Desktop Enhancements

Laugh it up all you want, you Web 2.0-using note takers. This simple note maker for your PC is small, robust, and excellent at what it does.

Stickies combines the best and most important features that you could want in a notes program. The program's main feature, the sticky note, can be customized on nearly every level, from font to color to behavior. The program installs a yellow sticky pad in your QuickLaunch bar. Double-click on it to load a new sticky, or right-click on it to access saved stickies and configuration options.

Fonts, hot keys, formatting, opacity, … Read more

Are you jealous of that slick Mac interface? Check out ObjectDock, a free utility that replaces the Windows Taskbar with a colorful, animated dock similar to the taskbar in Mac OS X.

ObjectDock displays icons for currently running applications and can hold quick-launch icons for your favorite programs. As you pass the cursor over each icon, ObjectDock magnifies it and displays relevant information, helping you find what you need even when you're running several programs at once. An attractive but optional clock rounds out the toolbar. The tiny utility comes with a dozen attractive skins, and users with slow … Read more

If you're looking for a smarter Start menu for Windows Vista, check out the subtly named Vista Start Menu. The program does away with Vista's translucent aero theme, making it opaque, and builds it out with several levels of features and customization. It prevents programs from jumping around, as is their wont sometimes in the standard menu, and it throws in a basic zoom feature accessible. It creates hot-key support for every item on the menu, clearly labeling folders and programs with numbers and letters.

Making cosmetic changes and surfacing directories is much easier with this app, too, … Read more

Simple, small, and free, Google Desktop for Windows, Mac and, Linux indexes your hard drive the way the company's own servers index the Web. Your search results are returned in a Web-page format that's similar to the Google Web site, and the app's sidebar shows regular updates to your favorite programs, from e-mail to your My Pictures folder to RSS feeds and weather.

Although the initial indexing process can take a long time--especially if you have a lot of e-mail, contacts, chat transcripts, and documents for it to parse through--it's well worth the wait to be … Read more

You could create every document, spreadsheet, and presentation you work on from scratch, but if you're like me, you'll likely spend more time futzing with the file's layout and design than entering the data that comprises it.

That's why I rely on the many free templates and extensions for my favorite productivity apps. I've written in the past about places to find add-ons for Microsoft Office, but there's also a wealth of free extensions and templates for OpenOffice.org's Writer word processor, Calc spreadsheet, and Impress presentation program.

Start at OpenOffice.org's … Read more

The widgets story has always locked icons and links in a race to recover your most-wanted data quickly and accurately. When it comes to cell phones, there's been no clear winner, only trade-offs. Mobile browsers such as Opera Mini and Skyfire promise rich desktop search augmented by straightforward links to favored sites, while well-designed widgets applications such as Yahoo Go supply clear paths to tightly-focused content, some of it user-customized.

Seattle-based Zumobi and Swedish newcomer Squace are two companies I spoke to this week that are pitching icons over links. On Wednesday, Zumobi announced a version update that gives … Read more

If you're the kind of clenched-up stresser who finds it hard to relax, invest in an aquarium. Watching the fishies swim by is a peaceful, soothing pastime, experts say. But are you really going to cart the whole operation into the office? Roll up your sleeves to siphon mucky water into your garbage can? Heft the tank to your coworkers' desk when your office is locked over vacation? Yeah, right. Undersea observation may do the trick at home, but for the office, a screensaver like Dream Aquarium Screensaver is a heck of a lot more practical. It works, too. … Read more

Users of the next Adobe Creative Suite may be able to mix and mash up the applications with online content and third-party tools.

In a bid to make workspaces more nimble, Adobe Systems is considering making parts of Photoshop and other Creative Suite applications available for users to manipulate within Flash widgets, according to a blog post Monday by John Nack, product manager of Photoshop.

The capability to bring tools from the Creative Suite to the desktop or the Web with Flash or Flex could lead to novel ways of exploring Adobe's expensive, hulking software. Users have mashed up … Read more

As you may know, I use both Mac and Windows PCs at work and write software reviews for both. In my experience, each platform has its strengths and weaknesses, but both can be extremely powerful if you have the right software. To me, it's not about picking which platform is the best, it's about finding the software you need to get the job done.

One of the great additions to the Mac OS in recent iterations is the visual program and document management system called Expose. On a Windows machine, you probably switch apps by using the trusty … Read more