Windows-focused
Having bought my first Mac about a year and a half ago one app that I quickly started to love was Growl. It brought a universal notification system to the operating system that any application could make use of, and the cross-program uniformity made the OS experience that much better.

Then came along Growl for Windows, which was something I took a quick liking to once the Prowl iPhone app was released. I wasn’t sure what kind of future Growl had on Windows since we had already seen other apps like Snarl start to fade out despite being updated regularly. It just didn’t catch on for me.

Growl, however, has become something I’ve installed on all my Windows machines. The notifications are clean and prominent, which can be a combination that is tough to come by. Not to mention the fact that there are also a variety of themes available. My favorite is definitely the Smokestack theme pictured above.

The new version 2.0 that was just released supports images in the notifications, can tell an app when a notification is clicked, can forward of notifications to an email address, and much more. And, of course, we can’t forget about the rapidly growing list of supported apps:

• Autotest – Get informed when your tests pass or fail.
• Emacs – Send and receive Growl notifications from within emacs.
• Firefox – Alerts you when Firefox has started, finished, or failed downloading a file.
• Feed Monitor – Alerts you when RSS and Atom feeds are updated.
• Foobar2000 – Get notified when playing starts, stops, or is paused.
• Gmail – Gmail Growl keeps you updated on new mails in your Gmail Inbox in a fancy way.
• Google Reader – Get notified of new feed items in Google Reader.
• Google Voice – Alerts you to new voicemails, text messages, call recordings, and more.
• Google Wave – Get notified of new Waves.
• Growlbook for Facebook – Get notifications for friend requests, messages, pokes, invites, and more.
• iTunes – Alerts you to the currently playing track in iTunes.
• Irssi – Alerts you when your name is highlighted, you receive a private message, and when someone joins/leaves a conversation.
• jWeatherWatch – Get the current weather and forecasts for multiple locations.
• Last.fm – Alerts you to the currently playing track on the Last.fm website.
• MediaMonkey – Alerts you to the currently playing track in MediaMonkey.
• Outlook – Get notified of appointment reminders and when new mail arrives.
• OWATray (Outlook Web Access) – Get notified of new Exchange mail without having to keep an OWA browser constantly open.
• Pandora AIR – Alerts you to the currently playing track in the Pandora AIR application.
• Pandora Website – Alerts you to the currently playing track on the Pandora website.
• Pidgin – Get Growl notifications for all kinds of Pidgin notifications.
• Postbox – Alerts you when Postbox receives new mail or RSS updates.
• Powershell – Send Growl notifications from your Powershell scripts.
• SageAlert for SageTV – Get notified for all kinds of SageTV events.
• SkypeToGrowl – Get notified of incoming Skype calls.
• Songbird – Pops up a notification when the currently playing track changes.
• System Monitor – Get notified of system-type events like low disk space, battery life, USB devices inserted & removed and more.
• Thunderbird – Alerts you when Thunderbird receives new mail or RSS updates.
• TV Browser – Get reminded when your favorite TV shows are starting.
• Trowl (Twitter) – Get notified of Twitter mentions, DM’s, and friends’ tweets.
• Twitulater – Get notified of new tweets and much more.
• uGrowl (uTorrent) – Get notified when torrents are added, start, or finish.
• Visual Studio – Get notified of success or failure when builds complete.
• Vuze (Azureus) – Notifies you of completed downloads.
• Witty (Twitter) – Get of new tweets, @replies, and direct messages. Sends summary notifications if you get too many updates at once.
• Yawcam (Motion Detection) – Get notified when your webcam detects motion, and then view streaming video of the activity.
• Yip – Transform any Fluid or Prism notifications into Growl notifications.

It’s tough to say how this app will pan out in the end, but I think it has a really bright future. Let us know in the comments whether you’ve given it a whirl, and how you feel about it.

Growl for Windows Homepage (Freeware)

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox
Growl Becoming a Must-have App on Windows?

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Windows only
I always find myself using regular expressions (a.k.a. regex) in my programming because they are often the best way to parse out bits and pieces from blocks of text. Ever since I discovered the online RegExr that has been my tool of choice, but sometimes it’s nice to have a dedicated application. Programs like RegexBuddy are awesome, but aren’t free.

When I came across an app called The Regulator I was pretty surprised to see that the developer wasn’t charging for it. Sure it didn’t look as powerful as RegexBuddy, but I had yet to come across a regex program that you didn’t have to pay for. So naturally I jumped in and started using it.

Basically, I’ll say that it isn’t really anything to die over, but the fact that it’s available offline is really a nice touch. You can enter in your regular expression, and then there’s a box where you can place the text that you want to test it with. Or, one of the nice features is that you can also provide the path of a text file that you want to have loaded in and run against the regex you generated. I’d say that it has all of the basic functionality you’d expect from a regular expression tester.

And then I saw that the developer had also created another rather interesting app called ReguLazy. This program, which is also free, tries to generate regular expressions for you. It took me a few minutes to understand how it works, but this can be helpful for anyone new to regular expressions. It will basically let you highlight blocks of text, right-click on them, and choose whether you want it to allow a string of numbers or letters (along with their corresponding length). The downside… this definitely doesn’t let you generate advanced regular expressions, and so it’s probably not something more advanced users will find useful. This animation should give you a better sense of what it’s used for:

The Regulator Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)
ReguLazy Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

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Regular Expression Generator and Tester

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Windows; Mac
Sometimes, Apple sneaks in new features into their software without ever making a big deal out of it. When iTunes 9 was released, they made it possible to add files to iTunes without even launching the app. The secret to this trick not as far-fetched as you might think…

The key to this feature is a subdirectory of the folder where iTunes keeps your data. Depending on your OS, your iTunes library has a different default location:

• Windows XP: \Documents and Settings\your username\My Documents\My Music\
• Windows Vista and up: \Users\your username\Music\
• Mac OS X: /Users/your username/Music

Once you’ve found your iTunes library, look inside the iTunes Media (or iTunes Music) folder to discover a directory called “Automatically Add to iTunes”. Anything you put in that folder will be added to your iTunes library next time iTunes launches. If iTunes was unable to recognize the type of a file you dropped in that folder, it will be moved into a subdirectory called Not Added. Most of you will probably use it strictly for MP3s anyway, so you should be safe.

Taking it a step further: downloading MP3s straight into iTunes using Firefox
If you’re a huge MP3 downloader, you can set up Firefox to automatically download MP3s to the “Automatically Add to iTunes” folder. You can do this by installing Automatic Save Folder and configuring a default download location for MP3 files as shown below.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox
Quickly Add Media to iTunes When It’s Not Running

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Windows only (32/64-bit)
I love the fact that Microsoft gives users a free 25GB of storage for files through SkyDrive, but I think they’re able to do that because they don’t provide an easy way for people to upload things. That way most people will never come close to hitting their 25GB limit, but that may change with the free SkyDrive Explorer app.

As the name implies this will make your SkyDrive account accessible right there in Windows Explorer… exactly what I’ve been wanting. From there you can drag-and-drop files into any of your SkyDrive directories, or copy down files that you’ve already uploaded. Once you’ve uploaded a file or folder you can then right-click on it to grab the URL that can then be used to send to other people you want to share it with. This is perfect for sharing music or photos with friends and family! It’s fast, simple, and makes it so that you never even have to visit the SkyDrive site.

Here’s what you can do with SkyDrive Explorer:

• View the structure and contents of folders in SkyDrive
• View files information (type, size, creation date in GMT format)
• Create new root folders and subfolders
• Copy files into the storage
• Delete files and folders
• Copy files from the storage to the computer
• Copy folders and subfolders from the storage to the computer keeping their structure
• Use Drag & Drop for files operations
• Rename files and folders
• Create links to SkyDrive folders on your computer
• Copy URL of the selected object(s) to the Clipboard

The one downside is a limit of the SkyDrive service itself… and it’s that you can’t upload files larger than 50MB. What would be cool is if a future version of SkyDrive Explorer would automatically split files up into 50MB chunks! It’s an awesome app even without that functionality though.

SkyDrive Explorer Homepage (Windows only; 32-bit or 64-bit; Freeware)

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox
Access SkyDrive in Windows Explorer

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Windows only
You may not know this if you haven’t used Windows XP (or earlier) in a while, but all Windows versions have a killer feature that lets you launch applications quickly without having to install memory-eating launcher apps. Read on to see how you can start typing away in Microsoft Word faster than ever before, and more.

The principle
To launch applications quickly, we’re gonna use Windows’ Run feature. You can bring it up by pressing Windows key + R. Alternatively, you can hit the Start button and click Run (in Vista or Windows 7 you may need to enable this through the Start Menu properties) but I recommend using the hotkey to save time.

The commands
Here are a couple of frequently used commands to get to applications like Firefox, Paint, the Command Prompt and so on. It takes a while to learn these but believe me, it’s worth it.

Arguments
Most of the applications mentioned above take arguments so that you can pass along a file to open. This comes in very handy when I have a URL of a video I want to open in Media Player Classic. To do this, I can type mplayerc http://this/is/a/pasted/url to open the specified URL in my media player immediately.

Creating your own launchers
Of course, this list of commands is non-exhaustive. You can create as many launchers as you want for just about anything including files, folders and URLs. This can be done in two ways. The easiest way is to put shortcuts in C:\Windows\. Whatever the name of your shortcut is will be the command to launch it from the Run window. So if I create a shortcut named ‘prf’ in C:\Windows\ to the Program Files folder, typing the command ‘prf’ in the Run window will bring up that folder.

Now, I can imagine you not wanting to put truckloads of shortcuts in the Windows folder. There is an alternative method involving some Registry Editor witchcraft where you create new registry keys in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths, but doing that is a lot more complicated than creating plain old shortcuts.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox
Speed Tricks: Launching Programs Quickly With Windows’ Run Command

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Is your desktop the digital equivalent of a gigantic stack of unsorted stuff? Perhaps it’s time then to cut through the clutter once and for all and get everything cleaned up. In this article, we’ll help you make it look organized again step by step and advise you on how to keep it that way.

Click to Enlarge

Step 1: delete files you don’t need
Although this is an obvious step, it is essential to the process of cleaning up your desktop. If you’re a big software downloader, chances are that you’ve piled up quite a bit of installers. Go through all of your files and delete the ones you no longer need. Do the same with your shortcuts. A lot of applications drop a shortcut on your desktop you don’t use anyway. If you find yourself using the Start Menu or the Quick Launch bar instead of clicking shortcuts on your desktop, just get rid of them.

Click to Enlarge

Step 2: group files that belong together in folders
Try to put files that have something to do with each other in folders as much as you can. You may discover that some of the folders you’ve created can be grouped together in a folder of themselves. Using folders, you can drastically lower the amount of icons on your desktop.

Click to Enlarge

Step 3: move the folders you’ve just created to My Documents
Storing documents on your desktop is not a good idea if you want to keep the number of icons down. An exception to this rule are temporary documents. In some cases it’s better to leave them on your desktop to remind you that they have yet to be processed. As for the rest of your files: move your newly created folders off your desktop and into My Documents. If you need quick access to some folders, optionally create a shortcut to them but remember to keep the amount of shortcuts to a minimum.

Click to Enlarge

Step 4: download Fences to create groups of files
Back in February, Ryan wrote about a useful little tool from Stardock that allows you to group files on your desktop together. What’s even cooler about this nifty piece of freeware is that it will let you double-click your desktop (or press Escape) to hide all your icons. My advice is to always have this so-called quick-hide mode enabled, except for one or two essential groups that contain stuff like the Recycle Bin or shortcuts to folders you use often. To prevent Fences from hiding a group you’d like to be visible in quick-hide mode, right-click it, go to View and click ‘Exclude this Fence from quick-hide’.

Click to Enlarge

Done!
There you go, your desktop should look a lot cleaner now. In the future, remember to move or delete files on your desktop asap to keep it as clean as possible. Not only does it give you the chance to rediscover your wallpaper, but your files will be more organized too.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox
How to Clean Up Your Desktop

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Windows only
One of the new features in Windows 7 is Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) 7, and Microsoft decided to also offer the most of the same functionality to Windows XP and Vista users. Many of you will probably shrug this off as a pointless update, but it has something that is really useful to me. What is it?

Sometimes I Remote Desktop into one machine, and from there I have to Remote Desktop into other machines. A good example of when this might happen is if you have multiple machines in your house… you may only open one of those machines up so that it can be accessed from outside of your network. If you want to connect to other machines you simply RD into the primary one, and then from there you can access any of the other computers on your network.

The problem? If you use one Remote Desktop session inside of another that yellow/tan connection bar along the top can become tedious to use when juggling your various sessions. The more machines you connect to the more those connection bars overlay each other, and can therefore make it extremely difficult to disconnect or minimize some of the connections. You’ll often find yourself sitting there playing with the pin/unpin until the correct connection bar appears.

In Remote Desktop 7 the connection bar is now an attractive transparent blue, but what’s important is that you can slide it back and forth along the top of the window. That basically means you can stagger the connection bars for multiple sessions so that they aren’t completely overlapping each other. I’m demonstrating this in the screenshot above where I connected to one machine using RD7, and then from there connected to another machine running an older version of Remote Desktop. I’ve cropped the screenshot, but the yellow connection bar is actually in the center of the screen. I then dragged the blue bar off to the side so that it could clearly be seen.

Unfortunately the bar can still only be placed along the top of the screen (you can’t move it to the side or to the bottom), but this is still a welcomed addition. There are also a bunch of other features I’m sure some of you will love in RD7:

• Web Single Sign-On (SSO) and Web forms-based authentication
• Access to personal virtual desktops by using RD Connection Broker
• Access to virtual desktop pools by using RD Connection Broker
• Status & disconnect system tray icon
• RD Gateway-based device redirection enforcement
• RD Gateway system and logon messages
• RD Gateway background authorization & authentication
• RD Gateway idle & session time-outs
• NAP remediation with RD Gateway
• Windows Media Player redirection
• Bidirectional audio
• Multiple monitor support
• Enhanced video playback

New features available only to users connecting from a Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 machine:

• Language Bar docking
• Remote application task scheduler
• Aero Glass support
• Start applications and desktops from ‘RemoteApp and Desktop Connections’

Here are the download links for XP and Vista users:

• Windows XP SP3
• Vista SP1/SP2 32-bit
• Vista SP1/SP2 64-bit

Remote Desktop Connection 7 Homepage

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox
Remote Desktop 7 Download for XP & Vista

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Windows only
I received a tip from Mark over the weekend that NeoSmart had posted their Windows 7 recovery disc ISO images just like they did when Vista was released. These discs are extremely handy to have especially if you didn’t receive any installation media with your new computer, which is a common occurrence when purchasing from a majority of manufacturers including Dell and HP.

Why are these recovery discs useful? They include the most important part of what you can find on the Windows 7 installation disc if you purchase a retail copy of the OS. These recovery discs strip away everything except for the recovery portion, which brings the size down to about 5% of what the normal disc weighs in at. With it you’ll able to do things like restore your computer from a backup, repair the startup, roll back to a System Restore point, run diagnostics, open the command prompt, and more.

I’ve used the Vista Recovery Disc numerous times to fix my own machine when the startup has become corrupt (namely because of installing and uninstalling several different Linux distributions). All I have to do is throw in the CD/DVD, run the Startup Repair, and Windows always manages to diagnose and fix the problem within minutes (example). This is something Microsoft got right in Vista… it’s a recovery tool that shockingly works, and the same functionality has been carried over into Windows 7.

So what do you have to do? Well, you simply download the ISO image below, burn it to a disc, boot your computer with it, and begin the recovery process. Here’s the 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) versions of the recovery tool that I’ve uploaded to MediaFire so that you don’t have to download them through a torrent:

• Windows 7 Recovery Disc 32-bit (x86) – 144MB
• Windows 7 Recovery Disc 64-bit (x64) – 166MB

If you want to download it through a torrent jump on over to NeoSmart where you’ll find the links you need. Thanks again to Mark for the tip!

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox
Windows 7 Recovery Disc

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Windows only
Coming across some free software is nice, but what’s even nicer is finding an app that you typically have to pay for that’s available at no cost for a limited time. Do you like the sound of that? If so you may want to check out the currently free (until the end of October) WinX DVD Ripper Platinum that is being given away compliments of Techweenies.

This software is perfect for anyone who’s looking to convert those DVD formats into a format that can pretty much be played on any device. It includes a lot of pre-configured profiles for things like the iPhone, Zune, and more to minimize the amount of tweaking you have to do.

• Rip DVD to popular video formats as AVI, FLV, WMV, MPEG, MP4, etc
• Rip DVD to popular portable devices including iPhone, iPod, PSP, PDA, Zune, Mobile phone, etc
• Support automatically detecting, connecting and transferring converted videos to portable devices
• Rip DVD audio into MP3 music file
• Support grabbing screenshot from DVD video
• Enable to remove or choose subtitles for output videos
• All video/audio parameters adjustable for users optimizing video quality
• Supper fast ripping speed, up to 300%-500% real time
• Best video/audio quality
• Easy to use and 100% stable

And here’s a more complete list of supported input/output formats:

• Input formats: Normal DVD, CSS protected DVD, region 1-6, Sony ArccOS, Commercial DVD
• Output formats: AVI, WMV, FLV, MP4, MPEG, iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, PSP, PDA, 3GP, Zune, Music, XviD, DivX, JPG, BMP

The software normally runs $25 (which appears to be an “on sale” price marked down from $50). What I love is that the version you download through the giveaway page doesn’t require a serial number or anything like that. Just install it and you’ll have the full version. And you can reinstall it on your computer whenever you want.

I’d say you should grab it before October 31st regardless of whether you plan on using it right away. That way the next time you have to rip a DVD you’re not stuck scrounging around for an app that can do it.

WinX DVD Ripper Platinum Giveaway (Windows only; Free until October 31st)

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox
Free WinX DVD Ripper Platinum

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A few weeks ago a lot of sites were writing about a web developer program from Microsoft that provided web-related software at no upfront cost. When you end your membership you will, however, have to pay a $100 fee. If you look at the overall value of the software you’ll see that it’s still worthwhile.

There’s another program that Microsoft offers which is an even better deal if you qualify… BizSpark. It’s targeted for small businesses that have been around for less than 3 years, make under $1 million a year, and are privately held. Once you get in you’ll have access to pretty much all the software Microsoft makes including all versions of Office 2007 (Ultimate, Professional, Enterprise, etc…), all versions of Windows 7 (Ultimate, Professional, Home Premium, etc…), all versions of Vista, and so on. You’ll basically get a full retail MSDN subscription.

Here’s a more detailed list of the requirements:

• An eligible startup must have the following characteristics at the time of joining:
  • Actively engaged in development of a software-based product or service that will form a core piece of its current or intended business
  • Privately held
  • In business for less than 3 years
  • Less than US $1 million in annual revenue
• To be eligible to use the software for production and deployment of hosted solutions, startups must also be developing a new “software–plus-services” solution (on any platform) to be delivered over the Internet. To meet this requirement your software must:
  • Add significant and primary functionality to the integrated Microsoft software
  • Be owned, not licensed, by you

After you apply it should take about one business day to get accepted (they’ll send a confirmation email to you). Once you’re in you’ll be able to enjoy 3-years of Microsoft software, and similar to the web developer program you’ll have to pay a $100 fee when you exit the program. That’s a heck of a deal for all of the software you get access to.

BizSpark Homepage
Thanks Chris for the details!

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox
BizSpark Provides a 3-Year MSDN Subscription for Small Businesses

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