Description: Framework detector is a free no-install utility that provides information on the version(s) of the .NET Framework your computer has installed, if any.

Let’s face it: figuring out which .NET framework version your computer supports can be somewhat confusing. For example you download a program that requires .NET 1.1 and it will not run, even when know for certain that another app which uses another version of .NET works just fine - but which version of .NET do you have installed. With Framework Detector the confusion is gone; simply run and it will display a list of .NET Frameworks and tell you which ones are installed, if any. More info as follows:

• List: displays installed components in green, non-installed components in red.
• Portable: unzip and run; does not need to be installed.
• Information provided: if a component is installed, it will display both version number and service pack.
• Other info: displays information on components labeled WCF, WPF, WF, and Card Space. Not sure what these are (let us know in the comments section if you do).

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Description: StickySorter is a free sticky notes program that introduces a number of innovations such as the ability to cluster stickies in groups, the ability to define fields, the ability to import and save notes into CSV, the use of the front and back of the sticky, and others.

This is a unique desktop sticky notes program from Microsoft Office Labs that it is primarily concerned with enabling the user to organize and work with their notes rather than simply to display them on the desktop. StickySorter, in fact, does not place notes on the actual desktop at all but rather creates a kind of virtual desktop that you can expand and navigate (zoom in and out of, pan) at will. What you end up with is an infinite workspace that, unlike your actual desktop, will let you keep adding notes as you need to and will never run out of real estate.

The other unique aspect of StickySorter is the concept of sorting notes into clusters of meaningful groups. This is a very basic concept that we do all the time (think of the icons on your desktop, for example), but in StickySorter this is built in such that you can drag and drop notes across groups, and you can automatically pile/stack/tile notes etc. (see image to the right). Here are more notes on this program:

• Define fields: StickySorter allows for defining fields inside your notes; for example title, description, rating, URL, etc. This is especially useful for importing/exporting notes (see below). Note that some fields can be invisible (useful when importing notes from, say, an Excel sheet where you do not want all the information displayed on your sticky).
• Use back of sticky: you can use the back of the sticky to store information. For example the front of the note can contain the names of websites or software of interest that you want to check out while the back can contain the URLs. Another example: the front can display the description of a website widget or HTML element while the back can contain the messy code itself.
• Import/Export: this program is designed read/export information stored in CSV files (which can be easily created in Excel or Access, for example).
• The infinite canvas: StickySorter will allow you to zoom out, pan your view across the screen, and place/organize your notes across a large area. See image to the right for an illustration (zoomed out added a single sticky in the bottom right area, some distance from my main cluster of notes).
• Formatting notes: you can increase/decrease notes sizes, change colors, and organize them manually or automatically pile, stack, or tile them. Read more »
  

Description: Q-Dir is a free file management / explorer replacement program with a light footprint and a nice set of features. It integrates very well with Windows’ desktop environment and employs an innovative interface that makes it very easy to work with multiple file panes. Can be run portably from USB.

I’ve tried a great many freeware dual pane file managers and I will say that this nifty little program has three main strengths: (a) it manages to deliver a number of essential file management options while managing not to suffer from feature overload, (b) it features an economical-looking interface that is quite intuitive and provides an excellent user experience, and (c) it is very quick and responsive.

Here are my top EIGHT favorite features that Q-Dir provides:

1- Manage your files across multiple panes: all programs of this type offer this, but Q-Dir gets the prize for most intuitive implementation whereby it allows you to select the arrangement of panes that you want by clicking on small icons in the toolbar. The Q Dir people deserve credit for this interface which works extremely well.

2- Access frequently used folders (quicklinks): you can have instant access to your favorite folders and organize them within a folder structure. Note that this is different from saving ‘favorites’ (see next point).

3- Save “Favorites”: as in, save a view comprising multiple folders across a particular distribution of panes. So let’s say that for a project you like to work with the “deskop” folder in the left hand pane and two panes on the right hand side showing “Folder A” on top and “Folder B” on the bottom; Q Dir allows you to save this entire configuration as a favorite. You can also save this as an object on the desktop, whereby double clicking this file will immediately open all of these folders in the configuration they were saved.

4- Filter box: you can access a filter box in the lower right hand corner of each pane in order to hone in on a file or group of files that you want to work with. The version I reviewed recently implemented an “always wildcard” option whereby anything you type is wildcarded (i.e. type in .mp3 and the program assumes *.mp3*) - very cool.

5- Installs an “open with QDir” shell extension: optional (see screenshot). From the “Extras” menu go to “System” then check “Add Q-Dir to the shell context menu”.

6- Works very well as a direct replacement to Explorer: I am now using Q-Dir in place of the default Windows Explorer and am extremely happy with it. Like Windows Explorer you can set Q-Dir to open to a single pane by default and to list the folder name in the title bar. One thing to consider, though, is that Q-Dir takes up approx 10-12 megs in memory, and opening multiple windows will launch multiple instances of the program whose overall memory use can add up.
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Description: Ammyy Admin is a free remote computer access tool that offers quick, easy, and reliable connections with nothing to install, no accounts to sign up for, and no technical configuration or messing with IP addresses and routers. It offers file transfers and desktop sharing, and can be used to connect with unattended machines.

I’ve written about remote access/desktop and file sharing programs similar to this in the past, but this one has the distinction of being the simplest and lowest-involvement in terms of the steps required before getting connected.

Have you ever been on the phone (or IM) with someone and wished that you could see their screen and/or access their computer or that they could see yours? I recently was helping a friend set up a Google Adwords campaign for his business and needed him to see what I was doing on my screen; however, I wanted something quick that would not require us to waste a lot of time registering accounts, installing software, and then spending more time trying to configure it on both ends. Ammyy Admin would have been perfect for such a situation. More notes on this program as follows:

• Ease of connecting: both users need to run Ammyy Admin, a 128K no-install
  executable. The program will display ID numbers for each machine. To access the other PC you will need the ID number provided on the other side; it’s literally as easy as pressing a button (on both ends). There are no accounts to register, no messing with IP addresses, no ports or routers to configure. The ID seems to be fixed per machine rather than per session, which means that, for example, your PC at home will always have the same ID and can always be accessed at will.
• Services: screen sharing, remote access of windows and applications, and if file system access is enabled, file sharing as well. For file sharing the person who is accessing the other machine can copy files back and forth straight to the hard drive of the PC being accessed.
• Performance: was actually quite good in that it got the job done competently, although other solutions I’ve written about (e.g. GBridge, Remobo) seem to offer faster performance overall.
• How it works: Ammyy Admin accesses public routers, but offers you the option to use private routers if you prefer. For the latter you will need to download and use Ammyy Admin’s sister product called Ammyy Router. Unlike some similar programs Ammyy Admin is not browser based.
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Description: Tidy Favorites is a free extension for Internet Explorer and Firefox that allows users to manage bookmarks visually as thumbnails that can be dragged and resized on a workspace, similar to icons on a desktop. It offers the ability to organize favorites within combination of tabs and folders, and provides a “drop stack” for quick, temporary bookmarking of URLs that you might want to check out then dispose of afterwards. Tidy Favorites can be installed portably.

If you are looking for a better way to manage favorites than the default bookmarking process that Internet Explorer and Firefox provide, check out Tidy Favorites. This program combines four concepts that make it much easier and more practical to work with your saved URLs, as follows:

1. Thumbnails: a bookmark is added as a visible thumbnail of the website, making it much more intuitive to work with (and much more pleasant) than the standard text link. Thumbnails can be resized manually at will and placed in the location that makes sense to the user.
2. Organize into tabs or folders or both: Tidy favorites provides a customizable workspace that can accomodate both tabs and folders, in effect providing a “3D” organizational structure where each tab can contain it’s own set of folders. This is much more flexible than the default 2D hierarchical structure that the browsers use.
3. Drop stack: this is an area to the right of the screen where URLs first appear (in thumbnail form) when you bookmark them. You can either drag and drop your new thumbnails into the proper tab or folder or simply use the drop stack as a temporary area for web pages that you want to look at at some convenient point in time but not add to your bookmarks collection.
4. Centralized bookmarking across browsers: Tidy Favorites works interchangeably in IE and Firefox both: if you use both browser your URLs that are saved in one browser will also instantly appear on the other.

More notes on this program as follows:
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Description: exTray is a free iTunes plugin that brings pop-up album art, track information, and iTunes controls to the tray menu. It also optionally provides iTunes and volume controls via keyboard hotkeys, and provides a function whereby you could export your track ratings, playcounts, and last play dates and import them into another machine.

I really like to see album art popups on screen (preferably in the system tray area) that show at-a-glance the track that’s currently playing . I find this feature to be a curious omission in iTunes. Regardless, exTray provides this and does a very good job! Here are more notes on this software:

• Desktop popups: you can get album artwork popups, track info popups, or both, and can make any or both of these “sticky” or fade them away a few seconds after showing up. Additionally, ExTray also provides a “Float Art” option; this one floats an album art image on screen (in it’s original size) that the user can move around or manually close (I didn’t care much for that one, to be honest).
• exTray in the system tray: aside from controlling the desktop popup behavior, the system tray icon is similar to the iTunes icon in that it can launch iTunes, toggle next/back/shuffle, can access your playlists (see below) and can be used to assign ratings to tracks. Note: you might want to remove iTunes’ icon from the system tray to save space, since exTray most of the things that iTunes’ system tray icon can do anyway.
• Keyboard hotkeys: you can use exTray to assign keyboard shortcuts to do the following: play, pause, next, back, rating up, rating down, and album art popup. Works well, although I personally wish that (a) you could enable a subset of these hotkeys at will rather than all or nothing, and (b) that a combination of special keys could be used to activate (e.g. CTRL+Shift) rather than just one (currently gives you the choice to activate using CTRL, Shit, and Alt).
• Customizability: exTray is highly customizable, from the background used for the popup messages to the position on screen, height, width, delay, scroll delay, scroll direction and font used, etc.
• Playlists: you have to enable this in the “advanced” tab, but once you do you can have scroll through and access your playlists from exTray’s icon in the system tray. Read more »
  

Description: Photology is a free image management program designed to navigate large image libraries and find images without the need for tagging or for organizing by folder structure. Instead, Photology scans all images and applies a number of innovative filters such as faces, color, location, time of day, exposure, etc. to find results.

This program’s slogan captures exactly what it’s about “No tags. No folders. It just knows”. It is designed for users who may have a huge, untagged, messy image library and need some way to quickly filter through it and find the images they are looking for.

To evaluate whether this program succeeds at what it sets out to do, imagine the following scenario: you have tens of thousands of photos on your drive, but you are looking for one specific one. Say it’s the picture of your nephew that you took of him when you visited New York in August, where as a joke he was wearing dark sunglasses and a hat indoors and looked like one of the Blues Brothers. Except unlike the Blues Brothers he was not wearing a black suit but rather - you seem to remember- an orange shirt or something like that (see the “hypothetical” image below).

Let’s assume further, for the purposes of this review, that you do not download your pictures into any organized folder structure, that you stick with the generic naming scheme your digital camera provides (something like “DC12345″ which does not seem to refer to anything), and that you do not rename or otherwise tag your files once they are donwloaded.

Photology is a program that is designed to find images based on exactly the kind of information available in the example above. I will come back to this example below in the “verdict” section, but for now here are more notes on this program:

• How it works: Photology scans user defined folders on your hard drive recursively (e.g. “My Pictures”, “Desktop”, etc.) to identify and “read” your images. Next it allows you to apply a number of filters to your image library in order to hone in on the image(s) that you seek
• Available Filters: there are 7 groups of filters as follows: time of day (morning/afternoon/evening/night); date (by month, year, or both), features (overexposed/underexposed/vertical/horizontal/in focus/out of focus/black & white/monotone); location (indoors/outdoors); content (plants, sky, faces, beach, flowers, snow, sunset, water); text (a search box similar to most image management programs that looks at file and folder names and - I assume - tags as well); and color (allows you to select from a color wheel of sorts, and finds images where that color is significantly represented).
• Using multiple filters: filters can be “stacked” in order to filter multiple criteria. For example say you are looking for a friend’s black and white portrait you could start with applying a “black & white” filter from the features group, and next, say, filter those results in turn by a “faces” from the content filters, eliminating all images without faces, etc. Overall you can use up to a maximum of six filters together. Note that the active filters are displayed in a column near the right edge of the screen, and that any single filter can be removed by simply clicking on it.
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Description: AltDrag is a free, small utility that provides the ability to move a window by clicking anywhere on it while holding down the Alt key, as opposed to having to click on the title bar. It also provides snap-to-edge functionality in relation to other windows or the sides of the screen when moving the window while pressing Alt+Shift.

For those of us with Linux envy, this program brings to Windows a function that Linux users have had for a while. More notes on this program as follows:

• Moving windows: you can move any window by simply pressing Alt and clicking the mouse button when it is placed anywhere over the widow. Note that Alt+clicking windows that are maximized will minimize them, while full screen windows such as games are unaffected.
• Snapping windows’ edges: pressing Alt+Shift when moving a window (or just shift if moving a window normally from it’s title bar) will cause the window to snap to the edges of other open windows or the edges of the screen.
• AltDrag in the system tray: the AltDrag icon in the system tray allows you to enable/disable it, hide the AltDrag system tray icon (inwhich case running the executable will make it re-appear afterwards if needed) and also enables you to toggle starting AltDrag on system startup.
• Memory use: approx 4.8 megs. Not a lot, but seems like it could have been smaller.
• Installation: no install needed; simply unzip and run.
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Description: RBTray is a free, lightweight app that provides minimize-to-tray functionality for any open window by right clicking the bottom right corner of the window’s "minimize" button. Alternately you can minimize to tray by right clicking anywhere on the title bar and using a context menu that also provides "always on top", and Window resizing functions.

First off let me note that the version of this program that I am reviewing here is a modified version of the open source program with the same name that I downloaded from this site. More notes on this program below:

• What it does: minimize-to-tray on demand, from the title bar.
• How it works: does not install any buttons on the title bar; rather, it can minimize to tray by right-clicking the lower right corner of the minimize button (see screenshot above) or through a context menu that appears on right-clicking anywhere on the title bar (see image to the right).
• Memory use: is very small. Memory use seems to vary across a range, 500K to approx 2 megs.
• No install: simply unzip and run. To have the program start with Windows you will need to add a shortcut to the startup folder manually.
• Other functions: "always on top", and a rather puzzling "my size" function which on my machine resizes any window to 1584×948, apparently without giving you the option to customize that size.
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Description: QwikTulz is a free Explorer extension that can add a number of interesting functions to Windows’ right-click context menu, including save directory to ISO image, convert folder to drive, open with custom text editor, view/save/check MD5 Hash, convert across BAT/COM/EXE files, copy path, open DOS prompt, and others. It also offers standalone or command line options for some of these , such as the ISO creation, MD5 Hash functions, and EXE/COM/EXE conversions.

I’m always in the market for cool and interesting functions to add to the right-click context menu. If you are like me you might want to check out QwikTulz, a context menu enhancement that offers an interesting range of context menu functions, from the standard “copy path to clipboard” and “DOS prompt here” to the rather unusual (and to me more interesting) “Save Directory to ISO image file” and “Convert Directory into new drive”, with a smattering of other functions in between. Here are more notes on these:

• Mix and match functions: you can pick only those functions that you like and want to use; simply check/uncheck as appropriate (see image to the right).
• Dos prompt here/Windows Explorer here/New Folder Here/Copy Path to Clipboard: self explanatory, I think.
• Convert Directory into new drive: this will create a virtual hard drive volume in “My Computer” that contains the files from the directory that was used to create it. You can both read and write to this new drive, and can specify the drive letter on creation; however it does NOT survive a reboot. If you are interested in creating “permanent” drive shortcuts from folders check out Visual Subst.
• Save directory to ISO: very useful if you need to convert folders to ISO images frequently, on the spot. I personally use Imgburn to do this when I need it but this function gets a nod for being one of the most original I have seen in a context menu for some time. Note: you can also run the standalone utility QwikISO - installed with QuikTulz - that provides this function as well (see image to the right).
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