Hasta La Gadget!

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

Tutorial Thursday

One feature that I’ve always wanted in Windows was the ability to have windows snap to the edge of the screen. Some people see that feature as an inconvenience because the operating system is trying to do something that the user may not have intended, but it can be useful when trying to quickly arrange windows.

Today I’m going to show you how to unobtrusively snap windows to the edge of the screen using a free program called FreeSnap! There are no options to configure, and there isn’t even a System Tray icon. The only way you’ll know the program is running is by the splash screen that’s shown when it starts. There is a predefined set of keyboard shortcuts that you can use to increase/decrease the size of a window, move it to one of the corners of the screen, or snap it to an edge of the screen.

–Keyboard Shortcuts–

Keyboard shortcuts are what make FreeSnap so wonderful. When I first started getting used to the program the shortcuts seemed unnatural, and nearly impossible to remember. It wasn’t until I visually drew a box around each set of keys that I began to understand why they were laid out the way they were (well, at least the ones for snapping and moving are intuitive). To help you visualize the keys I’ve color coded the groups and mapped them to a keyboard layout below.

• Snap…
  to top: Windows Key + I
  to bottom: Windows Key + K
  to left: Windows Key + J
  to right: Windows Key + L
• Move…
  to top-left corner: Windows Key + T
  to bottom-left corner: Windows Key + G
  to top-right corner: Windows Key + Y
  to bottom-right corner: Windows Key + H
• Center window: Windows Key + C
  Grow window: Windows Key + Z
  Shrink window: Windows Key + X

–Snap Windows–

The snapping feature is definitely my favorite part of the program. Naturally you would think that this would create some sort of “magnetic edges” on the program windows so that when you come in contact with another edge it is attracted to it. That’s not the case at all, and therefore it is much less likely to annoy you.

Instead when making a window snap to the edge of the screen it will extend the window to that edge. So let’s say you want a window to span from the top of your screen to the bottom, all you would have to do is press the Windows Key + I and then the Windows Key + K. To make it a little clearer I’ve created an animated image that shows what happens when I snap an application to the right side of the screen:

–Resize Windows–

The grow and shrink (Windows Key + Z or X, respectively) feature will resize windows to the most common sizes. This is really handy for website and program developers to see what their work will look like on computers running at various resolutions. Here are the five preset resolutions that FreeSnap will shuffle between:

• 640 x 480
• 800 x 600
• 1024 x 768
• 1152 x 864
• 1280 x 1024

–Move Windows–

Moving a window is different than snapping  it because the height and width of the window remain untouched. When you initiate a move it will be sent to the respective corner, such as in this case where I sent the window to the upper-right corner of the screen:

The shortcut keys, Windows Key + T/G/Y/H, makeup what appears to be a box on the keyboard. You can see this in the keyboard layout I posted above, and each letter corresponds to a corner of the box. That is important when it comes to remembering what key does what.

–Overview–

I think this program kind of provides the best of both worlds for users. You don’t have to worry about magnetic edges on windows which can get annoying after awhile, but you are still able to send a window to the edge of the screen. The only thing that takes some getting used to are the keyboard shortcuts. 😉

FreeSnap Homepage (for Windows only)

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on March 16, 2012 by CyberNet.

There are some keys on the keyboard, such as the caps lock and scroll lock keys, that can be annoying if they accidentally get turned on without you realizing it. When I found Keyndicate I thought it was pretty cool not only because it would indicate when one of those keys was pressed, but it also includes an option to “freeze” the current state of the keys so that they can’t be toggled.

The screenshot above provides an example of what it looks like with the caps lock and scroll lock keys turned on. There is a letter added to the System Tray icon for each of the keys that are on, and there would be another one for num lock if that was turned on. If the icon is too subtle you can even turn on the notifications to ensure you really know when the keys are toggled.

This is a very lightweight program that requires no installation, and uses less than 2MB of memory on my system. That means you can leave it running without it affecting the performance of your system.

Keyndicate Homepage (Windows only; 32/64-bit; Portable; Freeware)

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

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

I love the way Microsoft integrated the quick window resizing in Windows 7, and so I started looking around for something similar on the Mac since I frequently work with two windows side-by-side. Not only did I find an app, Moom, for my Mac that would let me resize my windows, but it also blew away any expectations I had for such a utility.

It’s hard to do Moom justice without you actually trying it out (there is a free trial on their site), but I’ll do my best. Moom gets activated by hovering over the green zoom button located on each window. By default you’ll see pre-defined options to move/resize a window to the left half, right half, top half, bottom half, or full screen. If you click and drag on one of those icons you’ll notice that the icon changes to quarter segments. For example, in the screenshot above I clicked and dragged down on the “left half” icon which turned it into the bottom left quarter icon. If I would have clicked and dragged up it would have turned into a top left quarter icon.

The slickness doesn’t stop there though. You can add the optional grid to the popout menu, which I highly recommend. The number of boxes are customizable, but I found their default 6×4 grid to be just right on my 27″ iMac. To use this you just click and drag on the area/size you want for the window, and Moom will make sure the window gets put into that position. You’ll also notice in the screenshot that some of the boxes are shaded different colors. These are used to represent where the window is already located: the solid white box means that the window already occupies that portion of the screen, and the other shades of gray mean that the window only occupies a fraction of that space. Very slick!

Keyboard junkies aren’t left out in the dark either. There are plenty of customizable keyboard shortcuts, such as for moving a window to another monitor, available for you to play with. An unexpected use I found with Moom is that using these keyboard shortcuts you can gather up some of those off-screen windows that appear on a monitor that isn’t connected to your machine anymore.

Before I tried Moom I was thinking “$5 for an app that just resizes window?”, but it didn’t take long for me to change my tune to “this is just $5?”.

Moom Homepage (Mac only, $5 in the Mac App Store – trial available at the homepage)

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

At Giz, we spend our days all clickity-clackity on our keyboards, and we’re pretty sure a lot of you sit at desks all day, too. Like us, you’ve probably got some favored keyboard shortcuts that changed your life when you discovered them. We want you to share it with us. What are the best keyboard shortcuts?

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