Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on November 27, 2012 by CyberNet.

When you’re using the desktop view in Windows 8 things won’t feel all that much different than they do in Windows 7. Something I thought Microsoft might change in Windows 8 was the size of the thumbnails displayed when you hover over running apps in the Taskbar, but unfortunately they are just as small as they always were.

Luckily you can change that just like you could in Windows 7 by using a third party app. The one that I would recommend this time around is Taskbar Thumbnails Tuner. This free app gives you all kinds of control over the Taskbar thumbnails including the size, margins, spacing, delay, and more. You can even use it to disable the thumbnails all together if you don’t like using them. Change take effect immediately without needing to reboot your machine.

I’ve always been a big fan of increasing the size of the thumbnails so that I’m able to see more clearly what each window contains. If you, for example, have multiple instances of Windows Explorer open it can help immensely to be able to see the contents of each window before switching to it.

There is one downside to increasing the thumbnail size though. The larger you make the thumbnails the further your mouse will have to travel to select the one you want to switch to. So you’ll probably want to keep that in mind as you determine the right size for your needs. Initially I started with them as large as I could make them, but eventually lowered it down so that they ended up being about 50% larger than what the default is.

Taskbar Thumbnails Tuner Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on March 13, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

There’s an application that I’ve been using for years that has saved me a lot of time and trouble. It’s a Windows application called Sizer, and it is completely free and extremely small in size. Those of you who have installation-phobia can rest easy knowing that there is a no-install version available.

Sizer doesn’t require much of an explanation in order for you to start using it. Basically it will let you resize a window to a set of predefined dimensions. There are plenty of applications out there in the wild that do almost the same thing, but there are some features that really make Sizer stand out from the crowd.

Once you have Sizer running there are several different ways you can use it to precisely resize a window:

• Shortcut – Hold down the Control key while resizing a window to have it snap to an invisible grid. By default the grid is set to 10 pixels, but you can adjust that number in the configuration.
• Tooltip – When you’re resizing a window you’ll see a little tooltip appear by your mouse that tells you the current dimensions.
  
• Menu – When your mouse turns into the resizing arrow (the double-ended arrow) you can right-click to see a menu of predefined sizes. You can customize the options that show up in the menu, and we’ll demonstrate how to do that in just a minute.
  
• Titlebar – Another way to access the menu is by right-clicking somewhere on the titlebar for the window. There will be a resize/reposition menu which will expand to show your predefined sizes.
  

Now that you know how to use Sizer lets take a look at how you can configure it. If you right-click on the System Tray icon you can open up the configuration screen to change some of the settings. This is where you can add or remove predefined resizing options from the menu:

You’ll also notice that for each menu item you create you can adjust the positioning of the window. For example, you can have a window resized to 640×480 pixels and centered on the screen! The “Move to” drop down menu will let you choose just about any corner of side of the screen, or you can specify a custom position in terms of pixels.

Towards the bottom of the configuration window is a box where you can enter in the “snap size.” I talked about this earlier where you can hold down the Control key when resizing a window to have it snap to an invisible grid. The larger the number you enter in this box will cause the grid to be less precise.

Sizer is a relatively simple application in terms of how it works, but if you’re constantly resizing windows this can become a huge time saver. Jump on over and give it a whirl if you’re a Windows user.

Note: The author of the application put a note on the site that Sizer has some issues under Windows Vista, but when I was testing it everything worked perfectly. I used the no-install version that was available which might be the reason why I didn’t run into any problems.

Download Sizer

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

If you’ve been thinking about getting started on the rocket project that’s been on your mind for ages, now is a good time to get serious. Next week, NASA will release a massive software catalog with over 1,000 projects. It’s not the first time the space agency’s released code, but it is the first time they’ve made it so easy.

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