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Check out the above site, there are some amazing free screen savers!
I especially like helios and cyclone, but they are all excellent.
I love it when someone with a passion does this sort of quality work, and then distributes it for everyone to use, it really embraces the sharing concepts of open source.
How bizarre… Scanning my site stats to see where people are coming from and what do I find? Referrals from digg.com, so I follow the link to a story on digg.com about me giving up on digg.com.
But hey! I got digged! How cool! (or did i get dugg?)
To be honest, this is nothing more than an interesting irony. It doesn’t change my mind, I am still not going back.
Digg.com appeared to be one the greatest tools an IT person could use to see what was happenning in the world, what was capturing the attention of others just like me.
For a while (maybe 4 months) I have regulrarly visited and interacted with this social networking community. You know, social networking… the killer app? Web 2.0 and all that.
I guess the bad part about social networking is that it is social however. Humans and the ones interacting with the information on the site, and just like the real community there are good humans and bad humans. Their are nice ones and angry onces, and ones that think they are better than the rest and above the crowd.
So I go to digg last night, hoping to find out something interesting and new and instead of seeing encouraging comment from the IT community I see comment after comment ridicule and bullying.
To be honest, I never posted anything on digg for fear of getting shot down in flames because I didn’t research my posting enough. As an example, I just went to digg and picked a story at random and found a comment like “As if they f***ing will be you retard.”
You don’t have to search hard to find something or someone being flamed! Go look for yourself.
Unacceptable behaviour, disrespectful in fact. Just because you are sitting behind a keyboard doesn’t give you the right to act this way.
Well… no digg, in fact i digg no more!
So every once in a while I find a new favorite song, this time it’s Feel Good Inc. from Gorillaz.
I play it and play it and play it and sooner or later I know I’m going to get sick of hearing it, but that doesn’t matter right now so I play it and play it some more.
I found this song after searching for the openning to the Grammy awards and watching the clip on Yahoo! music.
The last song to fall into this category was Nose Bleed Section from the Hilltop Hoods. Go figure.
So, you’re given 6 minutes to explain your philosophy, your product, the value, the market and your competitive advantage huh? Give me 3 and I’ll get the message across!
The thing that seems to stand out in these demonstrations is the complete lack of pizzazz! Explain to me why the founder of a company is the best person to do a demo. And the thing the annoys me the most about these demos is the way that some of the presenters completely disrespect the audience. Someone last year was quoted as saying “I know you’re really tired but this is really important so pay attention.” WHAT!
Ok, so i’m very critical, but my job is doing product demonstrations. Unfortunately some of these people look like this is the first time they have ever seen the product, let alone done a demo. I know, I know, hundreds of people in the audience etc. But honestly that should make you thrive, not scare you into doing a bad job.
In my opinion if you are passionate about your product and believe that it will actually help the people who choose to buy it then your demo is filled with emotion and interest. If your intention however is to really ’sell hard’ then you might just miss the boat.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the purpose of demo is to show emerging products, that’s not lost on me. I would have expected however that the quality of the demo is up to scratch.
This is the next tool in the ‘hard to find but really useful’ category.
This is one of those applications that I installed and started using from day 1, and haven’t stopped using it. In essence Roboform is a username & password saver, however this is only one capability, it also has a great form filler to save time filling in forms on websites.
Roboform makes this really easy. Basically after it is installed every time you fill in a username and password on a web page Roboform pops up and asks if you want to save the password for next time. Now I only use the unregistered version of the software which lets you save up to 10 username/passwords. However in a way this is good as it makes me think about registering on some website before filling in the details, others may think this is restricting. Regardless the software is cheap so if this bugs you then buy it.
There are other username/password savers available, even a free or open source one i think. The thing I love about Roboform is that it gives you a little icon in your system tray and with one click on this icon i get a list of all of my favorite sites (ones that require a login anyway) and roboform will open a new browser window, navigate to the page, fill in the username and password and then submit the login. Effectively jumping straight to the page I want without having to login, or even type the website address.
Of course when you install you have the option of encrypting your username/passwords with a master password which you are prompted for everytime you go to use Roboform for the first time in the morning. There is also a security timeout feature which simply forces the you to retype the master password every once in a while.
The second thing I love about this is that you can go in and enter all your basic personal details into Roboform and when you hit a website with a registration form, you can hit one button and have roboform fill in all the details for you, coolest thing ever. A huge time saver, especially for your slow typer.
I have my full name, address, email address, phone number and, get this, my default username and password. This means that if i am registering on a website for a login then it will even fill in what I would like my username and password to be.
There are a couple of other things this software does, however I don’t really even use them but I can the value. Firstly it has the ability to generate random passwords for you. If you are really padantic about picking passwords then you can select the complexity of the password, the length etc and have it copied to your clipboard.
In addition to storing all this username/password/personal information it also has the ability to switch personalities. Like many of you I have work life and a home life, so I configure roboform to have a work personality and a home personality. Primarily this means that if I am registering on a site for work it will put in my work address and phone number and email address. If registering for personal, then you get the idea…
There is also a Safenotes function, and although i haven’t used it it lets you save little snippets of text to recall quickly. It has a nice “create a new note from the stuff on my clipboard” function which you might find useful. I don’t you this function instead choosing to use the Notes in Outlook to store this sort of information. Things like IP addresses, phone numbers and commonly used paragraphs would probably be good candidates for this function.
Roboform is available for download from http://www.roboform.com/. The full version costs US$29.95.
This is the next tool in the ‘hard to find but really useful’ category.
I’m not even sure where I found this piece of software, but it must be one of the best free pieces of software available today. If your job requires that you produce screen shots then this is the software you need.
I know, i know, you can create a screenshot without any special software. For those that didn’t know you can just hit the ‘prnt scrn’ button on your keyboard and your screen will be captured and placed on the clipboard, ready for pasting into what ever you want. When I ask people to send me a screen shot of something they are having a problem with, I typically ask them to hit prnt scrn, then paste into a word document and send me the document.
Ok, so back to Screenshot Captor.
There are specifically five things I like about this software:
There are a couple of other nice things, however I don’t use them that much. Firstly as you might expect you can crop a screen shot really quickly, you just drag a selection rectangle then click the ‘crop’ button. After this you then add a shadow to keep it looking nice. I find this shadow function saves time because I don’t have to crop so exactly, cause it still looks good with a shadow.
The other option is the ability for the software to recognise different objects in the captured image (like a window, or dialog box) so that you can just select the object you want to capture AFTER you have captured the full screen. This means you have a lot less planning to do.
Screenshot Captor is available for download from here. The full version costs noth’in, but you need to request a key.
There are some you can pay for that have even more features.
I have just had a chance to play with the new IE 7, at last some features we have been waiting for for ages.
Not only is tabbed browsing now standard and easy to use, there is a cool feautre to enable you to jump to the right tab when you have quite a few open. When you click on the thumbnail icon in the toolbar you get mini screen shots of all fo the currently open tabs! Magic stuff.
I love the way Microsoft take an idea and expand on it to make it even better!
I love the way Microsoft take an idea and expand on it to make it even better!
Again, something we have been waiting for forever. The way this works is that when you visit a site with a feed available IE activates an RSS button on the toolbar. You click on the button and then subscribe to the feed, super simple.
I guess I miss not having this sort of function in something like outlook express but I guess that’s not too far off now.
You can get IE7 from here if you want to install it. The installation was simple, required a reboot, and the download was reasonably small for Microsoft, about 11 mb.
