Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on June 25, 2007 by CyberNet.

Microsoft Monday

When Microsoft released a DreamScene Preview for Vista Ultimate users, I couldn’t wait to try it out. Once I got it installed I was indeed impressed, but I still felt like I was missing out on the full capabilities of what DreamScene could really do.

Now being more than 4-months after the preview version was released, there is still no final version, but that’s a whole other story. Shortly after the Vista release, Stardock picked up some of Microsoft’s slack by extending the feature set that Dreamscene had. They made a free add-on called Deskscapes which once installed, lets you choose from their vast collection of user-uploaded “Dreams.”

Almost all of them are offered for free, and so I thought I would take a look at several that I have personally tested out. And since there are no videos of them available on the site I also felt the need to demonstrate to you what each of them looks like.

Note: None of the videos have sound because I was trying to keep the size of the video to a minimum, but its not like they would have sound on your desktop anyway. You can also look for the little white dots on the timeline to quickly skip to the next Dream demo:

–The City–

These three Dreamscapes are all based on cities, and one of them has a special place in my heart since it is of the Chicago skyline!

1. Bay Bridge
2. Detroit By Night
3. Stadt (Chicago Skyline)

–Waterfalls and Lakes–

Everyone loves water when it comes to desktop backgrounds, so I thought I would devote an entire section just to that! We’ve got waterfalls, lakes, and tropical paradise that will help prepare you for a vacation.

Note: Some of the effects that some of the Dreams have are more subtle than others, particularly the two Island ones. I threw these in because they look good, and some people don’t like too much motion on their desktop.

1. Berge
2. Future World
3. Heron
4. Island Oasis
5. Island Paradise
6. Small Waterfall
7. Sydney Opera House
8. Wassfall

–Other–

This is kind of a conglomeration of odds and ends that I found. A few of them put you in space, some are related to movies, and others just don’t belong anywhere.

The hot one in this group is no doubt the Shark Pit, which is what I have my current Vista desktop set to. When other people have seen me using it they think it is the coolest thing ever. Kudos to the Stardock team for developing it and not charging a dime!

Caution: The Rollercoaster might make you sick.

1. Apollo
2. Bliss (like the default XP background)
3. Evolution
4. Matrix
5. Rollercoaster
6. Shark Pit (this is my favorite)
7. Spiderman
8. The Moon
9. Vista

–Premium Dynamic Dreams–

Besides for producing free Dreams such as the Shark Pit, Stardock also works hard to create dynamic ones. Unlike other Dreams, the content that these show are not just a looping movie, and are instead created on-the-fly for your viewing pleasure.

Since these will cost you money, I decided to point out the features that each has a little bit more in detail so that you have a better idea of what you’ll receive. All of them, except the first one, also have options that you can configure to your liking and I made sure to demonstrate some of the different things you can do with those settings.

1. Blissful Dream ($8.95)
   This one is pretty cool because it adjusts with your computer’s clock. From what I gather, there are just a few transitions that it has (sun rise, afternoon, sunset, night) which I try to demonstrate in the video by manually adjusting the clock.
2. Desktop Earth ($8.95)
   I think the NASA-addicts out there will really get a kick out of this one. It is a rotating globe that shows where it is currently daytime and where it is nighttime. You can customize the speed of the rotation, or just make the globe stationary and have the light revolve around it as the day goes on.
3. Desktop Collage ($8.95)
   I really thought at first that this was going to be my favorite. I consider myself a photo guru and take pictures of almost anything, and looking through the options there was all kinds of stuff to love. At certain time intervals, it places a picture on your desktop (essentially forming a collage), and you can control the size of the pictures as well as the delay between adding photos. The downside is in choosing the location of the photos to use because it didn’t let me use a folder that only contained sub-folders. Instead I had to pick a folder that had pictures directly in it, which takes away a little bit from the beauty of this Dream.
4. Liquid Dream ($9.95)
   I think this ended up being my favorite out of the bunch because of how realistic it is. At first glance it doesn’t look like anything amazing, but the power lies in the configuration. You can adjust the rain drop frequency, the drop size, the background (rocks, sand, etc…) and the reflective image (night sky or clouds). If you sit there and play with the different options you are sure to find some cool settings, which I try to demonstrate in the video.

While all of the cool dynamic Dreams currently cost money, in the near future that could be changing. Stardock told me that they are working on an SDK (Software Development Kit) for the dynamic Dreams so that anyone could create ones just like these. So keep your eyes open because there could be some cool things on the horizon!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Your Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryDeskScapes 2.0 Preview Now AvailableStardock Puts Microsoft On the SpotDreamScene Download Shipped; Ultimate Extras Future BleakMake the XP Taskbar Transparent

This article was written on June 20, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

One thing that Microsoft did a good job of in Internet Explorer 7 was making it easy for users to read feeds. They provided a feed reader that was so simple, yet it does exactly what most casual users want, and that is to keep up on the latest news from around the Web.

Despite doing many things right, there are some things that it doesn’t do, but for those things, there are work-arounds which you might find useful. This includes adding a notifier so that you know when there are new items, and synchronizing with an online service so that your feeds are up-to-date both at work and at home. Here are some tips that you might find helpful if you use the feed reader in Internet Explorer…

–Synchronize with NewsGator Online (Homepage)–

This is one of my favorite add-ons for Internet Explorer because it focuses on the fact that not everyone sits in front of the same computer all day. Many of us go from being at home, to work, and then back home again which is where the NewsGator Desktop Sync comes in handy.

This small, lightweight program installs in a matter of seconds on your computer. Once setup, it will synchronize with an online NewsGator account to keep track of which feeds/posts that you have read. You can choose to have IE override all feed settings, have NewsGator’s online service override all settings, or have the application merge the feeds in the browser and what’s available online.

The System Tray icon gives you easy access to synchronization, and in just a few clicks you can sync up before you go to work or come home. Or, if that seems like too much of a hassle you can actually customize the duration between syncs so that you never even have to think about it.

–Feed Folder (Homepage)–

This add-on doesn’t do that much, but it does make your feeds a little more accessible outside of just Internet Explorer. By using the Feed Folder add-on all of your feeds will be placed in your Favorites bookmarks folder in addition to the normal feed location within Internet Explorer 7. This means that your feeds will quickly be accessible from Windows Explorer as well as the Start Menu (if configured to show Favorites in the Start Menu properties).

–MS Feed Icon (Homepage)–

This is simply a notification system and System Tray icon for the feed reader in IE7. Basically, it adds the most critical thing that Microsoft never put into their browser, but this one does a terrific job of going above and beyond the call of duty. Check out everything it can do:

• Icon in the system tray indicating status of you feed subscriptions
• Displays notifications when a feed contains new posts, and you can customize which feeds receive the notification.
• Can automatically marks a feed as read
• Force an update on all feeds
• Star a notification for later reading (essentially pinning it so that the notification doesn’t close)
• Mark as read without viewing the feed
• Unsubscribe from a feed within the notification window
• Search new posts for specific Tags so you can select which posts are interesting to you. Then any matching posts can be starred to ensure that the notification window does not close until you manually close it.
• Feed statistics
• Presentation mode aware (Windows Vista only)
• Customizable background color

–Feeds Plus (Homepage)–

Feeds Plus makes it possible to read all of your feeds on the same page. This is a really nice feature as long as you don’t have a large number of feeds, but you can always organize your feeds into folders. That way you can just read all of the items on a folder by folder basis.

It also has a built-in notifier that pops up near the System Tray when a feed has new posts, but it isn’t nearly as extensive as what the MS Feed Icon has to offer. Luckily you can disable this notifier so that it doesn’t conflict with MS Feed Icon.

–Summary–

As you can see, there are several tools available that all enhance IE7’s Feed Reader. None of them really make it a full-fledged application like FeedDemon or RSS Bandit, but they help make it a lot more useful.

If you have any other tools that you use with Internet Explorer 7’s feed reader be sure to let us know. We’ve also written two other posts, here and here, on other great add-ons for Internet Explorer 7.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Your Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryCyberNotes: Fwicki RSS Reader To Master Your FeedsGoogle Reader Goes MobileNewshutch: Top-Notch RSS Feed ReaderFirefox Changes The Way We Use RSS Feeds

This article was written on February 01, 2008 by CyberNet.

Mozilla hit a huge milestone the other day when the download counter for their add-ons rolled over the 600 million mark. That number only includes downloads from the add-ons sitea, and on top of that there are about 100 million update pings each day. The breakdown for the update requests are pictured to the right in the pie chart, and there are already more than 1 million update requests from users running pre-release versions of Firefox 3.

On a daily basis the add-ons site receives between 800,000 and 1 million downloads, and gets a whopping 4.5 million pageviews. All of that comes from people looking to get one of 4,000+ extensions that are currently hosted there.

I’m curious to see whether the integrated add-ons search tool in Firefox 3 will be able to boost the usage of the extensions. I know quite a few Firefox users who have never installed add-ons before, and probably don’t even realize that the browser is extensible. All they want Firefox for is the speed, reliability, security, and of course the “coolness” factor.

Mozilla Blog of Metrics [via Mozilla Links]

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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Another Windows Expose CloneFree Mac Exposé Clone For WindowsCyberNotes: Try Switcher for Windows Vista, an Expose CloneYour Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryCompiz Fusion Stackswitch: Another Application Switcher

This article was written on March 27, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

In Windows when you right-click on a file there will likely be an “Open With” menu that lists the various applications that can be used to open that specific file. I use it all of the time because there’s never really just one application that I want to open a file. For example, with HTML files the operating system naturally want to open them in a browser by default, but you may need to open them in Dreamweaver or Notepad to make some changes. The Open With menu makes that possible.

Today we’re going to show you how you can add or remove programs in the Open With menu. In the end you’ll truly appreciate how much easier it is to open files in several different applications that are installed on your Windows computer.

–Add Programs from Open With Menu–

Adding an application to the Open With menu is a pretty easy task, and can actually be done in a few different ways. The easiest way is probably to right-click on the type of file that you want to alter, go to the Open With menu, and click the Choose Default Program option pictured above. You should now see a window similar to this one:

(Click to Enlarge)

The applications listed underneath the Recommended Programs section are the ones that already appear in the Open With menu, and then underneath those are some of the other apps installed on your computer. If the program you want to add to the menu is listed just select it and hit the OK button. Otherwise you can use the Browse button to hunt down the program on your computer.

One thing that you may want to think about before hitting the OK button is whether you want to make the new application the default for that specific type of file. If you don’t you’ll want to uncheck the Always use the selected program to open this kind of file box.

Any programs that you select from this window will be added to the Open With menu until you decide to remove them.

–Remove Programs from Open With Menu–

Unfortunately there is no fancy interface for removing programs from the Open With menu like there is for adding items. To do this you’ll need to fire up the Registry Editor by opening the Run command (Windows Key + R), and then typing regedit into the box. Messing with the Registry Editor is not for the faint of heart, and I recommend that you understand how it works before diving into it.

The programs listed in the Open With menu should be located in one of two locations in the Registry:

1. HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ FileExts \ .FileExtension \ OpenWithList
2. HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT \ .FileExtension \ OpenWithList

Note: Replace “.FileExtension” with the extension of the file for which you’re looking to modify the Open With menu.

You should find the applications listed according to their executable name, and all you have to do is right click on the entry and have it deleted:

Tip: If you’re having troubles finding the application listed in the Registry Editor it might be easier to perform a search for the name of the executable. Just make sure that the entry you are deleting is located underneath an OpenWithList entry.

After you’ve successfully deleted the OpenWithList entries related to an extension you’ll want to restart your computer to see the changes take place.

–Overview–

So that’s how the Open With menu works! If you’ve got any suggestions as to easier ways to manage the Open With menu we would love to hear them.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

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