Folder View is a free Windows utility that gives you quick access to the folders you use most often in Windows Explorer. You can add shortcuts for every folder in My Documents, or choose custom folders to add to the toolbar. We'd advise against selecting an entire drive, since you'll wind up with a toolbar several rows deep filled with folders. It sort of defeats the purpose of having shortcuts when it takes you five minutes to find the one you're looking for.
As Martin at gHacks points out, one of the most useful features of Folder View is the recent folders toolbar. If you've accidentally closed a folder that you want to recover, this feature can be a life saver. It's not quite as magical as the recover closed tab feature in Firefox, but it's actually more useful since you can also use the Recent folders button to access your most frequently used folders in a snap.
Folder View also shows up in your Windows download and upload dialog boxes, making it easy to keep your files organized if you like to store your downloaded files in several different directories.
Believe us when we say that we know you're sick of hearing about Twitter, but there's a good reason it's one of Download Squad's favorite toys. We often find out about new software on Twitter before it gets blogged anywhere else, and the readers reap all the benefits. And did we mention that some people's Twitter streams are flat-out hilarious? Favrd, a new service from Dean Allen, will help you find some of the best. It keeps track of which posts people are marking as favorites, so you only have to read the good stuff.
Dean also uses a mysterious algorithm to filter out "webcock," a term he coined to describe "online-marketing, web-strategy, killer-startup cheerleaders/water-carriers." This is sure to offend some people, but it keeps the focus of Favrd on people who use Twitter to entertain. To put it another way, a way that probably wouldn't make it past Dean's algorithm, Favrd is crowdsourcing comedy, and everybody wins.
FavLoc is one of those FireFox extensions that should really have been built into the web browser. What it lets you do is create a list of download folders that is easily accessible from the right-click menu in Firefox.
Normally when you want to download a link or file you can either just download it to your default folder or click "Save Link As" and browse to a folder. With FavLoc installed, you can choose from a list of predefined folders, no browsing necessary. For example if you always download programs to one location, music to another, and videos to a third, you can create three favorites and save yourself a lot of time.
All Browser Bookmarks, from the makers of 1Password, is a free program that gives you easy access to your Internet bookmarks from multiple browsers via the Mac OS X menubar. Instead of launching Safari or Firefox and then opening the respective favorites menu and selecting a favorite, you can click the menu bar icon for All Browser Bookmarks and choose a bookmark.
The program lets you view your favorites separated by browser or combined, and you can choose which browser's favorites you want All Browser Bookmarks to show. 1Password users will find a section for their saved web forms making it easy to get to sites requiring authentication.
Recently, we told you about some ways to organize and manage your Firefox bookmarks, and one of our readers asked for similar suggestions to use with Internet Explorer. Since we want Michael and our other IE-using friends to loved too, we put together a few ideas for you. Favorites Box lets you add extra attributes to your bookmarks to make them easier to find and organize. Add comments, categories, tags, or login information or even set up a reminders. This one's free to try, but sets you back $19.95 if you want to keep it. Favorites Finder is a free extension that adds keyword functionality to your bookmarked sites so you can access them in just a couple of keystrokes. Just type a few letters of the site you're looking for and Favorites Finder will search your bookmarks and find all the matches, including whatever's in your folders. Power Favorites is a slick little extension that merges bookmarks from IE, Opera, and Firefox, then syncs them across multiples computers. You can annotate each bookmark with notes and tags, then view them by tag list or tag clouds. (Tag clouds? Are you listening, Foxmarks?) Power Favorites has a 30-day free trial, then it's $19.95.
When you finally decide to winnow down that super-long list of Favorites you've accumulated over the past two years, it's a pain to have to check each bookmark to make sure the site still exists. Use the free tool Favorites Inspector instead. It will plow through your whole list for you and alert you to any "404 error" pages so you can delete those Favorites instead of filing them.
If you're like most people, you probably have 5 or 10 websites, beside DownloadSquad, that you visit every day. But you've probably got dozens, if not hundreds of bookmarks cluttering up the bookmarks/favorites menu of your web browser.
That makes sense, because you want to bookmark pages you visit regularly, but not every day. And of course you bookmark pages you think you might come back to later, but never do.
The latest version of the Opera web browser has a nifty new feature that makes it easy to jump to your favorite pages. Every time you open a new tab, you're presented with 9 boxes with thumbnails of your favorite sites. You can either select sites yourself, or choose your most visited sites based on your browser history.
Each site is assigned a number, and you can automatically load each page by pressing Crtl+1, Crtl+2, etc. When you're on a blank tab, looking at the thumbnails, you can click Crtl+R to reload the images to see if anything changed while you were trying to decide which page to read first. This also handy because the thumbnails are not supposed to reload every time you start the browser (although in this initial release, they do).
When favicons first started to become popular, I have to admit that I didn't really "get" them. I couldn't see what the value was to having a dinky little icon in the address bar. Maybe I'm slow, but it also took me awhile to figure out that my browser could remember the favicon for my bookmarks or favorites that I'd visited, making it easier to pick them out from a long listing of links.
Of course, now that I'm used to them, I feel like I can't live without them. In fact, any listing of links that doesn't use favicons frustrates me, particularly if I use it a lot. One tool that I use a lot that unfortunately does not support favicons is del.icio.us. Of course, what do you do if there's something on the web that you wish was different? Well, if you're a programmer you just hack yourself together a greasemonkey script. And if you're like me, you just cross your fingers and hope that some kindly developer has hacked together a script to do what you were wishing you could do.
In my case, I'm happy to report that someone has in fact written a greasemonkey script to add favicons to del.icio.us. Creatively called fav.icio.us2, it does what it says it will do, and that's good enough for me.
Sometimes finding a download turns out to be a homecoming of sorts. AM-DeadLink is like a long-lost friend. I used it regularly on a machine I had at least 5 years ago, then lost track of it for some reason in an intervening system upgrade. Luckily, it's still around, and appears to be being actively developed.
AM-DeadLink does everything you would expect a bookmark validator to do - it tells you when your bookmarks have, for want of a better term, expired, and also lets you know which ones are redirecting, and may need to be updated, and will find duplicate entries that can be deleted. An added feature is that AM-DeadLink can update all of the favicons as it hits each server to check if it's still there. These updated favicons can be saved right into your bookmarks or favorites, so that the next time you look at your list of bookmarks, it's a little more visually interesting.
AM-DeadLink is compatible with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla and Opera bookmarks, as well as comma-separated or tab-separated text files of links.
Synapse is an online life manager. As of yet, there is no information as to whether this is a free web based application or not. Synapse is working up to their October 2006 release date, and it looks like it has some nice potential. The Synapse website lists off the main features that it will help users to manage their lives with. These include:
People - personal contact manager
Calendar - calendar and appointment tracker
Broadcast - send out email blasts to contact lists
Lists - daily to-do's
Ledger - financial tracker
Feeds - RSS feed reader
Favorites - bookmark list that is accessible from anywhere
Tags - easily find your favorite items and feeds
I personally can't wait to check out the release of Synapse. All of your most important daily items bundled together in one powerful tool.
Ahh, Technorati, what would we do without you. You are the reason we obsessively tag all our posts, and you dutifully respond to our pings in mere minutes (under 5 according to Technorati Principal Engineer Kevin Marks) to crawl our data. On today, your third birthday, you provide us with even more excitement, in the form of a spiffy re-design and some interesting new features. The new design is more modular than in its previous state, complete with standard issue Web 2.0 graded header bars decked out in desaturated colors.
Front and center (well, top right anyway) is the new "Discover" feature. Discover allows users to view the most active posts within set categories including life, entertainment, tech and business. Users can also Discover by specifying tags or groups of tags. Keep in mind that the Discover feature is still under construction, and thus features may come and go before they reach a stable plateau. The new Discover functionality is similar to the popular site Techmeme.
Other differences from previous versions of the site include changes to the way favorites are displayed. Favorites now give more weight to a users favorites as opposed to simply which posts are most popular in the blogosphere.
It's a categorized, very
complete and researched, magnificent list of
hacks, links, and tools for del.icio.us. So, naturally there's a little something for everyone in there. How about
mashups, skins, and even more lists? Out of the bunch I've picked through so far, my favorite has to be DiggLicious. With the perfect blend of digg's latest, a handy pause button, and
the ability to add to my del.icio.us favorites, it's a real time saver. Once you're done with the del.icio.us stuff,
head down to the bottom of the page and check out the Top 10 Google Services.
Folder View is a free Windows utility that gives you quick access to the folders you use most often in Windows Explorer. You can add shortcuts for every folder in My Documents, or choose custom folders to add to the toolbar. We'd advise against selecting an entire drive, since you'll wind up with a toolbar several rows deep filled with folders. It sort of defeats the purpose of having shortcuts when it takes you five minutes to find the one you're looking for.
Ahh, 
It's a categorized, very
complete and researched, magnificent 
