Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 29, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Windows only
One of the things that I thought was pretty cool with my Mac was that it lets you rotate your desktop backgrounds at set intervals using images on your computer. That got me wondering what kind of solutions are available for Windows users that do something similar, and what I happened to stumble upon is a real gem.

John’s Background Switcher is a free application that does exactly what you would expect it to, but likely goes a step further than anything you’ve seen before. It’s not only capable of grabbing images directly from your computer, but it can also interact with multiple online services including Flickr, Phanfare, SmugMug, Picasa, and Yahoo. What’s really nice is that it even supports retrieval of your private images for nearly all of the online services either through authorization or by providing your username/password. Heck, you can even mix and match the sources you want to pull images from. Neato!

Need a calendar on your desktop? No problem! Background Switcher has an option to display a monthly calendar directly on your wallpaper, and it will highlight the current day. Now how convenient is that?

Oh, right, but you use multiple monitors. Yeah, it supports that, too. You can have it show the same picture on each monitor, one picture for the entire desktop, different pictures on each monitor, or only show one picture on the main monitor. I think you get the point… this is a very full-featured background rotation utility.

(Click to Enlarge)

One thing that I do want to point out is that you can obviously specify the interval that the backgrounds will rotate, but it can also be done manually. To do that just double-click on the System Tray icon, and it will immediately begin processing a new background to use.

–Very Impressive Layouts–

Not only can this flip through your images, but it can also take multiple photos and lay them out in a way that is sure to make your friends go “wow.” Take the “Snapshot Scrapbook” mode for example, which takes a handful of your photos and lays them out in a polaroid fashion. It also takes one image and converts it to black and white to be used as the background. The number of images shown on the screen at any given time are dependent on your monitor’s resolution, and here’s what it looks like using images tagged as “flowers” from Flickr:

Note: The application does place some text in the upper-right corner of the background with the program’s name. I didn’t see any option to eliminate this.

If you want to see more images at a time just switch over to the mosaic mode where it will grab a lot of thumbnails, and then tile them on your desktop. Here’s what that looks like once again using images tagged as “flowers” from Flickr:

–Performance–

One of the questions that I frequently get asked when writing about apps like this is what kind of performance hit a PC will take for running this. As you can see above there are a handful of multi-image layouts that you can choose from, and Background Switcher has to generate the background each time the wallpaper is switched out.

On my Vista machine the memory usage for the app sat around 13MB when idle, and 21MB when hard at work. The processor usage obviously spiked while putting together the background, but the highest I saw it go was 65% (it only did that for a split second, too). That’s not all bad for what the program accomplishes.

The nice thing is that Background Switcher is actually a performance-conscious app, and offers several different settings to make sure it doesn’t interrupt your work. Here are some of the things you customize:

• On start up don’t switch the wallpaper for a specified number of seconds. This gives the rest of your apps a chance to finish loading before it starts working on the background.
• Stop switching the background when the screensaver is running.
• Stop switching when running over terminal services (ex. remote desktop).
• Only switch when the system has been idle for at least 15 seconds.
• Stop switching if any programs you specify are running. Great for games or applications that require extensive use of your computers resources.

–Overview–

To be honest I haven’t gotten this excited about an application in a long time. The interface is very intuitive and simple, but at the same time there are tons of things you can customize. And the fact that it supports so many online photos services is astounding. Plus it’s free! The developer is even very active in the support forum in case you need help using it, or just have a feature request. It’s not often that you see an application and developer of this caliber that doesn’t charge a dime.

Get John’s Background Switcher

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Automatically Rotate Desktop WallpapersYour Week In Review with Sunday’s SummaryGet Your Widescreen Wallpapers For Your ComputerShow Your Love: Firefox 2 WallpapersCyberNotes: Our Favorite Thursday CyberNotes Articles

This article was written on November 15, 2007 by CyberNet.

I know that many of you are already EverNote users, and the latest release added some great new features. This note taking application is handy for jotting down grocery lists, clipping information from websites, or managing expenses.

Giveaway of the Day has the full EverNote program available for free today only. The advanced version of EverNote ($49.95) includes searching within images, handwriting recognition, shape correction, and digital ink support. If you’re not a Table PC user it’s probably not that valuable to you, but it’s still free.

The only catch with all “Giveaway of the Day” offerings is that they can only be installed today. It will not let you run the installer after today, which means you’ll have to fork out the money for the advanced version should you ever format your computer. I guess you could always monitor the installation process, and then backup any registry and/or file changes that take place. That might be more work than it’s worth though.

Download EverNote for Free [via jkOnTheRun]
Hat tip to “S”!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on August 19, 2008 by CyberNet.

(Click to Enlarge)

The open-source file sharing application Shareaza has been going through some tough times lately. They had their domain hijacked by a company called Discordia Ltd. back in December 2007, which is the same company who turned Bearshare and iMesh into paid services. On the Shareaza.com site they then started offering an app called “Shareaza 4″ that promotes legal downloads. If a user installs the “new” Shareaza any older version of the real open-source application will be removed. Discordia has even gone as far as to file for a trademark registration for the Shareaza name. *sigh*

What does the Shareaza development team have up their sleeves now? They are actually working a new project that they’re calling Panther, and it’s slated for release on August 25th. It does everything that Shareaza is already capable of, plus some. Things like better BitTorrent support, skin support, not using the registry, and a revamped media player are all included.

Pre-release versions of Panther can be found here, but there are still quite a few bugs in it right now. As seen in the screenshot above there is still a lot packed into the program, but it’s tough to beat if you’re looking for an all-in-one file sharing solution that works on the BitTorrent, Gnutella1, Gnutella2, and ED2K networks. I’d just hold out until the official launch of Panther where it will likely be more polished than it is right now.

P.S. The real Shareaza homepage is now located on SourceForge’s servers.

[via TorrentFreak]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on September 02, 2007 by CyberNet.

There is no doubt in my mind that Switcher is the best Exposé clone ever made for Windows, and only Vista users get to bask in the features that this free program has to offer. Switcher 2 Beta has just raised the bar several notches by adding features Apple’s own Exposé doesn’t even have!

Among many other things the new Switcher has tremendously improved the smoothness of its animation. You’ll see this in the video demonstration below, but first lets take a look at some of the great new features.

–Custom Window Labels and Backgrounds–

You can now have labels on windows as well as customized backgrounds and borders. You would probably think that the labels only tell you what the title of the app is, but you can put multiple things in the label. My personal favorite is having it show the number of megabytes the particular program is using, but you can also have it display the program’s icon, the filename of the application, or the process name.

–More Productive–

Now the first 9 windows in Switcher are assigned numbers. This makes it a lot easier to move between windows without having to shuffle through them one-by-one.

One of my favorite features in Switcher has always been the customizable shortcut keys though. That’s also been taken up a notch by adding several new commands that can be assigned shortcuts, including "Begin and Select Next." That command behaves similarly to the standard Windows Alt-Tab where upon activation the last-accessed window is selected. I love this option so much that I’ve gone ahead and assigned it to be the default action. A more Alt-Tab like appearance can also be seen by using the new Grid View, which aligns all of the windows to a grid in number order. I’m sure the Alt-Tab fans out there will choose this to be their default preference.

Another shortcut action that was added was the ability to close a window straight from Switcher. I set it up so that anytime I right-click on one of the thumbnails in Switcher it closes that particular window.

–Live Filtering–

The live filtering gives you the capabilities to only show certain sets of windows at any given time. For example, you can have all minimized windows be hidden or you can only show windows from a certain program (like Windows Explorer). Here are the various options for filtering along with their default shortcut keys:

• Search by window title (default shortcut Ctrl+F, or simply type to automatically display the search box). You can search using regular expressions (an obscure feature that I keep forgetting about).
• Exclude minimized windows (default shortcut Ctrl+M).
• Hide a particular window (default shortcut Ctrl+H).
• Show only the windows belonging to a certain program (default shortcut Ctrl+W).
• The default shortcut to remove all filters is Ctrl+R.

After trying out the search feature I couldn’t stop myself from creating a video to show off this cool feature:

–Overview–

I honestly can’t believe how much Switcher has evolved since I first started using it, and it’s quickly become something that I recommend to anyone using Vista. Of course, if you’ve never used Alt-Tab before then you’ll probably never think to use this, but I’ve quickly found this to be a valuable tool in my daily work.

Get Switcher 2 Beta

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on January 19, 2011 by CyberNet.

Windows only
Every year Donation Coder holds an event called “New Apps for the New Year” (NANY) where developers do some cramming in order to whip up small but useful apps. The NANY 2011 event came to an end on January 1st, and there’s no doubt that many of the 30+ apps available will only be downloaded by a very small subset of users. There was one, however, that really caught my attention: JottiQ.

Jotti, not to be confused with the new JottiQ application, is a website that is comparable to VirusTotal. You can upload files to the site and have it scanned against a bunch of antivirus applications. The JottiQ app, however, is a great replacement for needing to interact with the Jotti website. You can queue up files that you want to be scanned, but one of the super cool things is that you can have it scan all of the executables that are associated to processes you currently have running. Now that is slick.

Some other features of JottiQ include:

• Uses Jotti’s internal cache to speed up scans by avoiding the uploading of files that have already been scanned in the past
• Lists scanners with detections at the top of their list in red
• Open scan results in your browser
• Context menu integration lets you right-click and select “Scan with JottiQ” on a file
• Up to three files can be scanned (processed) simultaneously.
• Items that have been scanned and are deemed safe can automatically be removed from the queue.

After using this for a little while I’d say this is by far one of the most useful apps I’ve seen come out of any NANY event, and it is definitely worth checking out. These a few more of the apps available from NANY 2011 that I thought were at least worth mentioning:

• Webcam Video Diary – A program to help you quickly record, label, and manage videos and photos from your webcam throughout the day
• Quick Cliq – A portable menu based application launcher and productivity tool
• Auspex – Automatically replace and complete text strings as you type
• Duplicate Photo Finder – Find and delete duplicate photos

Kudos to all the developers who put in their own time to contribute all these apps!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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