While I know there are plenty of good replacements out there for Windows Explorer, I'm not ready to jump ship just yet. I don't really need any really advanced functionality, but there are a few things I'd like to add. Vista-style breadcrumbs and tabbed browsing, for example.

QuizoApps has coded two small extensions that do the job quite well with a minimal impact on resources. Both addons are activated by clicking view -> toolbars in any Explorer window.

The Breadcrumbs addon (QtAddressBar) is extremely responsive and even displays links to subfolders (you can see the arrow off the Adobe folder above).

Brad blogged about using QTTabBar to add an up button in Vista a while back, but it also adds several other tabbed browsing functions. You can create groups to open several tabs at once, clone a tab, merge tabs from another window, undo tab closing, use hotkeys, and it even includes enhanced replacements for Explorer's standard buttons. It even maintains a list of recently closed folders for quick resurrection.

Customization offers tons of enhancements, like grid lines, alternating row colors, minimizing to tray, and a lot more. If you want, QTTabBar will restore your tab previous tab layout on launch - I use it to keep the Control Panel and my Printers close at hand.

These are two great addons for any Windows XP. .NET 2.0 Framework is required.

DM2 looks like any other shell enhancer at first, offering all the expected tweaks: it'll minimize apps to the system tray or to floating icons, hide, align, and change opacity of windows, and roll up windows to the title bar. With DM2, however, that's just the beginning.

Minimize, restore, and maximize just aren't enough options, so DM2 amps them up by letting you add right-click and control, alt, and shift click actions to them via the app's control center. For example, I've set right click on the minimize button to roll up, right click close to send to tray, and shift + right click close hides my window. But wait, it gets better.

One of our beefs with Windows is that there are some pretty obvious customization options missing. Little things, but things we'd use if they were there. Fortunately, NuonSoft's Shell Enhancer packs a bunch of these features into a single 2.5MB installer.

What can it do? For starters, it allows you to "roll-up" windows (display only the title bar), make any window transparent, minimize applications to the system tray, lock them in position, and even force them remain on top.

It doesn't stop there, however. Also included is a wicked hotkey manager; we particularly like the prepacked "Google selected words." Highlight some text in any window, press ctrl + alt +g, and Internet Explorer will open with your results (you can easily rework it to use Firefox, of course). There's also a thumbnail-enhanced task switcher and a taskbar button mover (it's not click and drag, but it works).

Who doesn't want a little more functionality with a dash of eye candy for their Windows shell?

There are plenty of things the Windows shell does really well, but there are other relatively minute details that have been overlooked since Windows 95 that really piss us off - like the ability to click and drag taskbar buttons.

Thankfully, this 600k app that will let you do just that. Taskbar Shuffle is 32-bit Windows-only (it works on all versions, 95 to Vista), obviously, and it gives you free reign over your taskbar buttons and system tray icons. Yes, at long last you can drag them all around to your heart's content.

We first looked at Taskbar Shuffle in 2006, but it's such a simple app with such great purpose that it deserves another look.

There are a couple added features as well, like the ability to middle-click to close a task button or group and tweaking for the "group similar buttons" function. Several improvements have been made since 2.0: settings are no longer stored in the registry, shuffling buttons in a group is possible, and it is now portable (and we love portable).

Of course you're going to give up a few resources, but the cost is minimal. Taskbar Shuffle uses only 5mb of memory barely any CPU. It's a tradeoff we're willing to make to gain some long-awaited functionality.

Search engines don't get much easier to use than Google. You type what you're looking for into a text box, and the web site will spit results back at you. But if you're looking for a slightly geekier experience, you owe it to yourself to check out goosh.

Goosh has the look and feel of a Unix or Linux shell, but the site is powered by Google. If you want to conduct a web search, just enter a search term, like "download" and hit enter. If you want to search Google News you can type "news download" (without the quotes) or just "n download." You can even search Google Maps by typing "place" before your query. For a complete list of commands, type "help."

The site gives you access to a bunch of Google services from a single web page, which is kind of useful. But the site's true appeal lies in the fact that it's incredibly geeky.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

Cairo is an upcoming Windows shell replacement. What exactly does that mean? There are plenty of programs that change the way you launch programs or perform other basic functions in Windows. And Cairo started out as little more than a Windows taskbar replacement. But it's since evolved into a complete replacement for the Windows shell, with a custom file explorer, favorites manager, and live file previews.

In other words, Cairo will be a lot more than a simple Windows skinning program. The shell also changes the way you interact with your data. Cairo is still in pre-alpha, and while you can download a bunch of concept artwork, there's no working version of Cairo available for download yet. But the team plans to release milestone 1 to alpha testers soon.

[via WinBeta]

Earlier this week Microsoft released the final version of Windows PowerShell 1.0. PowerShell, formerly known as Monad, is a powerful text-based command shell for Windows, basically the command prompt on steroids. Though I can't for the life of me find a changelog for the latest version, there's a wealth of information at Microsoft's TechNet web site as well as the official PowerShell blog.

I'm ashamed to say that as intrigued as I am buy Windows PowerShell's powerful syntax, I've yet to really give it a try. Usually when I want to do something complex on the command line I just type up a few lines of Ruby. Microsoft is trying hard to push PowerShell adoption, however, with a script repository and a scripting sweepstakes in which 12 Xbox 360s are being handed out.

The Windows Client team, the division of Microsoft responsible for the user interface in Windows Vista (and previous versions), has finally jumped on the bandwagon and started a blog: Shell: Revealed. The new blog is a place for Microsoft's UI developers to talk about the changes in Vista and communicate with developers and enthusiasts. So far the blog hasn't revealed anything especially stunning, but it does relate the quasi-interesting story of What Happened to List View. They're still getting the hang of this whole blogging thing, but for the Vista-obsessed it's a great addition to the ol' feed reader. (Also, I really dig the little egg logo.)

[Via Slashdot]

The first two fall under "taskbar enchancements," and the last is a nifty new virtual desktop manager. One of my biggest pet peeves in Windows is the management of the taskbar. First, I should be able to reorder the items in the taskbar. Enter Taskbar Shuffle, which allows you to simply drag-and-drop the items as you see fit. What a concept! Now even if I've got Photoshop lined up first (even though it was last, as it took longest to launch), I've still got IE with a dozen little windows minimized, crawling across the bottom of my screen, with no idea what's going on in each window. So I use Visual Task Tips to show me a preview. It's a light shell enhancement that lets me mouse over an item in the taskbar, and it pops up a teensy preview window. That helps more than you may realize until you start using it. Finally, when the taskbar won't cut it, there's always shifting around to different desktops entirely. Dexpot (sent in by Arun K.) is a great desktop manager in a field full of such beasts. Dexpot will manage up to 20 virtual desktops, and it does it quite well. Between these three tools I've significantly improved my workflow because I no longer have to hold things in my own brain as a sort of temporary RAM. Instead, I just dump everything into the computer in real-time, and let the computer manage the data. I can scan through what I'm working on faster as a result. All of these are free, although Dexpot requires a license if you use it in a business environment.

[Taskbar tools found on digg and digg]

Remember Monad, the next-generation command shell that was supposed to be part of Windows Vista? It's still not going to be part of Vista, but development continues and yesterday saw the arrival of the first release candidate. Microsoft has given it a new name, Windows PowerShell (I gotta say I liked Monad and MSH better), and given it its own web site where you can learn how to use it and even its own team blog. You can download PowerShell RC1 from the Microsoft Download Center, but you'll need to get a Passport account if you don't already have one.

[Via Slashdot]

Tactile 3D is another attempt at providing a three-dimensional interface to navigate your Windows computer. The most common 3D paradigm is that of a house or building with many rooms containing objects we would expect to see in the real world: file cabinets, picture frames for photo files and TVs for video files. Tactile 3D takes a different approach, turning everything into a very high-tech computery looking wire-frame interface, where files have their own specific 3D models. It sure looks cool, but from a usability perspective, well... you can judge for yourself.

I'm not sure that a truly usable 3D interface exists yet, or if one truly ever will. But in any event, these types of things are very fun to play with. Tactile 3D has a free trial available, after which it can be purchased for $29.95 USD.