Comments (0) This post is a great round-up of crucial software for your ever-present USB stick. Whether you go for one of the pre-grouped selections or you prefer to pick and choose which apps you want, there is something here for everyone.
I love to have portable apps as it lets you run things while at work that you would never be able to install on your work PC !
FolderMenu is one of those things that, after a very short time, you begin to wonder how you managed without it. It is very simple – with a click of the middle mouse button, you can bring up a list of regularly used folders. This can be done on many open/save dialogue boxes, proving it to be very useful. If there is an application that is currently uncatered for, it can be added. The only downside is that it can be a little confusing to get it set up – also the website leaves a bit to be desired – it is translated from the original Japanese and so sometimes can be hard to follow. This aside, FolderMenu is well worth checking out.
If you store a ton of things on your desktop (like I do), you are often having to minimise running applications in order to bring up your desktop. Desk Topmost is a little app that, when it is invoked by a shortcut key, it overlays a semi-transparent desktop over the window that you are working on so that you can access the shortcuts, docs, etc. on your desktop.
As the title says – simple, but effective !
For anyone who spends a lot of time on the web (and, if you’re reading this, that probably means you !), you often come across times where you would love to leave yourself a note to remind you of something next time you visited that page.
Now you can with the release of WebNotes. WebNotes is a browser plugin that allows you to highlight words or phrases and to add sticky notes to web pages. All of the highlights and notes are synced to an online account, so you can see them on any web-enabled browser.
It’s free to sign up and use, but if you upgrade to the Pro version, you can upload PDF’s and annotate them online.
This is something that I can imagine that I will use a lot !
Google have released something today that I’ve really been looking forward to – Google Squared. This is Google’s vision for the future of searching on the web. Bear in mind this is a very early Beta, so don’t expect things to work perfectly – they don’t ! But it does give you and idea of the potential of this.
Basically, what they are doing is providing search results in a spreadsheet-style format which allows you to compare relevant criteria all within the same column. You can add criteria that wasn’t part of the default layout and it will add it in for all results. It is essentially providing a structure around unstructured data – something of a Nirvana for web searching.
This is very early days for Google Squared, the possibilities are very exciting. Try it and see yourself. Try some of the example searches on their homepage.
How many times have you printed a web page or an article on the web, only to have it come out completely different to what you intended ?!? If you’re anything like me, probably a ton of times !
Enter PrintFriendly – add this button to your browser and this will be a thing of the past. You can remove things that you don’t want to print so that you only print out exactly what you need. Difficult to describe – try it – it’s very cool !
Take a look at this Lifehacker post – I haven’t really got anything else to add. I use virtually every single one of these programmes and it is the best collection of free software that I have seen. Highly recommended !
One app that I have been using recently and has since turned into being one of those ‘really-can’t-do-without’ apps is Magic Formation. Draw a little circle with your mouse and up pops a circle of icons that can be configured to be whatever favourite applications, websites, documents, etc that you want.
Very simple, but very useful.
If time is running short and you don’t have time to read that great website that you were just loking at, you need ReadItLater. This will allow you to save the page for reading later (odd, that, isn’t it bearing in mind what it’s called !). It will work on any browser and can be synched between browsers. If you are a Firefox user, there is an extension, which allows for one click saving (using a tick symbol in the URL bar), offline reading (so you can catch up on the train journey home), syncing, Google Reader integration and much more.
This is a really useful little utility – very recommended !
p.s. If you use FeedDemon as your NewsReader (which I heavily recommend), you can set up ReadItLater for that. Simply create a blank file through Notepad, add in the following text:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″ ?>
<fdsendto template=”https://readitlaterlist.com/bl?u={url}&;t={title}&h=4993″ service=”ReadItLater” />
and save the file as readitlater.xml
Once the file is saved, move it to C:\Program Files\FeedDemon\Application\Data\SendTo (obviously changing the C:\Program Files to wherever you installed FeedDemon to. The all you need to do when looking at a post that you would like to read later is to click the SendTo icon (the little right arrow) and choose ReadItLater. Magic !
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