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Filed under: Windows, Freeware

Taskbar Shuffle Tweaks Your Windows Taskbar

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.

Filed under: Business, Developer, Text, Utilities, Windows, Blogging, E-mail, Office, Productivity, Microsoft, Freeware

Send to Notepad

SendtoNotepadAlthough I'm always a fan of simple utilities, this one may be a touch too simple. Send to Notepad is a tiny little application that sits in your system tray, using the typical Notepad icon from Windows. When you want to copy text to an instance of the Notepad, you simply copy the text you want to copy, then double-click on the Send to Notepad icon in the system tray. Poof, it opens a copy of Notepad and dumps the contents of the clipboard there.

Although I can see that this could be a useful application, I wish it had a few other usability features. For example, the ability to paste to Notepad using a shortcut keystroke would be useful. Also, it should be able to detect when you've got text highlighted, negating the need to actually copy the text to the clipboard before firing off the Send to Notepad functionality.

Even still, this could be a useful utility to have in your arsenal.

Note: I had difficulty viewing the Send to Notepad site in Firefox; for some reason it didn't detect that I had the Flash plugin installed. It opened fine in an IE Tab in Firefox, though.

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Productivity, Web services, Yahoo!, Freeware, Social Software

Deliwin: access your del.icio.us bookmarks from the system tray

Deliwin - del.icio.us bookmark menu for Windows
As a Mac OS X user, I've written about Delibar, a del.icio.us bookmarks menu for the menubar, over on TUAW a few times now. But wouldn't it be great if somebody ported it to Windows, so PC users could join in on the fun?

Ask and ye shall receive, boys and girls. Deliwin is a Windows port of Delibar, allowing access to your del.icio.us bookmarks via the system tray. One of the nice features of Delibar/Deliwin is that these apps will obey a tag hierarchy; the first tag on a bookmark will be displayed as its top-level directory, while the second tag will act as a sub-directory. This might cause some del.icio.us users to retool the way they tag their bookmarks, but I welcomed the change and quickly became used to the advantages this brought to my tag labeling and organization paradigms.

Deliwin is donationware and available from the author's site.

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So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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