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Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Freeware

Pin minimized windows to desktop thumbnails with miniMIZE

I'm always on the lookout for a good application to utilize the extra space on my widescreen monitor, and this morning I happened upon miniMIZE.

It's a free app for Windows that monitors the applications you launch. When you minimize a window, miniMIZE removes the button from your taskbar and creates a thumbnail. It's easy on system resources, only consuming about 7mb of memory.

Thumbnails can be dragged anywhere on your desktop, or you can let miniMIZE automatically line them up along any edge of your desktop. You can also choose to pin icons to the desktop or have them float on top of active windows.

Further tweaks include thumbnail size, opacity, customizable hotkeys, and application icon overlays. Any applications you don't want handled by miniMIZE can be added to an exclusions list - just drag the crosshairs onto the appropriate program.

It's similar to ThumbWin, which Brad wrote about last year, but the site and application are both English.

Note that miniMIZE will only catch things after it's running - so you'll have to close and re-open your other apps after installing it for things to take effect.

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

QuizoApps Adds Tabs, Breadcrumbs to Explorer


While I know there are plenty of good replacements out there for Windows Explorer, I'm not ready to jump ship just yet. I don't really need any really advanced functionality, but there are a few things I'd like to add. Vista-style breadcrumbs and tabbed browsing, for example.

QuizoApps has coded two small extensions that do the job quite well with a minimal impact on resources. Both addons are activated by clicking view -> toolbars in any Explorer window.

The Breadcrumbs addon (QtAddressBar) is extremely responsive and even displays links to subfolders (you can see the arrow off the Adobe folder above).

Brad blogged about using QTTabBar to add an up button in Vista a while back, but it also adds several other tabbed browsing functions. You can create groups to open several tabs at once, clone a tab, merge tabs from another window, undo tab closing, use hotkeys, and it even includes enhanced replacements for Explorer's standard buttons. It even maintains a list of recently closed folders for quick resurrection.

Customization offers tons of enhancements, like grid lines, alternating row colors, minimizing to tray, and a lot more. If you want, QTTabBar will restore your tab previous tab layout on launch - I use it to keep the Control Panel and my Printers close at hand.

These are two great addons for any Windows XP. .NET 2.0 Framework is required.

Filed under: Text, Utilities, Macintosh, Freeware, Open Source

Jumpcut - multi-clip clipboard tool for OS X

jumpcut clipboard toolSomething that blew me away, back in the day, were the multiple clipboard slots I started using when Office 2000 came out. This blew me away because, as a mostly Mac user, I was used to the old copy/paste one thing at a time routine. Well Office 2k spoiled me, because despite efforts like iClip Lite (a Dashboard widget), I have yet to find a great clipboard tool. But Jumpcut might fit the bill. It's free, open source, and incredibly easy to use, once you get the hang of it. Copy some text, and it's stored in Jumpcut's holding tank. Drop down the menu bar icon (or use a hotkey to activate a bezel view), choose which clip you want to paste, and go paste it. There are some idiosyncrasies, but those are mostly from other apps like Camino, and how they handle keyboard shortcuts or the clipboard. It's the little things in life that help so much, isn't it?

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The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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