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Oct 09

Disable IE Tab Previews in Windows 7

This article was written on May 24, 2012 by CyberNet.

Ie9 tab previews

In Windows 7 Microsoft made it so that multiple windows from the same application are grouped into the same icon, and when it comes to Internet Explorer it treats each tab as a window. That means if you have two tabs open in Internet explorer the Taskbar icon will show two previews when you click on it (like the screenshot above). Having it show all of the tab previews whenever you click on the Internet Explorer icon may get annoying since it takes an extra click to pass focus back to Internet Explorer, but you can always disable the feature.

To disable the IE tab previews in Windows 7 these are the steps you need to take:

In Internet Explorer click the gear icon in the upper-right corner, and choose Internet Options:
You should already be on the General tab. Click the Settings button in the Tabs section:
Uncheck the Show previews for individual tabs in the taskbar option:
Restart Internet Explorer

Now with that in place the next time that you click on the Internet Explorer icon it will switch to the app rather than displaying a list of tabs that have been open in the browser.

Oct 08

New Windows Live Movie Maker is Nice

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on August 25, 2009 by CyberNet.

windows live movie maker.jpg Last week Microsoft released a new version of Windows Live Movie Maker that I have to admit is rather impressive. I took some time to play around with it over the weekend, and the Ribbon interface makes creating movies so easy that I actually feel like new computer users could grasp how to do it in a matter of minutes. Plus they’ve included an “AutoMovie” button that inserts transitions, effects, credits, and titles automatically for you. The team did a remarkable job of making movie creation simple.

Now here’s the thing that some Windows users might notice. This version of Movie Maker lacks some features that older versions had. The most notable thing is probably the disappearance of the timeline view (used for more precise editing), and I’m pretty sure there are also less transitions available. The real damper may be that this version is only available for Vista and Windows 7, which means Windows XP users will have to stick with Movie Maker 2.1. Yeah… you power users probably aren’t too happy.

So what’s the point of Windows Live Movie Maker then? Many of you may not agree, but I think Microsoft made the right move with the direction they’re pursuing. The Windows Live blog stressed several times that a a good chunk of users are sharing videos that are just a few minutes long:

According to recent research from IDC, over 60 percent of US consumers watch user-generated videos online. They also found that almost half of the videos shared on the Internet are just a few minutes long. While video is becoming just as easy to capture as photos, it’s nowhere near as easy to edit and share.

So the focus of Windows Live Movie Maker is on videos that are around 2-minutes long. Personally there are very few cases where I’ll watch a video any longer than that, and so they are spot on for my kind of usage. That’s why I think the revamped Movie Maker is so nice. If I was going to put together a movie that was an hour or two I’d probably want to look towards a program that’s a bit more advanced.

They’ve also made sharing videos easy by integrating a YouTube uploader, allow exporting in HD quality, and let users burn a movie to DVD. Again, these are all things that are just a few clicks away. It’s fast. It’s simple.

There are some people I know who will absolutely love using this, and I’ll definitely be telling other people about it. The only thing I don’t like is the dreaded installer that tries to throw all the rest of their products on your machine at the same time.

Windows Live Movie Maker Homepage (Windows Vista/7 only; freeware)

Oct 07

EmailTray is a Simple Desktop Mail App and Notifier

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on April 12, 2011 by CyberNet.

Desktop mail notifier

If you’ve been looking for a light desktop email application I’d give EmailTray a high recommendation. This isn’t something that is designed to replace those full-fledged programs such as Outlook or Thunderbird, but when it comes to a simple mail manager and notifier it does quite well. Plus this will monitor multiple webmail accounts, POP or IMAP, for free.

Looking at the screenshot above you can probably tell that EmailTray does its best to categorize the emails you receive based on what it thinks are important. This reminds me of Gmail’s Priority Inbox, but the nice thing is that it all works locally on your machine. There is no information being sent to their servers, which I’m sure makes users feel more comfortable trying it out. Having used this app for a few weeks I’d say that it does a decent job of assigning priorities, and in the event it gets something wrong you can always manually change the priority of a particular email.

Here are some of the features they highlight:

Monitors all email accounts, including those based on Webmail, POP3 and IMAP.
View and reply to messages.
Analyzes your read/respond/delete/forward actions, as well as interconnections between email senders, to rank incoming emails by importance.
Get notified about new important emails with a pop-up ticker and sound.
Scans the Spam boxes of all your accounts (webmail and Outlook) to recover important messages mistakenly trapped by spam filters.
Never sends the subject lines nor texts of your emails to its servers. Our smart algorithm will help analyze your email behavior locally on your computer.

It should be noted that in the settings you can configure how notifications work, and whether you only get prompted for one or all of the priority levels. Also, the most frequently you can have it check for new mail is every 5-minutes, which is something that may disappoint those of you that prefer that 1-minute interval that some other apps offer.

EmailTray Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

Oct 07

CaptureIt Plus is a Free Screenshot App for Windows

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on October 13, 2011 by CyberNet.

Free screenshot capture

There seems to be all kinds of screenshot apps available for Windows, and many of them cater to different audiences. One of my favorites is Greenshot since it is lightweight, free, and has just the right number of features, but CaptureIt Plus comes in a close second.

What makes this one any different? It has a long list of different screen capture modes, and this does just about everything except include a screenshot editor. Why wouldn’t you want a screenshot editor included? I know some of you have your own image editor that you prefer to use, and you can configure this app to open that program with every screenshot you take. So if you don’t want any kind of editor then I’d say this will quickly find its way to the top of your list.

Here are some of the features offered by CaptureIt Plus:

Includes the following screen capture modes: Fullscreen, Window, Rectangle, Circle, FreeForm, ActiveWindow, Fixed Region and Scheduled capture
Repeat Last Capture
Various output formats, JPG, PNG (default), GIF, BMP, WMF, and TIFF
Customizable keyboard shortcuts
JPG quality settings
Shows grid lines while drawing
Can include mouse cursor in screenshot capture
Plugin support

CaptureIt Plus Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

Oct 05

Online Regular Expression Builder

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on April 03, 2008 by CyberNet.

regular expressions

Regular expressions are one of those things that are incredibly powerful… if you know how to use them. It has taken quite a bit of time for me to learn the ins and outs of how they work, but once you get the hang of them there is almost always some variation that can be used in the different programming languages.

There have been some programs that try to lend a hand at building the regular expressions, but more often than not you’ll have to fork out some money for them. RegExr is looking to solve this problem. It is a free online regular expression builder that will show you the results of your regular expression in real-time.

I’ll be using this all of the time now, and it would have definitely been a great tool to have when I was trying to learn the ropes. Along the right side it includes a small “library” of the syntax available for building your regular expressions. That is a huge time saver so that you don’t have to keep referencing a cheat sheet.

If you don’t find the online version appealing they have also taken the liberty of converting it into a desktop application using Adobe’s AIR technology. That means it will run on Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux assuming that you have Adobe Air installed.

RegExr Online Version
RegExr Desktop Version
[via Download Squad]

Oct 05

CyberSearch 0.9.9: Better Icon Management, “Smart” Keywords, and More

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on July 10, 2008 by CyberNet.

cybersearch 099.png Here you thought that the only big announcements today were going to be from Apple. Looks like you were wrong! We’ve got another new version of our CyberSearch Firefox extension, and this time it packs more than just bug fixes.

P.S. I apologize for releasing these updates so frequently, but I’m trying to make the extension the best it can be.

–Keyword Icons–

The new CyberSearch 0.9.9 has two main features that are accompanied by a handful of bug fixes. The first thing that we’ve added is a slightly intelligent system that will try to guess what icon to use when you’re creating a new keyword. Basically what it does is grab the first URL you specify in the “Website URL” field, attach “favicon.ico” onto the end, and then paste it into the Icon URL field:

To have the icon URL regenerated you can click the “auto” link at any time. We also wanted to show a preview of what the icon looks like, and CyberSearch now does that by replacing the “help” image located next to the URL field. If the field is blank you’ll still see the question mark icon, and you’ll still be able to get help for that field by hovering over the icon even after it’s been replaced.

–Smart Keywords–

I know that we all love the keyword system that CyberSearch offers, but sometimes it can be difficult to remember all of your keywords once you have more than a handful. That’s why we came up with what we like to call “smart” keywords.

How do they work? Well, there isn’t really anything that you have to setup in order to start using them (they are enabled for everyone by default). That’s why they are so great. Just type a URL, followed by a space, and then the text you want to search for. You will instantly see results from only that site:

cybersearch smart domain.png

We, however, wanted to minimize the amount of work you needed to do in order to take advantage of this feature. Thats why you can also just press the spacebar after a full URL in the address bar to immediately search the contents of the site you’re currently on. Here’s an example where I was viewing the Firefox add-ons homepage, and all I had to do was press the spacebar followed by the extension name I was looking for:

cybersearch full url keyword.png

Notice how all of the results are from the Mozilla add-ons site? Cool, huh? You don’t have to spend time setting up an extensive list of keywords that you’ll never remember, and yet you can still search your favorite sites!

Keywords take precedence over the domain searching, and so any keywords you have setup will override this functionality. If you want to disable the setting all together you can do so in the General tab, and then uncheck the Automatically search domains option.

–And More–

We also threw in a couple of more minor fixes in this release:

When configuring keywords CyberSearch will truncate long URL’s that may appear in the drop-down menu.
HTML characters that appeared in the titles of results (ampersands, quotes, etc…) should show up as expected.

We’d very much appreciate it if you can kick around the new release to see if there are any bugs. The smart keywords won’t work with sites that have some special characters in them, such as question marks, and the reason we did that was because Google doesn’t like searching those kind of sites. Other than that anything should be fair game.

If you get a spare second don’t forget to leave a review for our extension. We’re currently sitting at 4.00 out of 5 stars, and we wouldn’t mind seeing it go up a little more. 😉

Get CyberSearch Extension for Firefox

Oct 05

Adobe Flash Player 10 Beta Available

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on May 15, 2008 by CyberNet.

flash player 10.jpg Adobe has announced that the first Beta of Flash Player 10 is now available for everyone to download. It comes with al kinds of really nice features and improvements, but the best thing that we’ll probably see come out of this is the newly available 3D effects. One example that they gave of where this could be useful is taking 2D images and arranging them in a rotating 3D carousel similar to that seen to the right. Making your own Cover Flow clone wouldn’t take too long either then.

Concerned about performance? According to Adobe they are pushing some of the graphical processing onto the user’s video card so that the processor can be used for rendering special effects:

One of the best things about the creative features now available in Adobe Flash Player 10 beta is that they won’t slow down performance. With Flash Player 10 beta, developers can enable SWF content to render through the memory bandwidth and computational horsepower of the GPU hardware processor, freeing up the CPU to do more – such as render 3D content and intricate effects, and process complex business logic.

Here’s a list of some other notable new features in Flash Player 10 Beta:

3D Effects – Easily transform and animate any display object through 3D space while retaining full interactivity. Fast, lightweight, and native 3D effects make motion that was previously reserved for expert users available to everyone. Complex effects are simple with APIs that extend what you already know.
Custom Filters and Effects – Create your own portable filters, blend modes, and fills using Adobe Pixel Bender, the same technology used for many After Effects CS3 filters. Shaders in Flash Player are about 1KB and can be scripted and animated at runtime.
Advanced Text Layout – A new, highly flexible text layout engine, co-existing with TextField, enables innovation in creating new text controls by providing low-level access to text offering right-to-left and vertical text layout, plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.
Enhanced Drawing API – Runtime drawing is easier and more powerful with re-styleable properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line.
Visual Performance Improvements – Applications and videos will run smoother and faster with expanded use of hardware acceleration. By moving several visual processing tasks to the video card, the CPU is free to do more.

It will probably be a little while before we start to see developers making use of the new technology offered in Flash Player 10, but once a majority of users have upgraded the developers will be all over this like a kid in a candy store. 😉

Get Adobe Flash Player 10
Adobe Flash Player 10 Release Notes

Oct 04

OpenSuse 10.2 Goes Gold

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on December 07, 2006 by CyberNet.

My favorite Linux distribution, OpenSuse, has released another great version. OpenSuse 10.2 has been in the works since back in June and 6-months later we receive this fine release. Here is what the announcement says is new for 10.2:

As usual, we ship all the latest open source packages available at the time. But we want to give special mention to the redesigned GNOME and KDE desktop, Firefox 2.0, ext3 as new default file system, support for internal SD card readers, new power managment and last but not least our improved package management.

I’m in the process of downloading the DVD via a Torrent right now but it will take awhile. In the mean time I have been looking for a site that has a good screenshot gallery posted but can’t seem to find anything yet. I expect that OSDir.com will be posting one shortly so if you want to visually see what’s new then you should be able to check it out there. Otherwise, when I get it up and running I might post a few screenshots here as well.

Download OpenSuse 10.2

Update:

The OpenSuse Torrents are having issues downloading so I went ahead and mirrored them. Here is the 32-bit Torrent and here is the 64-bit Torrent both of which are for the DVD.

Oct 03

Awn 0.2 – An Unbelievable Dock for Linux

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on October 08, 2007 by CyberNet.

Awn Weather Applet Avant Window Navigator (Awn) 0.2 was just released, and there is no doubt that it is one of the best looking docks I’ve seen on any operating system. There is a video below that shows all of the cool icon effects, including the sweet reflection. Before we get into that let’s take a look at what’s new:

Icon effects – choose whether your icons bounce like cartoon characters, spin like a coin, or have a spotlight cast on them.
Awn Manager – a unified interface for managing all of the settings Awn has to offer.
Applets – you’ll soon be able to get things like weather, system information, and more all from the comfort of your own dock. Things like Stacks and a clock are also in the works.

Below is a video that demonstrates the various icon effects, and you better sit down if you haven’t seen it before. The 3D turning with the spotlight is my favorite.

Source: The Dude Abides [via Digg]

Oct 01

Sunbelt Personal Firewall for Vista

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on July 08, 2008 by CyberNet.

sunbelt personal firewall-1.png

It has been over a year and a half since the consumer release of Windows Vista, and the Sunbelt Personal Firewall is finally compatible with it. The new version has better network performance, enhanced packet filtering, improved stability, Vista (32-bit) compatibility, and more. Plus, like always, it comes in both free and paid flavors.

Do you need a third-party firewall when Windows comes with one? According to Sunbelt the “built-in firewall in Windows is worse than useless, since it is only one-way.” They aren’t completely telling the truth there. Windows XP’s firewall is indeed a one-way firewall that is only capable of blocking incoming connections, but that’s not the case with Vista. I’m sure that Sunbelt is a much better choice for protection, but I think they need to be more clear in the claims they are making.

Aside from the new Vista compatibility there isn’t much that I’m able to accurately test in the new Sunbelt Personal Firewall. Memory usage between the three processes (SbPFSvc.exe, SbPFCl.exe, and SbPFLnch.exe) totaled about 35MB for me, which is a bit more than I had anticipated. When compared to Comodo that is about ten times more memory being used.

If you do decide to give this a whirl it’s important to know that the free version and the paid version are both bundled in the same download. Once you download the “trial” you’ll have a full 30 days to play around with all of the features. After that it will fall back to the free version that doesn’t include things like ad blocking, identity theft protection, and remote administration.

Sunbelt Personal Firewall Homepage
Thanks Scott!

Hasta La Gadget!

Disable IE Tab Previews in Windows 7

New Windows Live Movie Maker is Nice

EmailTray is a Simple Desktop Mail App and Notifier

CaptureIt Plus is a Free Screenshot App for Windows

Online Regular Expression Builder