Description: ThumbWin and miniMize are two free memory resident apps that allow you to minimize open windows and programs to the desktop as thumbnails. You are then able to maximize and access these windows/apps again by clicking on the thumbnails on the desktop.

I’ve been looking at these two programs and finding it difficult to determine which one to write about, therefore I decided to post a comparison of both.

Summary of results I will be using miniMize because it is more reliable (ThumbWin fails to maximize some thumbnails, while miniMize always does). However I generally prefer the way ThumbWin behaves in relation to the desktop and the fact that it will shuffle thumbnails around whenever you maxminize a previously minimized window, and will keep my eye out for future versions.

What both of these programs do is create a thumbnail of your windows/apps on the desktop when you minimize them. These apps have undeniable coolness factor that can enhance the user experience, which is why many will be attracted to them (and which is evident from looking at the screenshots). Users who like to customize Windows will love these; in fact the reason I decided to try these two programs out in the first place was that because I was experimenting with Windows shell replacement programs (e.g. Emergedesktop) and in that context found them to be both pretty and useful.

Having said this I will also say that while it may be more practical or intuitive to be able to see desktop representations of your minimized windows, these thumbnails will in many cases compete with the icons on your desktop for real estate, and if you have a cluttered desktop to begin with may contribute towards busying it further, which is something to bear in mind.

The following is a point-by-point comparison of these two programs:

Interactivity: you can drag and drop the thumbnails freely and place them exactly where you like them on both programs. Thumbnails can be set to maximize on click or double click for both, and you can right click on a thumbnail and close or restore windows from the context menu.

Placement and behavior: both of these programs allow you to set the corner of the screen and direction that they will minimize to. Differences are as follows:

• miniMize: will not refresh once you close windows out leaving "gaps" on the desktop where thumbnails once were. Further, for some reason miniMize will invariably start minimizing windows in what seems like random placements on the screen, forcing you to drag thumbnails around in order to get things to look tidy. The placement of thumbnails can be a little off.
• ThumbWin: will "refresh" and actively scroll minimized thumbnails towards the starting corner when others are closed out, as is the better of the two in terms of organization and streamlined behavior.
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You might have noticed that I’ve not been able to post for a few days. The company I work for flew everyone in the office from Seattle to NYC for a company function on Thursday, and it was an opportunity to take my wife and kids along for a long weekend in the big city.

I figured since I already had a couple of half-written reviews, that I might be able to steal the time here or there (on the 5 hour flight for example, when my two kids might be asleep) to post a couple of reviews. Needless to say it didn’t happen. I didn’t even have the time to check my email. I’m realizing that it takes quite a bit of time effort to find interesting software, test it out, and write about it, etc.

Can you write these reviews? if you think you can write reviews in the format you see here on Freewaregenius, and if you would like to do it, send me an email and let me know. Not only will you become, um.. famous, but I could also offer a monetary compensation and/or link to your site if you have one.

Description: This posting will present a number of free options that can provide access and/or allow surfing of sites that are blocked by a corporate firewall or by your Internet Service Provider. Options presented are (1) using a proxy service site, (2) Web2mail (3) getting internet from your home machine via VPN, (4) using an internet anonymizer, and (5) using Google.

Have you ever been in a situation where you where prevented access to certain sites on the internet because you were behind a company firewall or because of a restriction imposed by your Internet Service Provider? If so, you might be able to use the solutions provided below as a workaround.

Although I’ve been asked variants of the question "how do I surf blocked sites from my job" often enough to decide to investigate some potential solutions, let me begin by saying that I present these without experience in a restricted internet situation myself and therefore can not attest to the efficacy of the solutions below.

1- Use a Proxy service site: such as hidemyass.com, can’t bust me, or anonr.com. Many of these sites in fact all belong to the same network and work in the same way: they will act as a go-between between you and the sites you want to access.

The easiest way to find these is to search Google for "proxy service sites" or a similar keyword. Once you are able to access one of these sites you will find an address box where you can enter the URL for the site you want and the proxy site will grab the content for you and present it within the proxy site URL, allowing you to surf your desired content while its actual URL is being masked by the proxy site. Note that some of these sites will also provide anonymous internet surfing by disguising your IP address and location info.

Click on the image to the right for a list of some proxy service sites. Bear in mind that your corporate firewall or ISP may have already blacklisted some proxy sites, preventing you from accessing them. In this case you might simply search for some new ones that may have not been blacklisted or considering another solution.

2- Web2Mail: this is a free service that works as follows: send a blank email to send[at]web2mail.co.cc with your desired site URL as the subject. After less than a minute the Web2Mail service will send you an email that contains the web page you requested in HTML format, which you can read in your email client.

As you might imagine, "browsing" your desired site using this service involves receiving the initial email, clicking on a link on that page that most likely be blocked in your browser but that you would use as the subject line in another email to Web2Mail, and repeating. Not the highest quality surfing experience, but will work in a pinch.

One thing I might add: the Web2mail servers are at times unresponsive and there was a point when I was testing it a few days ago and having my emails sent back to me. Since then the issue seems to have been fixed and it is working just fine.

3- Get internet from your home machine via VPN: this stands for Virtual Private Networking. If you are behind a restrictive company firewall you can in most cases set up a connection to your home PC and get unrestricted internet through your home connection. You might want to signal to your network admin that you are doing this; it should not be much of an issue in most settings (you will not need any technical intervention from your network guy to set a VPN up necessarily).

There are many free VPN software options: OpenVPN (and GUI version, pictured above), UltraVNC, TightVNC, LogMeIn Free, and Windows’ own built in VPN. This post is not intended to be a tutorial on how to set this up, but if you search the internet you will find a lot of further information on this. If you know of a good tutorial or tutorials on this please post them in the comments.
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Description: WinExt is a free horizontal bar docked to the top or bottom of your screen that can give access to your files, folders, and programs as cascading menus or as shortcuts placed on the bar itself. It also offers an optional “infobar” with status indicators for CPU, memory, battery, and hard disk drive usage.

There are many ways to get access to your favorite folders, files, and apps, and WinExt can do this in the form of a docking bar that can be placed topmost on your screen or on the bottom above the Windows taskbar. What the screenshots might not at first convey is the depth and versatility of this program, and the extent to which WinExt allows for customization. Here are more notes:

• Folders on the WinExt bar: you can do 3 different things with folders placed on the bar; (1) create a cascading menu from a folder; (2) place a folder icon on the dock itself that you click on in order to open that folder in Explorer; and (3) place a so-called expanded folder, whereby the contents of the folder are displayed as clickable icons on the bar itself (as for example the contents of the quicklaunch folder in the screenshot). Personally for many folders I like to put up both a folder icon that opens the folder itself as well as a cascading menu from the folder right next to it.
• Always visible: WinExt will “nudge” your desktop down, so to speak, and Windows will maximize such that they will touch the bottom of the bar so that it is always visible.
• The infobar: an additional bar that is placed adjacent to the original and contains gauges that display status indicators for CPU, memory, battery, and hard disk drive usage, etc. I don’t care much for this, personally, but I can see how it can be useful (I use Systraymeter for some of these and am very happy with it).
• Customizability: WinExt is highly customizable; however, I will also say that the interface used to tweak and change the settings is not very user friendly and, in my view, is a lot more work than it could be (why can’t I just go into some sort of edit mode and right click on elements to change them?) It will take some work to get this app configured exactly the way you want it.
• Skins: comes with 2 skin choices (pictured in the thumbnails on this page). Customizable variables include alpha blending, changing the color of every single element, etc. Keeping my fingers crossed that more will be provided in the future.
• Hotkeys: comes with a system-wide hotkeys manager that can launch a file or maximize, minimize, or close windows. I honestly couldn’t figure out how to get it to work, but didn’t try that hard as I am not that interested in this functionality personally.
• Marquee: the right hand side of the bar can display information such as the time, memory use, battery consumption, Winamp track information, etc. It will scroll these in succession, and you can click to scroll through the different messages. The kind of info displayed is customizable and you can switch it off altogether if you like.
• Memory consumption: consumes a rather large 30 megs of memory.
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Description: Stitcher is a web service that brings together a number of internet radio news podcasts, creates virtual stations by topic, and allows users to customize stations and bookmark favorites, etc. Stitcher is also available on the iPhone.

The principle behind this site is rather simple: bring together a number of quality internet radio news sources in one place, organize them by topic, and allow the users to customize and personalize them. Here are more notes on this service:

• Radio news providers: as of this writing they offer a very respectable list which includes ABC, Associated Press, BBC, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, CNET, CNN, Cosmopolitan, ESPN, Fox, Financial Times, NBC, NPR, The New York Times, PBS, People Magazine, Reuters, TechCrunch, The Onion and The Wall Street Journal.
• Account creation: you can use Stitcher without registering for an account (which requires a valid email); however you will need one in order to customize stations, save favorites, or use it on your iPhone.
• A “social” service: you can give a news item a thumbs (this helps influence the items that Stitcher serves you in the future). You can also bookmark a news item as a favorite or quickly email/share it with a friend.
• Beta release: this service is still in beta and in my opinion the user interface needs to evolve significantly (see the ’playlist’ section in the ’wish list’ below for more).

In a way, you can create something similar to Stitcher using a local podcasting client where you set up and download podcasts from your favorite internet radio news providers, however, there are reasons why you might want to log into Stitcher instead, as follows:

• Browsing by topic: each topic (or “channel”) seems to be organized around a set of “keywords”, and the user is able to edit these or add to them in order to change them or create custom channels. Although having the topics is cool, I am not quite sold on the value off adding keywords to topics, and it is not explained on the site. Also, strangely, it does not seem that you can create your own topics from scratch (am guessing that this is just because it is still in beta?).
• Serendipity: i.e., the possibility of discovering some cool radio show that you wouldn’t necessarily have known about before.
• Search: search across all of Stitcher’s radio news providers for something specific that you are seeking. Very cool, but the results found for some of the searches I attempted where at times underwhelming.
• Iphone support: if you have an iPhone, you can log into your account and access your favorite channels and radio news sources, which is really cool. (Of course it is unlikely that you will be able to stream internet radio fast enough to listen to without interruptions unless you are in range of a WIFI network, but still an exciting service to have for iPhone owners).
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Description: Phlox is a small program for Windows XP that runs in the background and tweaks the "f2" button when used to rename a file in Windows XP, such as to select only the file name without the extension (similar to Windows Vista).

If you read the description above and did not understand what this program does, consider the following:

1. The function in question is clicking "f2" while a file is selected (and assuming the file extension is visible and not hidden). In XP this will select the file name including the extension to allow easy renaming (try it and see). In Vista it behaves a little differently whereby the file name is selected but the extension is not, making it possible to type in a new name without over-writing the extension.
2. Phlox provides this same behavior as in Vista when pressing f2 in XP.

More notes on this program:

• Can be enabled and disabled through the program’s icon in the system tray.
• While it works really well in general, I noticed at times that it becomes less responsive and might stop working and require a program restart (a bug, perhaps?)
• Memory use: approx 5 megs. Not a lot, but it seems that something like this should have been smaller.
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Description: Favthumbs is a web service that can show del.icio.us bookmarks from any public account as thumbnails or iTunes-style carousel display.

If you use del.icio.us or if you like to browse other people’s public bookmarks on del.icio.us, Favthumbs can make browsing these a much more enjoyable experience. What it does is scan and capture del.icio.us bookmarks collections as thumbnails, and then makes these available in a stylish, sleek looking interface.

This service employs the same principle as Homepage Startup in that both are designed to display pages of bookmarked sites as thumbnails which then can be used as home pages. Here are more notes on this program:

• Del.icio.us accounts: Favthumbs can display any public del.icio.us bookmarks (the URL used will be Favthumbs/name where “name” is the delicious account name. You can optionally provide your Del.icio.us password and retrieve any and all bookmarks that might not be shared publicly.
• Thumbnails: can be resized using a slider. Each thumbnail is captioned with the site name and description. Although the service was able to grab thumbnails for the majority of my bookmarks, for some it simply displayed a blank white rectangle, an “image coming soon” message, or a partially-rendered thumbnail. If you are lucky and all of your thumbnails are rendered adequately then that is great; if not and you end up with a lot of white thumbnails it can reduce the attractiveness of the whole thing considerably.
• Carousel view: this is similar to the iTunes carousel view. A good idea but was less than smoothly animated in my browser window and I must admit to personally prefer the simple thumbnail view to this.
• Tags: del.icio.us tags are displayed on the right hand side of the screen and can be used to filter the displayed thumbnails.

The verdict: such a simple, brilliant idea I am surprised that del.icio.us itself does not provide something like it. Because of this I am now seriously thinking of reviving my otherwise dormant del.icio.us account and using it as my primary bookmarking service. Recommended.

Version Tested: the site as of Aug 12, 2008

Go the Favthumbs page.

Description: Png2swf is a free program that can convert PNG files into an animated flash SWF file. It can process a number of PNG images serially into a SWF file or otherwise batch-create SWF files out of individual PNGs.

If you need to convert PNG images to flash animations or if you need a simple, quick way to create flash SWF animations or banners this program can be extremely useful. Here are some notes on this program:

• Input: can use PNG images as input, preserving their transparency. You can use a single image or multiple images that will be displayed in succession within the resulting SWF.
• Transparency: the transparency in the original PNG (if any) is preserved in the SWF.
• Quality: reducing the quality factor can significantly reduce file size; this operates in a similar manner to what you would expect from JPG compression.
• Delay: when using multiple images in succession it is possible to set delay between them either through the delay field in the program dialog (in seconds) or the FPS field (frame per seconds). The program seems to respond to whichever value you entered in the two boxes that is the largest. Also note that it seems to readily accept fractions of a second if that is what you want.
• Batch operations: it is possible to create a SWF from each PNG in the list rather than a single animated SWF.
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Description: Totally Free Burner is a CD/DVD burner with a nice, minimalistic interface and an excellent range of features.

A nice surprise, this one. Totally Free Burner offers a set of features that will cover most people’s CD/DVD burning needs. It also offers a sleek design and nice look-and-feel as an added bonus. Here are more notes on this program:

• Automatic data verification: for all burning operations.
• Bootable: can create bootable CDs and DVDs (see image to the right).
• Technical specs: an impressive array of configurations supported; “all current hardware interfaces (IDE/SCSI/USB/1394/SATA)”. Multi-Session or Disc-at-Once mode for all formats; any combination of UDF/ISO9660/Joliet bridged file systems, and UNICODE support.
• Burns Audio CDs: supports mp3, wav, ogg and wma files. Does not rip audio cds (use the free BonkEnc or Exact Audio Copy for this).
• Burns disk images: supports ISO and BIN/CUE. Burns images on the fly without first staging locally on your hard drive.
• Burns video CDs: from Mpeg1 VCD files.
• Burns DVDs: for both data and video DVDs. For the latter it can burn from local DVD files or ISO. Supports using UDF format, for compatibility with hardware DVD players.
• Drag and drop: [updated Aug 14, 2008] as of the just released ver. 4.0, supports drag and drop files and folders (a good thing, since adding files and folders individually through the two seperate dialog buttons is not very practical.
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Description: taskTome is a personal information manager that comprises a monthly planner, task list, notes module, and a money-management module. It offers a good set of well-thought-out features while maintaining a clean, intuitive interface.

If you need software to help you organize your appointments, tasks, notes, and/or finances without being overly-laden with features and complications then taskTome is probably what you are looking for. taskTome allows you to use any or all of the four components that it has on offer (Planner/tasks/notes/money), or otherwise to disable any component(s) that you do not care to use.

One thing that I will say about this program is that all four components are very competent in their own right, and all of them manage to offer just the right amount of features/sophistication to make them very useful while still maintaining a very straightforward interface with no learning curve to speak of. Here are more notes on this software:

• Monthly planner: offers a month-view (no week or daily views, but these somehow don’t seem necessary). You can add an event by right clicking “add event”. Events can be set to repeat at regular intervals and, if so, can be set to expire at a certain date. The event page itself offers rich-text editing options as well as a spelling checker.
• Tasks component: you can set (1) priority, (2) user-specified category, (3) date, and (4) status, and sort by any of these fields by clicking on the column headers. A task with a set date will appear in the monthly planner page, which is great. Other features: spell-checking, adding comments to individual tasks, a search box for finding tasks.
• Notes component: offers tabbed notes browsing, rich text editing, spell-check, and searching within a note (although not across all notes). You can also embed objects such as MS Office files, images, etc. in your notes. Notes are individually saved in taskTome’s own format, but can be exported. The bottom line on notes: an OK component, but will not compel you to migrate from your current notes program if you have one.
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