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Gmail in a Tab at the top of your screen
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The other day we reviewed Stick for Windows, but we’ve been finding some extra functionality in Stick every day and I thought I would follow up with a couple other things you can do with Stick. Since I’ve installed Stick I have created a Gmail “Stick” or tab at the top of my screen so I can always get my gmail in a hurry. While I pretty much always have my Gmail open in Firefox there are times when my Firefox window gets buried and having a tab at the top of my screen to get my email makes sense since sticks overlay other programs.
Also I have realized that just about any widget can really be used with Stick. By putting in the html code in a text file, saving as html, and then linking up to the page with the Explorer tab I was able to put in just about any widget I could find. So basically I now have any widget I want in a stick (or tab) beat that Google Sidebar.
Sticks, the new Widgets
This utility is pretty cool, it adds tabs to the top of your screen that lets you access things like a Notepad, RSS feeds, Quick Launcher, Internet Browser, Calculator, Explorer (with full drag and drop support) and many more. After installing Stick I found myself removing widgets from my Google Sidebar because I was able to replace several widgets with “Sticks” that were better because they get out of the way (roll up into the top of your screen). If you have ever used Spring Folders this is similar but more useful.
Before I had a Craigslist RSS feed that I kept in my Sidebar because I wanted to see all the latest items up for sale in real time. Now I have a Craigslist “Stick” that I can open at a moments notice freeing up space for another widget. I also have a notepad and todo list “Stick” that I can open at any time and is accessible easily even when my screen is full of windows because a Stick rides above all other applications. Whats really cool is when you have a maximized application Stick doesn’t impede on toolbars or take up valuable screen real estate. Where the tabs live is where the titlebar of the window is so now instead of wasted space you get a useful tools.
On top of all this the tabs are highly customizable and can be customized to meet your needs. Can’t find a stick that suits your needs build your own with Sticks extensible framework. This is a must try application.
Quick Eyedropper Tool Does One Click Color Pick
I’m a regular user of ColorZilla for Firefox but there are occasions when my color picking possibilities need to include the desktop and in those cases Instant Eyedropper is the tool of choice. Its a little awkward at first but once you get used to the way it works you will never want to go back. Just left click and hold the system tray application and drag the little window over the pixel that you want pick up coloring information on. A nice feature in the Instant Eyedropper tool is that it automatically takes the HTML color or RGB color and puts it into your clipboard so you can copy and paste into your application of choice. This little tool should be in every developer’s arsenal.
Best icon editor is freeware
Ever need to create an icon? IcoFx lets you extract icons from just about anything (EXE, JPEG, or DLL) edit and re-save. It also auto generates all the sizes you need for every occasion screen depth or Windows version. On top of that the program comes with a full suite of tools and effects that you would usually expect in a Retail paint program only crammed into an icon editing tool.
Best of all its free and works under the latest greatest Vista version.
Clean out your registry
It happens to even the best of us. You install a program and thinking its the best thing since sliced cheese, it turns out to be moldy cheese. You uninstall the moldy software and move on. A few weeks later after installing a few more moldy software titles you are basking in the glow of a bogged down PC that either responds with an error or a shrug. What next? Chances are your moldy software left behind a trail of junk. Thats where CCleaner comes in. Originally named Crap Cleaner which probably was a far more yet descriptive yet somewhat offensive name it digs through your registry to clean out old, unused, and corrupt entries.
Not only can it drill down into the muck into your registry but it can also clean out other areas of your PC such as temp files, cookies, cache files, prefetch and many more. In other words it slices it dices and spits out a much cleaner PC.
Get your curson our of your way with MouseAway
Ever start typing only to have your cursor get in the way of what you were actually typing? Well some clever programmer made a piece of software that gets that pesky cursor out of the way so you can type. See the example above.
This one does exactly what you expect it to do while taking up only 40K.
