folders posts

Filed under: Productivity, Web services, Google

Google Docs now allows folder sharing, batch uploading

by Jay Hathaway Oct 13th 2009

Google Docs has always been a decent solution for collaborating on individual documents, but users have been frustrated for some time by the lack of support for sharing multiple files at once. Google recently heard their demands - delivered via the Google Docs product ideas page - and added folder sharing. Now you can not only set the same sharing permissions for a whole folder full of docs at once, but also upload multiple files simulataneously.

To organize you docs quickly, there's a new "folders" dialogue at the top of your docs screen. You can check items and then click on "folders" to set which folder they're in, even as a batch. Google also brought back an old favorite feature: "Items Not In Folders," because feedback told them that a lot of people used it for drafts or to queue items to work on.

[via CNET]

Tags: folders, google docs, GoogleDocs, sharing

Filed under: E-mail, Google

Gmail tweaks labels, kind of turns them into folders

by Brad Linder Jul 1st 2009

Google is rolling out a handful of changes to the way it handles labels in Gmail. First, labels are moving into the top left-side navigation area, right by your shortcuts for inbox, sent, starred, and other items. You can also choose to hide some labels while showing others.

Probably one of the biggest changes is that users will now be able to drag and drop messages into labels. In other words, you can sort your messages much the same way that you would add them to folders in almost any other webmail system.

Google is also removing the "right-side labels" feature from Gmail labs. The company says the new labels behavior makes it unnecessary. But try telling that to users who have gotten used to their labels hanging out in a sidebar on the right side of their screens.

The new features aren't showing up in my inbox yet, but Google has a way of rolling these kinds of changes out gradually to some groups of users before others. Have you noticed any changes to your Gmail interface? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Tags: folders, gmail, gmail-labels, gmail-labs, labels, tags

Filed under: E-mail, Google, Web

Gmail rolls out tools to make labels easier

by Brad Linder Feb 3rd 2009

About 4 years after Google confused millions of people by telling people to tag their email messages with "labels" instead of sorting messages into folders, the company is rolling out a new feature that could make labels a little easier to use.

Here's the idea. Instead of clicking the "more actions" button to apply a label and then hitting the archive button to move a message out of your inbox, you'll be able to just hit a "Move to" button in the Gmail toolbar. If you want to add a label without removing the message from your inbox, you can just select the "Labels" drop down menu instead.

The new feature is expected to roll out for all users soon, but the new buttons haven't shown up for any of my Gmail accounts yet.

Tags: email, folders, gmail, labels

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Freeware, Mods

Add Leopard-style folder stacks to Windows

by Lee Mathews Dec 15th 2008

I'm not a Mac user, but OSX has a lot of nice features - several of which have been translated into Windows shell enhancements. I've been using the Stacks docklet in RocketDock for quite a while. It's a very handy way to navigate frequently accessed folders.

If you're not a fan of dock applications, but you'd still like to add stacks to your taskbar, just download StandaloneStack. It's a small executable that launches either grid (pictured) or fan style stacks.

Settings are written to a .ini file and you can create as many stacks as you like. To call a specific one, create a shortcut to the standalonestack.exe and add its name after the closing quote. The developer's home page has more detailed instructions on how to get things going.

The stack consumes about 7mb of memory while open, but it closes the instant you click an icon or the window loses focus. It's a free download for Windows only and worked nicely on my XP and Vista Ultimate x64 installs.

Tags: folders, leopard, osx, stacks

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Freeware

Automate your drive re-organizing with Download Mover

by Lee Mathews Nov 28th 2008

I've been writing about plenty of manual ways to keep your hard drive neat and clean recently. That's a nice start, but what about some automated help along the lines of Auto-Delete?

While Download Mover is no longer actively developed, it's still good at what it does. Download and extract the zip file and launch the executable, and DM will ask you where and what you want to monitor. Specify the interval for checks and set your notification options, and you're done.

You can specify multiple folders to watch and specify different targets for each file type you add. I often forget to change my Firefox download preferences to save things in my d:\downloads folder. Setting Download Mover to scrape .exe and .zip files into the proper directory keeps my desktop nice and tidy with no interference.

If you've got another automated tool for handling chores like this, please share it! I'm always on the lookout for another app that can tackle tedious tasks like directory cleanup.

Tags: automate, automation, files, folders, hard-drive, move, organization

Filed under: Windows, Freeware

Tired of Manilla Explorer Folders? Get Rainbow Folders!

by Lee Mathews Jul 7th 2008

The default folder icons in Windows are so dreadfully boring, what with their bland manilla coloring and horizontal orientation. What we want is brightly colored folders that we can choose to stand on their side (like Vista). In the real world, not such a great idea - your paperwork would just slide out constantly and you end up with a bigger mess than before you crammed it into a folder.

In Windows, it's another story. Using Rainbow Folders to change the default icons gives you a quick way to visually distinguish your folders. Color all your image folders orange, documents green, or memos from your boss brown. It's a very simple way to add a bit of sanity to any directory that is overrun with subfolders. You can even add tooltip text to your folder, which displays in Explorer's status bar when you single click it.

As an added bonus you can also switch between old school (Windows 9x), XP, and Vista style icons. Sweet.

(note: publisher's site is not linked as it timed out repeatedly)

Tags: colorize, explorer, folder icons, FolderIcons, folders, windows

Filed under: Windows, Productivity, Freeware

Folder-to-Drive Alchemy With Visual Subst

by Lee Mathews Jul 3rd 2008

No, it won't really turn your folders gold, but Visual Subst does deserve a medal. It's little more than a GUI frontend to the Windows prompt's subst command, but if there's one thing we like more than commands that save repetitious typing it's pretty graphical systems to utilize them.

What subst does is create a symbolic link - assigning any folder on your system its own drive letter. Most of us aren't even close to using up all 26 letters, so why not set up a few of them as ridiculously short routes to get at our commonly used folders?

Visual Subst makes the process ridiculously simple, just choose an available drive letter, browse to your folder, and click the green plus. Just like that, your new virtual drive shows up in My Computer. Now getting at the temp folder is as easy as windows + r, t:, enter. Simple. Check the box at the bottom, and your new drives return after a reboot.

For a 110k application, Visual Subst is a no-brainer. You've got to have it, we swear!

Tags: drive letters, DriveLetters, folder, folder link, FolderLink, folders, symlink, windows

Filed under: Internet, Office, Web services, Google, web 2.0

Google Docs redesigns toolbar, adds colored labels

by Brad Linder Mar 26th 2008

Google has rolled out two new features for Google Docs, the company's online word processing application. The first is a new improved menu toolbar. Well, improved might be a subject term. To be perfectly honest, it doesn't appear to add a whole lot of new features. But it looks far more like the menu toolbar you'd expect to find in a desktop application, complete with File, Edit, Insert, Format, Tools, and Table options.

Google has also added the ability to select colors for your labels/folders. This is a feature that Google added to Gmail a few months ago. And we have to say, it's one of those features you didn't necessarily know you needed until you have it and then it's hard to imagine life without it.

If you use Google Docs regularly, these two features, particularly the colored labels could make life a lot easier. But as much as we love us some free Google office applications, we have to say, Zoho Writer still blows Google Docs away in a feature by feature comparison.

[via Google Operating System and... Google Operating System]

Tags: colored-labels, folders, google-docs, labels, menus

Filed under: Utilities, Features, Linux, Productivity, Open Source, How-Tos, Search

Flipping the Linux switch: Misplace a file? Find it quick!

by Kristin Shoemaker Jan 21st 2008

It happens to the best of us. We forget where we put things. Car keys. Flash drives. Yes, sometimes we even forget where certain files are on our computers. We can't really help you with the car keys and flash drives (although we inexplicably find things like that in the refrigerator here), we can help you out with finding missing files.

Coming from a Windows environment, you might be familiar with the graphical Search Files/Folder application. You know the one, it has the weird little cartoon dog that sometimes finds your files and folders, sometimes returns a lot of stuff you don't need, or sometimes doesn't return anything at all, even though you know it exists.

Linux also has graphical search applications. With them, you're able to configure your search parameters a little more tightly than with Windows (or maybe it just seems so, because we're not rushing to get the search done and make the freaky little dog go away). However, this usually isn't the quickest, or easiest, way to find your files.

This is definitely one of those times it's more productive for both old pro and new Linux users to use the command line. The confusing thing, even for some more experienced Linux users, is choosing which command to actually use to find the file or folder in question.

Tags: command line, CommandLine, commands, files, find, folders, gui, Linux, linux-switch, locate, terminal, whereis

Filed under: Business, Internet, Utilities, Web services, Microsoft

Microsoft introduces Live Folders and Live Photo Gallery

by Chris Gilmer Jun 27th 2007

Microsoft has been steadily rolling out new "Live" items since its introduction, there were two that got released late last night, with more planned to come out this summer.

Live Folders has been showing its face since around May, and are finally ready for some outside testing. The "storage on a cloud" Live Drive service, as it was coined earlier, will provide users with a free 500mb of online storage. (cough, cough...um... is that enough for the average user nowadays?) The storage was built for document storage only, so Microsoft isn't betting on the fact that people will be stuffing their spaces with multimedia materials like videos and music.

The Live Photo Gallery replaces the standard Vista Photo Gallery when installed. This allows users to control, manage, burn a picture or movie or create photo stitches, where photos are seamlessly stitched together to make a panoramic photo, relatively easy. It's an upgrade to the Windows Photo Gallery that comes standard with any Vista install. The main benefit to this application seems to be the ease of use for uploading images to Live Spaces, and videos to Soapbox.

More Windows Live services are said to roll out throughout the summer, as well as a Windows Live Suite that will include all of the Live services in one clean install.

Limited managed betas of the service will begin rolling out as of today with 5000 to 10000 testers, so look out for them if you're interested.

More coverage on this new release can be found here, here and here.

Take a look at some screenshots of the Live Folders interface:

Gallery: Windows Live Drive and Gallery

Tags: folders, images, live, live drive, live folders, live photo gallery, LiveDrive, LiveFolders, LivePhotoGallery, photos, storage, windows

Filed under: Business, Internet, Web services

Egnyte content sharing with backup and email storage

by Chris Gilmer Apr 16th 2007

egnyte content sharing, backup and email storage

There are many different options for sharing content and transferring files between contacts, or between different workspaces.

Egnyte is a relatively new company which provides a content sharing solution with up to 1GB of data that adds organization and search capabilities, as well as a continuous synchronization feature.

To get started with the free service, Egnyte requires you to install an uploader. Emails, word, excel, images, and pdf's can be chosen to be upload and backed up, as well as tagged with keywords creating a fully indexed and searchable online workspace. The data can then be exported onto any computer once it has been backed up. If you care to share files between contacts, specifying files to share can be done by choosing the specific files, choose folders or tags that you want to share.

Egnyte's uploader is available for Mac and PC platforms, and works with Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail and POP enabled mail for email backup and storage.

Tags: backup, egnyte, email, files, folders, mac, pc, search, share, uploader

Filed under: Business, Utilities, Windows, Office, Productivity, Freeware

FolderMarker - differentiate your folders

by Jason Clarke Aug 17th 2006

Yes, FolderMarker is yet another way to color or otherwise mark the folders in Windows Explorer in different ways, to make it easier to find the important ones. Yes, we've covered other similar utilities with similar functions in the past, but FolderMarker is worth considering since it not only allows you to set the color of folders, but also assign meaningful icons to them. So now rather than having to create a system in your head where red folders are important, and blue are private, now you can just use the "important" and "private" icons - much easier to figure out. And it's free, which is always good.

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