Articles in Utilities
Desk Drive is a free program that adds automatic shortcuts on the desktop to flash drives and other media when you plug them in, and removes these shortcuts automatically when the drives are unplugged. Supported media include (CD’s/DVD’s, removable drives, fixed drives, networked and RAM drives).
FreesSnap is a free program that runs in the background and allows the user to individually maximize any of the four sides of an open window using hotkeys (Win+arrows by default). It also allows you to use hotkeys to quickly shift the placement of a window to the center or any of the 4 corners, and to perform a number of windows resize operations.
Lebendig is a Windows enhancement that will animate your windows, making them twist around as they open, recede into the horizon when closed, or perform any of 15 different actions when opening or closing. Works on programs, windows, and dialogs.
SysExporter is a small tool that allows you to extract information from any application or window and export it as text, HTML, or XML files. It is designed to retrieve information from programs that do not normally allow you to simply copy/paste info, such as the files list inside a folder or zip archive, list of emails and/or contacts in an email client, registry values in the right pane of the registry editor, error message prompts, etc.
Wubi is an Ubuntu Linux installer designed to be run from within a Windows environment in order to create a dual booting Windows/Ubuntu machine. Wubi is an officially supported Ubuntu installer and is open source.
Xneat windows manager is a free windows enhancement that adds a number of “window management” type functions to explorer, including the ability to customize window transparency, minimize (or hide) windows to the system tray, toggling always on top, and drag and drop taskbar buttons in order to rearrange them. It also adds interesting options to the windows save file dialog: a “clone file” button that becomes active when overwriting a file, and a time stamp button.
Looxis Faceworx is a free 3D modeling program that can construct a textured 3D model of a person’s head out of two 2D photos (one from the front, "mugshot" style, and the other profile style from the side).
Translate.Net is a desktop-based translation tool that will translate any text from one language to another. It connects with multiple online translation engines and delivers multiple translations at once straight into your desktop.
Daphne is a windows process manager that provides a number of interesting functions, such as the ability to shut down, find, or hide an app or process by dragging and dropping a tool onto open windows with the mouse. Other functions include the ability to set “traps” where processes invoke user determined actions, killing processes by name, etc, in addition to a number of the usual functions that you would expect to find in a program of this type.
Binary Toys are animated windowless vector characters “made up of springs, muscles, and masses” that are designed to inhabit your computer, interacting with your desktop environment in accordance with the laws of physics.
Kana Launcher is a “pop-up menu” style applications launcher that can either reside in your system tray or appear anywhere on the desktop when invoked by a hotkey. It offers two modes, a regular “context menu” style pop-up launcher with a hierarchical tree structure, and a so-called “floating icon” launcher style. It also offers the ability to install a permanent shortcut to programs, bookmarks, or folders within the system tray itself.
