Description: DExpose is a replacement for the Alt+Tab application switching funcitonality that emulates the Mac Expose window-stacking style.

A colleague of mine recently asked me about a good alternative to the Alt+Tab application-switching function in Windows XP, and I pointed him to the two Vista-style 3D-layering apps that I previously reviewed on this blog (Shock Aero and Winflip), as well as the uber-simple SmartTab, which is almost the opposite of those two in its complete lack of eye candy, but is still one of my personal favorites. None of these were quite what my friend was looking for; he did not care about the Vista style app switching but wanted more bells and whistles than the minimalistic SmartTab provides.

This made me think that it probably is a good idea to post DExpose on this blog, an application that displays open apps and windows Mac-style in a stacked "thumbnail" display, and varies the size of its presentation according to the number of windows displayed and the overall available screen area (see screenshot above). Here are more notes on this program:

• The look and feel: once invoked by a hotkey, both minimized and maximized windows become animated and fly into position on a preview screen (see screenshot). It really looks very cool, and can be performed in slow motion by pressing the appropriate hotkeys.
• Two modes of operation: you can DExpose all windows, or you can focus attention to one of the DExpose windows (using the arrow keys or mouse) and "maximize" that window while still in the DExpose "suspended animation". You can also use a hotkey to simply "DExpose" the currently active window, though I’m not quite sure what practical purpose that would serve.
• Other functions: pressing F11 can minimize all windows, while pressing it again afterwards will maximize them again. Unfortunately, this seems to conflict with the F11 function in Internet Explorer, and I had to switch it off (there was no way to re-define the hotkey in the version I tested).
• Invoking DExpose: F9 or F10 to DExpose all windows or a single window respectively (also Win+W and Win+Shift+W). Or you have the option to define your own shortcut keys, including using Alt+Tab, which I am guessing is probably what would make sense for most people.
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Description: Minimem is a free program designed to reduce the memory footprint of individual applications selected by the user. It runs in the background and will handle as many processes as requested.

If you’ve ever encountered a program that simply uses too much memory, Minimem will almost certainly be able to reduce it’s memory expenditure for you; just point Minimem to said app and watch its memory footprint magically decrease to a fraction of it’s original usage. It really is that simple (and really quite impressive to see).

Now that you know that Minimem will do this, a number of questions arise: is this a good thing to be doing? How is Minimem able to accomplish this? Which applications are a good fit to optimize using Minimem? This review will attempt to answer (or at least explore) some of these issues.

My experience with Minimem: to test this program I set it optimize the memory usage of four programs which I knew consumed too much memory (or memory than I thought they should). These programs were: Internet Explorer, Digsby, Outlook 2007, and VolumeTouch. All I had to do was run Minimen and select the programs I wanted (see image to the right) And although Minimem consumed approximately 20 megs of memory itself, the overall “savings” was in fact many times that number. See the screenshot above for a before and after. (Note: whether or not these apps were a good choice for using Minimem is another story).

How does it work?: according to the Minimem website “it optimizes memory by removing as many non-necessary memory pages as possible from the selected processes.” It will do this every 30 seconds by default, although this time interval can be tweaked by the user. The applications can then load these memory pages back if and when it actually needs it; meanwhile, if it does not, that memory is made available to other applications that might need it.

When is this a good idea?: I am assuming that (a) there are instances where “optimizing” a program’s memory footprint using Minimem is a good idea, and, alternately, that (b) in many cases there is in fact a very good reason why a program might hold on to memory pages and not unload them, and using Minimem to force it to do so is therefore not a good idea. The following are situations where I think that you might use Minimem to very good effect:

• Programs that have problems with memory leaks: such as Firefox v2 (and maybe v3?). These programs tend to hold onto pages in memory past the point that they should, and get increasingly larger and top heavy without needing to be. You might need to observe your programs and/or do some research on the internet to identify these, though. As a rule of thumb any program that grows exponentially and becomes unwieldy the more you use it might be a good candidate). The authors recommend using Minimem with browsers, office applications, and word processors.
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Description: Debut Video Capture is a free video recording software that can capture video and audio from any USB device, and can also record anything that is displayed on-screen such as a video that is playing or a user’s visible on-screen activity. Supports a wide variety of output formats and encoders.

I was recently faced with the need to make videos of a user (me) interacting with a site that we’ve created at work. This presented me with the opportunity to do some research and find a good screen-recording program; the last time I’d posted something like this was the Krut Computer Recorder way back in April 2007, but since then there seems to have been a proliferation of good free options. I decided to post this program because it is simple and straightforward, extremely easy to use, and offers a good number of output encoders and formats. Here are more notes on this program:

• Input sources: you can record any input coming from a USB video input device (including a videocam with USB input). You can also record your visible screen or a sub-section of the screen.
• Defining an area of the screen to record: is extremely easy; click on the "select a desktop rectangle tool" and draw a rectangle anywhere on screen. Debut will only record that area and any visible events that take place within it. Alternately you can click the "capture the whole desktop" button to record the entire screen.
• Output: can output in a variety of formats, including AVI, WMV, ASF, MPG, 3PG, MP4, MOV, and FLV). You can use a number of encoders which the program - I believe - installs (including DV video), as well as any encoders that you might have installed on your system (e.g. I installed an Xvid encoder and was easily able to use it to encode video screen captures with Debut).
• Editing output: you can resize the output video on the fly while recording and/or change the framerate to something that you set manually.
• Video effects: you can apply a number of filters on-the-fly (black and white, negative, sepia), and also have the option to change output color settings (brightness, contrast, gamma).
• Text annotation: also supported is adding an on-screen text message that is present across the entire video. You can choose it’s on screen placement, alignment, whether or not to use a background color, font, font-style, and font size, etc. The program also allows for variable date and/or time stamping.
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Description: Miestas is a free point and click flash adventure game that features artsy, hand-drawn graphics and a jazzy soundtrack that combine together to create a dream-like game environment.

I stumbled on this game and decided to post it for the following reasons: (a) its’ nice atmosphere and game experience, (b) that you can get into it quickly and pretty much solve it within an hour or so, and (c) that it looks like art, which I like very much.

If you’ve played any games in this genre before you will instantly know what to do: you can control your character using the arrow keys and interact with the environment using the space bar; the only prerequisites for figuring out how to solve the game are lots of experimentation and, at times, thinking outside the box.
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Description: DK Finder is a desktop search program that employs a sophisticated indexing algorithm to deliver lightning fast search results. It is primarily designed to find files on your system but can also search for keywords contained within files. The program can also perform a number of excellent file-related operations on search results that go beyond moving and copying to include group-operations, advanced filtering, and exporting results as a collection of shortcuts.

Searching for files on a computer is something that everyone needs (or needed at some point or another). Most people have used the search that comes with Windows which, unfortunately, is sub-par to say the least in terms of performance. Then there are programs such as Google Desktop and Windows Desktop Search which, in my experience are resource hungry widget-engines in disguise that have the ulterior agenda of "integrating" your desktop with the internet - which might sound ok, until you find that the desktop search program has taken over your system. (Needless to say Google Desktop did not linger for a long time on my computer before I uninstalled it).

Alternately, I would venture to guess that 99% of most people’s desktop search needs revolve around finding files on a computer and filtering results quickly. If this is what you are after I present you with DK Finder, a small, lightning-fast, and powerful desktop search program with some nice features. Here are more notes on this program.

• The technology: DK Finder is an "indexing" search program that scans your hard drive(s), ’learns’ what’s there and stores it in an index. This means that you will need to perform periodical partial "smart reindexing" at times to keep it up to date.
• Filtering: is one of the strongest aspects of this program. A name filtering box allows you to specify multiple criteria simultaneously, including (/) and (-) for "or" and exclusion, respectively (see image to the right). You can also filter by size and date and/or by keywords inside the files themselves, and finally you can click the column headers to sort your results. Rather powerful and very cool.
• Performance: search results are almost instantaneous, however, the initial indexing when you first install the program will typically take a few minutes; subsequent reindexing, however (i.e updating the index) will typically take a few seconds (an average of approx 5 seconds on my machine, but this will vary). You can also run a full low-level indexing/re-indexing in the background.
• File operations: this is one of the most interesting aspects of this program. Aside from the usual copying/moving operations, DK Finder has the ability to create and save shortcut collections for marked files that can be saved into a folder.
• Where to search: because performing a search provides (almost) instantaneous results, narrowing in on a location for your search scope is done through the filtering function (see above). However, you can specify the folder locations on your hard drives which you might want excluded from the indexing process.
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Description: XnView Shell Extension is a free Windows explorer extension that installs a number of image-related tools in the right-click context menu, including a thumbnail preview, image conversion to a wide variety of formats, image resizing, editing image IPTC metadata, uploading to ImageShack, and other functions.

All you need to do to get a grasp of what this program is about is look at the screenshot above. XnView Shell Extension’s most striking feature is the thumbnail in the context menu, but more than that it offers a number of useful functions mentioned in the description above. Here are more notes on this program:

• Layout: there are 3 different ways that XnView Shell Extension can be displayed in the context menu. The above screenshot, which is my favorite, shows the image preview displayed in the main context menu and the other functions in a submenu, but you can opt to have the preview be pushed into the submenu as well (see image to the right) or otherwise decide to display everything (preview and other functions) in the main context menu (not pictured).
• Image conversion/resizing: you can either convert to another image type or convert and resize. The supported image formats to convert to is breathtakingly long, and includes PSD, PNG, TIFF, and about two dozen others most of which you’ve never heard of.
• Editing IPTC metadata: this stands for "International Press Telecommunications Council". The range of information is exceptionally broad, and XNShellView’s support for this alone makes it worth installing.
• Uploading to ImageShack: ImageShack, one of the biggest image hosting services on the net, allows you to upload images without registering and provides you with a URL for use from any site or project. XnView Shell Extension makes uploading to this service 1-click away.
• Customizability: if you do not want any of the functions in the custom menu, you can pick and choose and simply switch it off. You can make the image preview thumbnail bigger or smaller.
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Description: Vjpeg is a fast, lightweight free image viewing program designed to open "images as objects", such that they are draggable on the desktop and not placed within a program window.

We are so accustomed to images opening in application windows that this viewer at first feels so .. unusual. In fact there is something so pleasing about manipulating images on the desktop as objects, most notably the ability to place them side by side for simultaneous viewing, which might come in handy if you need to, say, compare or contrast a number of images.

The developer writes about his motivation in creating this viewer in terms of viewing large files (the program makes them large images smaller but allows for instant resizing). Here are more notes on this program:

• How it works: click on an image file and it will open as a draggable object on the desktop. Right click to close the picture. Note that Vjpeg provides for layered images whereby images can overlap or can be moved on top of each other or other windows.
• Changing image size: left-clicking on the image moving it towards (and then away from) any of the four edges resizes it (actually very easy to get the hang of). Double clicking on an image enlarges to actual size or maximizes full screen if the image is larger than the screen.
• Supported filetypes: becomes the default viewer for JPG, BMP, and GIF; can also open Photoshop PSD but the author does not make it the default viewer for that format. Does NOT support PNG, unfortunately.
• Keyboard Shortcuts/manipulations: the arrow keys rotate images clockwise/counter-clockwise by 90 degrees. Pressing (e) emails the original file, while (E) emails the bits of the image on screen (i.e. a compressed image). For color auto-levels press (a), while CTRL-alt-Q closes all open images. CTRL+0 through 3 resizes images, and CTRL+plus/minus enlarges/makes smaller; Alt+enter = maximize to the edges of the screen.
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Description: this posting will provide a number of mini-reviews for freeware programs written by the amazing Dirk Paehl: SimplyZip, DP MediaInfo, IndexMaker, and UPXG.

I received an email from reader Christ T (CT) which had insightful things to say about a number of freeware titles written by Dirk Paehl. CT kindly allowed me to use his mini reviews as a posting.

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CT: “Purely by accident (I was searching for a “GUI UPX-er”) I came across a website full of Outstanding Freeware Programs, from a guy named Dirk Paehl (visit his site here).

He has a LOT of nice SMALL programs, notably:

• SimplyZip: 2.22 MB Multi-Archive Tool, with GREAT Encryption ability, spanning/multi-zip, supports Many, MANY Archive types, and it can even run Portably! It’s directory looks like “Universal Extractor”, but it can Create as well as Extract, and more - Very Nice! (screenshot above).
• DP MediaInfo: 0.54 MB, kind of like “GSpot”, only much more comprehensive, IMHO! [Note: for a full Freewaregenius review of the related MediaInfo, go here].
• IndexMaker: 187.28 KB (yes, ’KB’!) & CDtoHTML, 208.35 KB - Which create HTML from Files & Folders and from CD’s/DVD’s (respectively), very handy for cataloging.
• UPXG [UPX Graphical]: the reason I found his site, only 372.55 KB (with Docs & Uninstaller); It’s a Single-File GUI for UPX, but with the UPX 3.03 ’Engine’ BUILT-IN to the single 351 KB ’EXE’ file, Totally Stand-Alone or with optional Shell Integration, plus many other options - I still haven’t figured out how the heck he did it, UPX is 265 KB by itself! Maybe his brain thinks at Machine-Language Level? Beats “UPX Shell”, “UPX Front End”, or “UPX Tool+” - Scary Efficient!

I really like UPXG & SimplyZip particularly, and have been using them a lot lately, with no problems at all.  SimplyZip and Pismo File Mount are working beautifully together. Read more »

Description: “Ben there Dan That!” is free a point and click adventure game in the old LucasArts tradition that loosely explores the theme of “the death of the adventure game”. It chronicles the adventures of Ben and Dan, the digital versions of the two developers of the game, as they solve puzzles and engage in clever and amusing dialogue containing numerous humorous references to old 90’s adventure games.

This is a point and click adventure game that’s designed to challenge you with some interesting (and mostly logical) puzzles and to put a smile on your face. The latter it accomplishes through humorous tongue in cheek references to classic adventure games (the Space Quest series, Escape from Monkey Island, etc.), but also by poking fun at the adventure game genre itself. The following exchange is a case in point:

(In the context of examining a note stuck on a door)
Dan: What about the extra-sticky BluTak on the back? … that might prove useful
Ben: Stop questioning my authority, quisling. We leave the note and the sticky-sticky BluTak right here, ok?. It’s not going to help make an aerial, is it?
Dan: No, but we might be able to use it with something else. You know… later on.
Ben: Oh, I see. So I’m supposed to just start carting junk around with me all day …on the off chance we need it for something later?
Dan: Um.. yeah.
Ben: Well, in the unlikely event that happens, I shall make a mental note of the BluTak being here… and simply return to collect it should the unthinkable happen, and we find ourselves BluTak-less in a BluTak crisis situation ok?
Dan: Yay! Thanks Pal.

Of course, carting junk around for no apparent reason is exactly what you will need to do in point and click adventure games, and this one is no exception . Here are more notes on this game:

• Actions: right click to switch across the different possible actions then point to the object you would like to perform the action on.
• Inventory: mouse over to the upper left corner to see your inventory.
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Description: Desktop Media is a free program that can display shortcuts on the desktop to USB drives, CDs/DVDs and other media when you plug them in, and automatically removes these shortcuts when you unplug. It can also alternately create so-called "hard links" to your media instead of shortcuts.

[Update Jul 24, 2008] This program has gone through several changes as to warrant an updated review and a "Freewaregenius Pick" award!

This program is similar to the afore-mentioned "Desk Drive" in that it aims to provide the user with automatic shortcuts to their USB and other drives that appear and disappear from the desktop as the user plugs their media in and out. Shortly after posting the review for "Desk Drive" I received the following email from the author of this program, which pretty much sums it all: "I just saw your post on the Desk Drive application yesterday, and I thought it was a great idea ….. Unfortunately, I usually prefer not to install .NET apps, so I decided to write my own version of this… It also has a feature that Desk Drive does not, which is support for Symbolic Links via the Junction utility from SysInternals… Please let me know if you run into any bugs and I will be glad to fix them. This was a great idea for an application and I wanted to create an app with a small footprint to make it a little more appealing." This about sums it all up. Here are more notes on "Desktop Media":

• Supported media: optionally supports any or all of: removable drives, fixed drives, network/remote drives, CD/DVD drives and RAM disks. Also allows the exclusion of specific drive letters that you might want to opt out of displaying desktop shortcuts.
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