Windows 7 already provides several handy keyboard shortcuts for moving and resizing application windows. If you're running an older version or want a more exhaustive set of commands at your fingertips, take a look at WinLayout.

The free, open source application is built on top of AutoHotkey and adds some serious arrangement kung fu your under-loved numeric keypad.

For its basic moves, WinLayout slices your screen up into a 3x3 grid (think tic-tac-toe board). Hold the Windows key and tap the corresponding key to send an app to that spot on the grid - 7 = top left, 5=center, 3=bottom right, etc.

Windows can also be resized and moved in single-pixel increments. Word of warning: not surprisingly, some commands do interfere with those built in to Windows 7.

Sometimes a really interesting piece of software slips through the cracks here at Download Squad head office, and we miss covering it when it was first released. Sometimes when that happens, it's worth going back and pointing out what we missed. Though it was released back in February, we have somehow up until now neglected to mention the experimental New York Times Article Skimmer, and for that we feel shame.

Silliness aside, the Article Skimmer is an alternative way to experience the New York Times' content online, and in my opinion it is a better analog for reading a physical newspaper than most news websites are offering. Since you can't reasonably display the same amount of information on a web page as you can on a physical page of newsprint, the only way to make scanning for stories more efficient is to optimize the display for that purpose, and that's exactly what the Article Skimmer does.

The interface gives you a simple five-by-four grid that fills the page showing headlines and very short summaries for the top stories in the section that you select. Thumbnail images accompany many stories, and if there are more stories than fit on the page, you can quickly flip forward and back between pages. There are also keyboard shortcuts like the obvious arrow keys that will navigate you up and down through the different sections of the paper, and a couple of less obvious shortcut keys. Holding down the 's' key (for section) will show numbers beside each section -- type the number of the section you'd like to view, and press Enter all while still holding the 's' key to jump straight to that section. Hold the 'a' key (for article) and use the arrow keys to navigate the highlight to the article you'd like to view, then press Enter while still holding 'a'. As always, you'll need a free account with the New York Times to view most of the articles.

The announcement for the Article Skimmer notes that it doesn't yet have an official name, but that its purpose was to try to replicate the feeling of spreading out the Sunday times on a table while maybe eating brunch and skimming through the stories. I think this might be the closest we'll get to the tangible feeling of having a huge amount of articles right at our fingertips only a few inches away from each other.

In a mouse driven world we often forget just how much you can accomplish using only a keyboard. Keyboard shortcuts are a quick and easy way to up your PC productivity, and memorizing a slew of them can be incredibly helpful.

Smashing Magazine has compiled a monster list of 200 keyboard shortcuts for some very popular applications and the Windows OS itself. Worth printing out and saving for posterity.

You'll speed up your work, impress your co-workers and meet incredibly hot women*.

*Incredibly hot women may not be met.

Stephen Mack is director of TiVoCast operations for, you guessed it TiVo. He's also a keyboard shortcut guru. As he points out, the less often you have to reach for the mouse, the less strain you put on the wrist, and the quicker you can get your work done at your computer.

After getting a few requests for keyboard shortcut tips from his coworkers, Mack went and set up a new blog. Sure, there are plenty of places on the web where you can find lists of keyboard shortcuts. But it's nice to just find one new shortcut a day to focus on. It's sort of like flipping through a word a day calendar. You don't become a wizard overnight, but by the end of the year, you've expanded your vocabulary.

There's just a few tips up right now, and they might seem pretty obvious (hit the Windows key to bring up the start menu), but there's a few hidden gems in there. For example, I didn't know you could also bring up the start menu by clicking Ctrl+Esc if your keyboard doesn't have a Windows button.

Mack's list appears to be Windows only, but there are plenty of resources out there for Mac and Linux users.

For power users (read: those of us who sit in front of a computer for 8+ hours a day), keyboard shortcuts can be a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that using the keyboard is much quicker than using the mouse or trackpad. The curse, of course, is repetitive stress disorder, but that's not what this post is about.

If you want to assign a shortcut to a particular task (for me, it's "Crop" in Photoshop), delete a shortcut from a task that you never use, or reassign existing shortcuts, Menu Master is the utility you need. Menu Master comes to us from Unsanity Software, creators of many pieces of shareware near and dear to my heart, such as FruitMenu and WindowShade X (seriously, I don't know how all you people tolerate your windows collapsing into the Dock all the time). Menu Master works with all native Mac OS X applications. Bonus: it's compatible with Intel Macs.

Download the 15-day trial to see if Menu Master suits you; then hand over the paltry $10 if the answer is "yes."

Mihai Parparita of Persistent.info habitually creates some of the best Greasemonkey scripts (like his Conversation Preview Bubbles), especially for Gmail, and on Friday he released a couple more. First is Gmail Macros, a user script that adds some handy new keyboard shortcuts to Gmail, plus makes it possible to define your own multi-action shortcuts. Second is Gmail Label Colors which gives the Gmail labels of your choice unique colors, making them easier to identify at a glance.

[Via Digg]