Little Things, Big Difference
General - 30/6/2006 at 12:42 CET
Over the past month or two, I’ve found and grown to love several small programs, utilities and websites. You know, those little things you just can’t live without once you get used to them. Sort of like the “Show Desktop” shortcut. So spend a few minutes of your time a find out whether you’ll find something for yourself in my short list.
While I’m on the subject of making a difference, typing and coding just isn’t the same anymore, not since I got the Logitech UltraX, so another thanks to Matija and others who recommended it.
StrokeIt
Ever since I tried the SuperDrag&Go Fx extension, I fell in love with mouse gestures. Joen’s post revealed StrokeIt, a great little, oddly named app. I quickly replaced clicking menus to open files and clicking back and forward buttons with mouse gestures. Simply brilliant. Now, whenever I use another computer which doesn’t have StrokeIt installed, I frown and click the right mouse button and drag the damn thing around in hope it’ll somehow pick up the gesture. Get this, you’ll thank me later. You will.
CLCL
Many of you probably wished Windows had some sort of a clipboard manager. I know I did, when I found out what a blessing copy/paste really is. Fast forward ten or more years to 2006, I stumbled upon another one of Joen’s posts and discovered CLCL. Boy oh boy, do I wish I knew about this thingy sooner. Makes life a tad easier.
TaskArrange
Dragan was the one to “blame” for me getting hooked on TaskArrange, a utility that allows you to re-arrange items in the taskbar. Perhaps this doesn’t sound major, or install-worthy at all, but I always wanted to be able to do this. For some reason it’s important for me to have a tidy taskbar, with all the programs in some sort of an order.
Easy Rename
Have you ever wanted to rename like fifty or more pictures (or any other documents for that matter) at once? Sure, Windows can do it, but not very elegantly. Easy Rename does the job, and it does it well enough. While I’m aware it’s an old program (back from 2002, I think) with not much features, it has served me well so far. All I need is for it to change the file names and sometimes extensions, anyway. However, if you’re using some other fine tool for mass renaming, do let me know.
Ungreek Dummy Text Generator
You’re probably saying “hey, we all use dummy text, who doesn’t know about Lorem Ipsum?”. Well, the thing is, it just might be better you try something similar to what is actually going to be used. For instance, I’ve been playing around with a re-design of this place for quite some time now. Occassionaly I fire up Photoshop and tweak stuff. Now let’s say I use “Lorem Ipsum” for my H2’s, which are the post/article/page titles. Is that enough? Probably not… I probably won’t be using two words for every H2 on the site. And I sure as hell won’t be writing any Latin stuff here.
So, something like ungreek.toolbot.com or copy/pasting other real-deal stuff is a better solution.
Stylish Fx Extension
Stylish lets me do exactly what I want — quickly create user stylesheets and apply them to any site I want. I mostly use this to override the a:visited pseudo-class and actually not get lost on some sites I visit frequently. More than enough to make its way on my list of Firefox extensions.
In the meantime I have found a better program than TaskArrange called TaskbarShuffle which I am using now.
As far as batch renaming goes, I use Windows Commander for that, or this “hidden” trick in windows explorer. Either way they both work and you don’t need to install additional software. ;)
Author: Dragan Babić, June 30th, 2006 at 16:18
@Dragan: I’ll give TaskbarShuffle a try.
I’m aware of the explorer trick, I was referring to that when I said it’s not an elegant solution. You don’t really have much control over that. Not enough for me, ayaway :)
Author: Bojan, June 30th, 2006 at 16:49
I’m so going to make you switch to a Mac ;)
Author: Ivan Brezak Brkan a.k.a. Fortius, June 30th, 2006 at 16:55
@Fortius: that’s so not gonna happen :)
Author: Bojan, June 30th, 2006 at 18:00
@Dragan: Oh yeah, TaskbarShuffle is an improvement. It’s more like shuffling tabs in Fx, so that’s a plus. Thnx.
Author: Bojan, June 30th, 2006 at 20:38