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Filed under: Macintosh, E-mail, Productivity

Mail Badger - why stop at just one badge?



Although Mail Badger sounds like a small woodland creature trained to deliver packages, it's actually an OS X app that allows you to add extra badges to the Apple Mail dock icon. For some people, it's good enough to have one single red badge, proudly displaying the number of unread messages from all their email accounts. The developers of Mail Badger didn't want to stop there: why not have a different badge for each account?

Once installed, Mail Badger lives in your Apple Mail preferences. There are a few preset shapes - hearts, stars, circles and the default starburst. You can adjust the color, size and font on these easily, and even upload your own. For power users, Mail Badger will assign a badge for messages that meet search criteria you specify, and it will also badge the results of an AppleScript. This app is definitely worth installing for anyone who keeps mail across more than one folder or account.

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Icon Restore: Save and restore your Windows desktop layout


Ever change your Windows desktop resolution, only to find that all of your program shortcuts, image thumbnails, and other desktop icons have shifted? Changing back to your original resolution doesn't help either. But Icon Restore might.

This handy little freeware application lets you create a snapshot of your desktop layout. Once it's installed, you'll find two new options in your right-click menu for My Computer. One lets you save your desktop icon layout, while the other lets you restore your layout to your most recently saved settings.

There is currently no way to uninstall Icon Restore using Windows' Add/Remove dialog. Instead, you have to download a standalone uninstaller application from the developer's site.

[via gHacks]

Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Internet, Blogging, Web services, Social Software

Automattic acquires Gravatar to help with scaling

Automattic acquires Gravatar to help with scalingAutomattic, the owner of the popular blogging platform WordPress, has announced they have purchased Gravator, a popular avator system used mainly in blog commenting.

Matt Mullenweg, Automattic's founder, announced the details of the deal on the Gravatar blog (now built on WordPress of course), saying that the decision to acquire the company stemmed from scalability issues they were dealing with. Gravatar allows users to keep the same 80x80 pixel image beside their name when they travel from blog to blog, so long as it supports the platform which the new version of WordPress does. Automattic saw this as the perfect fit since they have plenty of experience scaling, and saw a great opportunity with Gravatar believing it closely resembled what had been previously accomplished with Akismet, another one of their products, open API and its ability to be used with any platform.

Since buying the company, Automattic has also made all premium Gravatar plans free, and has noted that avatars are being served three times as fast. Refunds are available for those that had purchased the plans within the past 60 days. Look out for a new Gravatar API to be developed as well, plus get ready to see plenty of pretty pictures in blog comments soon!

Filed under: Windows, Productivity, Open Source

iColorFolder: Color-code your Windows folders

iColorFolderAwhile back I blogged about changing Windows folder icons to make navigation faster. It's a great productivity booster and I've been doing it ever since, but I'm going to have to give iColorFolder a try. Like the folder icons, iColorFolder makes folder navigation in Windows easier, in this case by letting you assign colors to your folder icons, which is done from the right-click context menu. It also lets you assign custom icons and comes with three different icon skins, but it also works fine if you're already using some icon customization/skin tool. Even better, iColorFolder is open source software and takes up little memory.

[Via Lifehacker]

Filed under: Windows, Productivity

Easier Windows navigation with custom icons

Custom folder iconFrom the seems-really-obvious-in-hindsight department comes this Windows productivity tip from Lifehacker: For folders in Windows that you frequently access but spend maybe a little too much time trying to find, give them a special icon to make them stick out. It's as easy as right-click on the folder in question, choosing Properties, hitting the Customize tab, and clicking on Change Icon... Like I said, seems obvious but, well, they thought of it first.

Filed under: Internet, Mozilla

Standardized feed icons

Feed IconMicrosoft's adoption of Firefox's feed icon for IE7 has sparked a lot of activity, and in the interest of standardizing on one feed icon for all web sites and browsers developer Matt Brett has created Feed Icons, a web site where you can download the new "standard" feed icon in every format imaginable. He's also encouraging people to customize feed icons in a variety of colors and will be hosting customized icons starting next month.

Featured Time Waster

Forumwarz - a potentially offensive time waster

I pwn UAfter spending the better part of an hour on Forumwarz I still can't decide if it's just sick or if it's kind of fun. It's a bit like a car wreck on the highway. I know I shouldn't be looking but I can't quite turn away.

It's sick, it's twisted, it's the internet on it's worst level and darn it, it's kind of fun. At least for a little while.

Forumwarz is a parody role-playing game that takes place on the internet - or at least the Forumwarz version of it. Your goal is to complete missions that are given to you through a mock up of GoogleTalk called Sentrillion.

Your first "friend" is ShallowEsophagus who begins giving you missions to pwn various forums by being a troll. Depending on the character type you are assigned at start up, you have tools like drooling on the keyboard or bashing your head on the keyboard that you can use to destroy forum threads and eventually, pwn a forum.

Future missions involve buying illegal software from the Russians, pwning more difficult forums and other internet oddness.

Completing missions gives you cash, called Flezz in game, and items that you can pawn or use in other missions. The game is NOT for those easily offended. It's crass, coarse and there are frequent f-bombs in the fake chat sessions.

This is also a game for a more mature audience as it requires you to shop at the Drugs R Fun store to get various concoctions to improve your playing, engage in certain cyber activities to get more Flezz and just generally use a more adult perspective.

If you can get past that, here are the more enjoyable and time-wasting aspects.

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