If you've got a mammoth widescreen monitor on your desk and you're a Windows user, you may be wondering what to do with all the extra real estate you've got. Why not use it to visually manage your running applications?
Microsoft Scalable Fabric takes your monitor periphery and turns it into a tumbnail gallery of your non-active windows. After installing the app (which requires the .Net 1.1 framework), the middle of your desktop becomes a hot zone. It's totally customizable, so you can stretch the boundary lines as far to the edges as you like to prevent accidental resizing.
Drag a window out of the zone, and it will shrink, getting smaller as you drag it farther away from the boundary line. Drag it back, and it returns to its restore size. It's even smart enough to remember the position you drag your windows to - click a taskbar button to minimize, and it'll shrink back to it's thumbnailed home.
Oh yeah, there's a little more eye candy inside: minimize and maximizing are animated, albeit somewhat poorly. It's a good way for anyone who heavily multitasks to keep their arsenal of applications at the ready.
Collaborating with a team in an online space has its challenges, Mindquarry wants to make it as simple as possible, yet keeps the productive functionality.
Mindquarry is an online space that allows for the sharing of documents, management of products, and collaboration with team members wherever they might be located. Its four main collaboration tools consist of Teams, Files, Wiki, and Tasks and it works totally in a browser window.
Teams and team members can be analyzed and managed.
Files can be shared and stored online, with a history of change record.
Wiki's can be used to share information or creative ideas, think of it as a blackboard.
Tasks can be assigned to team members, and to-do lists can be checked.
The rich text editing environment provides a space where users can work both online and offline, syncing documents when complete or back online. There are two parts to this application, the online Server, and the Client application. The Server is the collaboration hub that ties everything together and gives a strategic overview of everything that is happening. While the Client is the tool that team members use to connect them to the Server and sync up files and tasks when complete and online.
The free downloadable Mindquarry Go software is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX users. It is available in beta only for now. For a more in depth look at the software, take a look at the User Guide, or this quick video demonstration.
Dan Lurie over at TUAW found a review of BitTorrent clients for Mac OS X a few days ago. Apparently, this inspired Clone Software, Ltd. to stop guarding their secret and release BitRocket (which TUAW promptly found) - an OSS torrent client (in beta) for the Mac that indeed rockets past the competition (zing!).
BitRocket excels because it is refreshingly Mac OS X friendly, right down to the UI and design of the app. On the left side is a list for RSS torrent feeds, and at the bottom of that list is a master up/download panel for keeping an eye on just how much is moving in each direction.
Anyone eager to climb Google's pagerankings - listen up, as Google has just introduced a slew of tools specifically designed to allow webmasters to learn more about and interact with Google's crawling and indexing systems. Complete with a topic-specific blog, this new Webmaster Central service offers tools like a site status wizard (I thought we were getting away from 'wizards' in the industry), statistics, diagnostics and sitemap submission tools, as well as a discussion group and a webmaster help center for good measure.
I took a quick breeze through the offerings in Webmaster Central, and it looks like a fairly comprehensive set of tools. Of course, with Google's typical track record for pricing with similar services, everything under the Webmaster Central umbrella is free, so what are you waiting for?
Web-based project management seems to be all the rage lately, and activeCollab is a great example. A 100% free and open source project that is under 'heavy development', activeCollab 0.6 offers what seems to be the now-standard array of messages, tasks, projects, milestones and documents, along with a tagging system and per-user project permissions. activeCollab's site even includes a list of upcoming features and offers screenshots of a forthcoming 0.7 feature: a much-updated files section.
Of course, this app offers a few advantages over popular web-based project management solutions like Basecamp, including the fact that you can host activeCollab yourself, on your own domain.
If you're interested in learning more about everything activeCollab offers, they offer a helpful screencast and writeup to get you more up to speed without having to install and tinker with it yourself. I personally haven't used this yet, but my web host recently added it as a one-click install, so I'll post a review in a week or so once I move my sites over and have time to get things up and running. In the meantime, why not check out activeCollab for yourself?
37Signals' Basecamp is pretty slick, wouldn't you agree? Tablet PCs, in their own right, have quite the slick factor as well. Wouldn't it be cool if someone, say a small software company called Luckymonk, came up with the idea of combining the two, say with a product called Scout? It sure would!
While Scout isn't quite ready yet, Luckymonk offers a preview screencast of everything that will be possible once it's released. As an added bonus, the company will be releasing their Basecamp API wrapper for .NET 2.0 as well. For now, however, you Tablet PC owners will just have to bookmark Luckymonk's Scout product page under 'ToDo'.
If you've got a mammoth widescreen monitor on your desk and you're a Windows user, you may be wondering what to do with all the extra real estate you've got. Why not use it to visually manage your running applications?
