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Filed under: Business, Developer, Internet, Text, Utilities, Windows, E-mail, Productivity, Microsoft, Freeware, Open Source

Panic Button - support help for the clueless

Panic ButtonRunning the risk of making assumptions about our readership, I'd venture to guess that most of the people reading this blog have been in a position of having to support some of their less computer-savvy friends and relatives with the use of Windows and software in general. If you've ever been in that position, you probably understand the frustration the creator of Panic Button was experiencing when they decided to make this program.

Panic Button is a simple program that sits in a user's system tray innocuously, doing nothing. Where it becomes useful is at the moment where the computer displays an error message that is bewildering to the user. Rather than clicking OK or Cancel on the error and continuing on until they run into more trouble then calling you up and saying "I got some kind of error, I'm not sure what it said. Was it important?", the user simply clicks the Panic Button in the system tray while the error message is on the screen. It takes a screenshot of the error message, then offers the user a simply dialog to type out a brief description of what they were trying to do, and what problem they might be experiencing. When the user clicks Send, the screenshot and message get automatically emailed to a pre-determined email address.

It's so slick and just makes sense.

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Web services

Preview your site in IE7 and Safari on the web

Preview your sites in other browsers - sans the browsers

Need to test some web design on a Mac - sans the Mac? How about making sure your CSS is down up to IE7's standards? Daniel Vine has produced a couple of handy solutions for you: iCapture and ieCapture, for testing how a URL looks in Safari and IE7, respectively. You submit a URL for capturing and, depending on the queue (hey, he's paying for this out of pocket), can then search for a screenshot of the site you requested. The system is a little clunky, and it offers screenshots as opposed to full-blown interactivity, but this could be pretty handy for making sure a few pages at least look the way they should. Daniel is also accepting donations for his work on these utilities, so if you start banking your web design work on them, why not pass the guy a few bucks?

Featured Time Waster

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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