While we know a lot of folks like to pan Windows Vista's new graphics as useless eye candy, there are a few aspects of the Aero interface that are actually pretty useful. For example, in Windows Vista you can get a real-time thumbnail preview of running applications by scrolling over the Windows taskbar. But you can get this feature without switching operating systems, thanks to Visual ToolTip, a free application from Chris'n'Soft.

In order to run Visual ToolTip, just download and unzip the file and click on VisualToolTip.exe. The settings menu will open up, but you don't have to configure anything if you don't want to. You can just start scrolling your mouse over your taskbar to see previews of your running applications. You can click on the Visual ToolTip icon in your system tray if you do want to adjust the image size or animations.

Because Windows XP lacks some of the under the hood features included in Vista, Visual ToolTip doesn't show you real-time previews, but it will make a new snapshot every time you mouse over an icon. In other words, if you've got a video playing, you won't see a tiny video show up in the thumbnail. But you should see the frame that was playing when you moused over.

Visual ToolTip also packs a program launcher dock which you can use to replace the Windows taskbar. But there are far better dock applications out there, including RocketDock and ObjectDock if you're looking for a program launcher.

[via Life Rocks 2.0]

You spend hours and hours crafting the perfect video. You upload it to YouTube certain that you'll be famous within a matter of hours. The acting is superb, the editing sublime. Once people click the play button, they'll be blown away.

And then you realize that nobody's ever going to click that play button. Because the thumbnail image for your video is just a blank screen.

Up until now, there was no way to change the screenshot YouTube shows the world to represent your video. Basically, it's a screen grab from about halfway through your video.

But now YouTube has added a new feature to the "Edit My Video" option in the "My Videos" section. While you still can't upload your own screenshot, you can choose from three different images taken from your video. Now go out there and make something that will get noticed.

[via Googlified]

I've long been on the fence about whether seeing a thumbnail picture of a web site actually gives me any useful information about the site, but I know a cool web service when I see it and WebSnapr is pretty cool. It's a service aimed at developers and more technical users that generates thumbnails quickly and easily given a URL like images.websnapr.com/?url=www.example.com. This makes it easy for developers to add web site thumbnails to their own sites and software. WebSnapr has an example JavaScript that demonstrates how to make external links display a thumbnail of the destination site when hovered over with the mouse. As you might expect, capturing those thumbnails takes processor cycles, and as a result thumbnails aren't immediately available--while a thumbnail is processed (which, like most such services, can take awhile depending on server load), WebSnapr generates a "Thumbnail in queue" image instead.