that, post-beta, allows the user to sync a number of folders between computers. In the beta, your synced files showed up in a folder on the desktop and in most cases linked to the clunky web version but now you choose which folders you wish to sync from one computer and then simply select what folders they relate to on the other computer. That’s it. Whenever you are connected to the internet, it checks if you’ve added or updated any of the files in those folders and uploads only those files to the internet, which are downloaded to all other connected computers as soon as they connect to the internet. There is currently a 5GB limit because everything you upload is also accessible from a much-improved web-interface, so don’t expect to sync your music and pictures folders, but I do expect them to up it to 25GB and/or integrate with SkyDrive’s 25GB of storage space instead of being separate.

Here is what I’m syncing:

  • 3 (small) pictures folders
  • My Documents
  • A lightweight save-game folder

As a bonus feature, it has a simple Remote feature. It takes longer to connect than the standard Remote Desktop in Windows but is almost zero configuration. Simply click the Remote tab and click “Allow remote connections to this computer” and you are all done. The list will show all your configured devices and clicking connect will start loading the remote connection.

Windows Live Mesh Online

This program is useful even if you only have one computer because you can sync the files to the cloud and then access them from any other computer. This is particularly useful if your My Documents folder is small enough to sync. Believe it or not, this actually works on Mac as well but I haven’t tested it because I don’t own one.

Software Review: Mosaic

Mosaic Grid View

Most of my readers know, by now, that I’m a big fan of the Metro UI. Today I discovered a new program that fits very well into that category, called Mosaic. Mosaic is a news/RSS viewer. The main screen, as shown on the right, is a grid of photos taken from the articles. Clicking a tile shows the title of that article and clicking again takes you to the article. It is highly optimized for touch and while idle has a nice scrolling effect so you aren’t staring at a static grid of images.

You can also browse in a more familiar layout by switching to the title view, which also has a handy weather summary.

Mosaic Title View

There are a few odd things about this app though. First, your choice of “premium” news feeds are very limited. While you can add your own via RSS, they are not saved if you close out. Second, you cannot filter the news by category. I would choose to filter my news to just the Technology Category in most cases, while I know a few people that would choose sports, but there is no option. Finally, this app is a resource hog. At 350MB, the only program I run that uses more RAM is Firefox. In other words, this app is great if you like unfiltered world news presented in a nice way.

Hopefully they will improve performance and add more options in future versions, but because it runs on Silverlight, it is literally a one-click install, so give it a whirl! http://www.mosaicbytribune.com/microsoft/

UPDATE: It does actually save your settings if you don’t end the process manually… :P That’s what I get for caring about system resources…

Software Review: Stardock Fences

Stardock's Fences

I never thought I would use software from the same people that built RocketDock, but here I am. I installed Stardock’s Fences software a few months ago when I realized I just had too many shortcuts on my desktop. Now, I don’t leave my desktop a mess with files scattered all over the place, I stick to mostly shortcuts and less than five files at any given time. Still, I found myself with too many icons and no easy way to organize them. Sure, you can group them by type manually, but Windows glitches once every long while and re-orders your desktop. Fences in a simple, and lightweight, program that gives you unlimited “fenced” areas to group your icons. Since using it, I’ve never had to completely re-organize my icons, and even if for some odd reason they get messed up, Fences has a built-in backup and restore feature so, with one click, you can reset your icons.

Simple, fast, effective, clean. What more can you ask for?

End of XP Support

Don’t get me wrong, XP has been great. But with the release of Windows 7, it pales in comparison. It was released way back on August 24, 2001 – that was almost 10 years ago! Recently, Microsoft announced that it has sold over 350 Million copies of Windows 7(1) which is a pretty good indication that it is a solid operating system. I won’t go into a full review today, but maybe soon. In the United States, Windows 7 licenses outnumber XP licenses, which is good progress, but there are still some holdouts.

While some users have a good reason to stick with XP because of hardware insufficiency, most XP users could upgrade to Windows 7 easily and without breaking the bank. Microsoft will only support Windows XP SP3 for 1075 more days, or until April 7th, 2014(2), so now is as good a time as ever to upgrade.

Upgrading from Windows XP or Windows Vista can cost as little as $100 for one license, or $150 for three during limited Family Pack sales. (32 bit – 64 bit)

(1) Microsoft Passes 350 Million Windows 7 Licenses

(2) Date calculated using teststrtotime.com

Already have Windows 7? Count down the days until Windows XP support ends using this cool gadget from Microsoft.

Software Review: WinDirStat

Mini Pacmen

Okay, okay, you can stop laughing now. For a program with such a funky name, it surprisingly useful and has very little system performance impact. The name is actually short for Windows Directory Statistics. Once you download it, run it, and stop laughing at the mini-packmen running around your screen, you will see a fancy graphical reproduction of your hard-drive.

Now, the hard-core geeks in here will protest that the graphical representation is linear rather than radial, but that’s just because the typical computer user thinks linearly instead of radially. You still have to admit, the reflective tiles are really cool!

WinDirStat

Okay, enough talk about the graphics, here is how this thing works. The little pac-men you see running back and forth is the graphical representation of the program checking the file-size of each folder. Once it’s done, you’ll see a list of folders in the root of your hard drive sorted by size. Open the folders and browse around to discover which programs are taking up the most space. Each time you select a folder, you’ll notice that an area in the bottom half of the program gets outlined. This will help you visualize what percentage of your hard drive each program/folder is using and how it relates to other programs/folders. Alternatively, you can just click any of the large blocks and it will navigate to that file in the folders above so you can get more information or delete it.

If you haven’t noticed by this point, there is a color-coded legend in the top right corner, also sorted by size.

Software Review: Tasks.Show

Tasks.Show Logo

Tasks.Show is a brilliant, simple, and elegant to-do list manager. It sports features like categories, due dates, priority, expected time required, and a spiffy timeline view. There are some features missing in version 1.0 like recurring tasks, notifications, and automatically refreshing itself daily (if you leave it open overnight, it will think it’s still the previous day). However, I hardly even notice those features are missing, and I’m sure they will be added as the program is developed.

There are two methods to add tasks. You can just type in the name of your task and hit enter, and then edit all the details of the task using the graphical interface. The other option, and the one I personally prefer, is you can type in all the task information using the following syntax.

Take out the trash by:tomorrow in:Chores

  • Tasks.Show Main Screen

    “Take out the trash” is the the to-do task.

  • “by:tomorrow” is obviously the due date, but accepts several forms of input:
    • a friendly date such as Next Wednesday all they way up to two weeks into the future
    • a military date like 6 April 2011
    • a standard date like April 7, 2011
    • a short-form date like 4/7/2011
  • “in:Chores” puts the task into a color-coded category. If the category doesn’t already exist, it will be automatically created.

The rest of the software is fairly self-explanatory. Click the checkbox to mark a task complete, use the tabs across the top to navigate through categories, click the active tab again to rename or change colors, on each task click for to set how long you expect the task to take, and drag the timeline side to side to navigate.