Microsoft Windows

18 Feb

Thumbs Up – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 25 Oct

Welcome to the Thumbs Up Edition of my review of the week in tech.

Each week I’m picking out the things that I liked the most that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read. If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

I missed out on doing this weekly review on time as it was all hands on deck in Making Life Ezy putting the final touches on HireEzy 2.1 before release that week. We’re all done now and everything is back to normal.

This week in Thumbs Up the common theme here is Windows 7.  It’s out – finally – and it’s awesome.  I’ve been finding all sorts of really handy links which I think you’ll like, such as how to change settings, handy little apps and more. Check it out:

This feature is something that sort of exists in Windows 7 already but takes it to the next level – what you can do is split your monitor into multiple monitors, so that you can maximise a program into a portion of your monitor and then maximise a seperate window into another portion of your monitor.  What you’re left with is a few apps open on the screen at the same time, all into their tidy areas.  Pretty handy for power users, check out the screenshots on the article link.

  • Great article – Top 10 Windows 7 Booster Apps [Lifehacker Top 10] http://tinyurl.com/yfnfoqg #Lifehacker

I won’t detail all of the Top 10 here so I encourage you to take a look yourself, but the summary here is tips for changing some of the look and feel of Windows 7 back to older styles of Windows for the technology phobics out there, in addition to useful jumplist applications for GMail and FireFox, which allow you to access application shortcuts from the taskbar which is handy (especially if you’re using a touchscreen). There are also a couple of super handy apps at the bottom – one of which I detailed last week, the alternate ALT+TAB application, but also a sinlge program that will install a whole pile of programs for you that you might use all the time – in one installation – which is really handy for people buying new PC’s and find downloading and installing all of their favourite utilities a drag.  Check it out.

  • RT @makinglifeezy How to Design a Company Name, Logo and Colour Scheme – http://tr.im/CKmk Includes examples of the bad ones

Our very own marketing department put together this little gem of an article – a list of links to other sites detailing how to choose the core details of your business well.  Great examples here of the right and wrong way of doing things, I found it quite educational. :)

A pretty self explanatory post here – this article has a whole pile of links to good tips and handy apps and definately worth a read of you’ve just grabbed yourself a copy of Windows 7 or a thinking of doing so.

  • Here’s a huge pile of links to useful #Windows7 articles and tutorials – Lifehacker’s Complete Guide to Windows 7 http://j.mp/3Fy0cc

… and another one! Consider this article the ultimate crash course in Windows 7.  Forget about buying books or training courses, EVERYTHING is here.  The best part about this article? I can guarantee that you’ll see something in the list here and you’ll say “wow I didn’t know it could do THAT!”  Check it out!

Here’s a good way of somewhat balancing out all the excitement for Windows 7 – post an article about how you can install Mac OSX on a normal PC so that you don’t have to buy an expensive Mac.  I’ve been reading other articles about people who are tried this out and they say it’s legit and works well – even on netbooks.  If you’re willing to give it a try, then have a look at this.

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HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

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21 Dec

Thumbs Up – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 18 Oct

Welcome to the Thumbs Up Edition of my review of the week in tech – each week I’m picking out the things that I liked the most that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read. If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

I missed out on doing this weekly review on time as it was all hands on deck in Making Life Ezy putting the final touches on HireEzy 2.1 before release that week.  We’re all done now and everything is back to normal.

This week in Thumbs Up is all about handy apps.  There were a few things written about that blew my mind and I’m sure will blow your mind too, as detailed below:

  • Wow, very cool and handy app – Dropresize Monitors Folders, Automatically Resizes Photos [Downloads] http://tinyurl.com/ylzkz73

I’m a big fan of apps that supply a simple convenience and are simple to use, as detailed in previous blog posts.  This application is a brillant idea for handling photos online – digital cameras are so deep in resolution now that they are regularly creating pictures that are 2 – 4mb is size, which is great and all, but can present a problem when you go to do a mass upload of digital photos to places like Facebook or even into our very own HireEzy app for uploading pictures of Hire Items to your online store.  Once you install this application, you can nominate a folder in your computer (Windows only) as your photo upload folder and then all you do is copy and paste whichever photos you are going to work with into that folder and the application auto resizes all the photos you paste in there and voila! They are resized to a web-quality standard and ready for uploading.  This will speed up the uploading of your photos significantly to online services and you won’t need to worry about photo quality – places like Facebook will only resize your photos to a similar quality on their end anyway so you may as well save yourself the pains of sitting through the unnecessary uploading time.

I’ve blogged and tweeted (I’m a trendy online socialite) previously about Augmented Reality (AR) and whilst admittedly this video would mainly appeal to nerds, I tweeted it just to really reinforce to regular users what can be possible with this new technology.  Don’t know what Augmented Reality is?  The concept is looking into a camera and seeing non-reality elements overlayed ontop of the real things that the camera sees.  Currently, AR apps are doing things like showing the name of a building on your screen when you look at it with your camera, but these first versions are cheating by using GPS positioning to know where you are – this software demo actually processed WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING AT, recognises it and shows you the appropriate content.  Some examples of AR in realtime are using your phone to look at a menu in French and having your app overlay the French words with English words so that you can read it as you are looking at it, in addition to things like looking at the Statue of Liberty with your app showing you the times that day that give you the best shot of it without a shadow cast on it’s face, etc as apposed to how it looks at that moment.  Truely amazing stuff, it blows my mind.  We all need faster internet connections to make this stuff happen but hey, it’ll happen eventually.

  • Wicked! – VistaSwitcher is an Absolutely Awesome Alt-Tab Replacement [Screenshot Tour] http://bit.ly/HpCWY

Don’t be fooled by the name, it works on Windows 7 as well and it is awesome.  Currently, when you ALT-TAB through open windows you only see an icon and the name of the app open, or if you’ve got the Aero Glass feature of Windows turned on you see a tiny little screenshot of the open window that you can tab through – this app gives you a fullscreen menu showing the list of open apps down the right hand side whilst giving you a HUGE screenshot of the open app as it currently appears.  Very handy and highly recommended.

This is really the new way to work now – people are afraid of updating their computers because it’s hard to learn where all the new things are, or programs that work in an older operating system don’t work in a new one, or even worse they are people switching to Mac who have a whole pile of programs that only work in Windows.  Virtualisation allows you to run an operating system within an operating system – for example, I currently use Windows 7 as my main operating system but I also virtualise Windows XP and switch between them (I also have a Linux version called Ubuntu which isn’t relevant here, but this proves the power of what I can do) – this allows me to have both Internet Explorer 7 (in XP) and Internet Explorer 8 (in Win7) for testing web apps across common browsers whilst also testing our own software in how it behaves in each environment.  The most common use of virtualisation nowadays is running Windows from inside of Mac OSX so that people can jump into Windows if they need to whilst using a Mac and not miss out on being able to do whatever they want.  This article details a bunch of FREE virtualisation applications that allow you to do this – I myself use a paid version of VMWare for what I do but these do a comparable job – and I figured that people would particularly find this interesting if upgrading to Windows 7 and want to use Windows XP and are (unlucky) like me who can’t use Microsoft‘s built in Windows XP Mode feature in Windows 7 because they don’t have the right kind of CPU to support it (which sucks).

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02 Nov

Thumbs Up – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 1 Nov

Welcome to the Thumbs Up Edition of my review of the week in tech – each week I’m picking out the things that I liked the most that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read. If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

This week in Thumbs Up I found myself noticing a whole bunch of really handy and useful applications being announced and written about.  I’ve highlighted my favourites of the week below:

  • Great tip about Screencasting – From the Tips Box: Windows 7 Screencasting, Quicksilver, and Recipes [From The Tips Box] http://bit.ly/z47ef

This article has a whole bunch of tips in it but it was the first one in the list that I was really interested in (the rest were boring) – Windows 7 has a Screencaster feature in it so that you can record exactly what is happening on the desktop as a movie.  This is fantastic for getting help with support and we’ve been recommending it to all of our customers – simply hit record and play out a situation that you experiencing so that you can show the video of the problem to an extremely appreciative support technician.  All you need to do is open up the Run window (Window Key + R) and type “PSC” and hit enter.  Voila – you have it open and can hit record to start tracking what is happening on your computer.  Kudos to Microsoft for including this feature in Windows natively.

This is an idea that I was just talking about last when when I was talking about the possibilities of Augmented Reality – This iPhone app lets you use the iPhone camera to hover over something written in a foreign language and it’ll show you what that means in English written over top in what the camera sees – super handy when travelling overseas or when your computer manual is only written in Korean.  I was slightly disappointed that Japanese wasn’t supported at this stage (I’ve been learning it lately) and it’s a tad inconvenient that you have to download each language supported seperately, but once you’re set up you’re setup and it’s extremely convenient.  They are charging people $1 a language – $1 to buy the app and then you buy all the languages you want support for.  They say that more languages will be supported soon and Asian languages are the obvious ones missing from it but it’s got ALL the European languages covered which is pretty good.  Highly recommended.

This is a pretty exciting development – There are a number of applications available that allow you to run Windows on a Mac but this one is my favourite – Not only can you install Windows 7 as a program within Mac OSX and get full support for the aero interface and enjoy all the fun things that comes with Windows 7, but you can actually install programs within Windows 7 and then run them outside of Windows – so much so that you can attach them to the dock at the bottom of OSX and it runs like it is a native application. This effectively allows you to be a Mac user and then run any Windows program just like a Mac program and it’ll work every time.  This is quite exciting and I’ll be looking to create this exact setup for myself when I upgrade a little later in the year (I hear the new Macs are lemons and have problems that need to be fixed – see this week’s Thumbs Down article for more details).

  • Good on ‘em for doing this – Microsoft’s Official USB/DVD Download Tool Helps you Upgrade Netbooks to Windows 7 http://bit.ly/Ozh1M

This is great – people who own netbooks will know that there is no DVD drive in it, so if you want to upgrade Windows you don’t have a disk drive to put the installation CD in – fortunately, Microsoft have released a free tool which allows you to move the Windows 7 installer onto a thumb drive and you can use that to upgrade Windows to 7.  I have two netbooks at home and am doing that this week – Windows XP is too crappy and freezes a lot to not want to upgrade to a stable operating system.

  • FANTASTIC idea Microsoft should copy it (like everything else) – Aerofoil Keeps Your Laptop’s Battery Alive http://bit.ly/1maRls

Windows 7 already has a whole bunch of stuff built into it which helps preserve battery life in laptops significantly, and using this application will better your battery life even further.  The concept here is that Aero Glass, which is the Windows feature which animates your windows shrinking down and up and go 3D when ALT-Tabbing and all that jazz, is quite the battery sucker so this program will automatically turn Aero Glass off when you unplug the power charger to your laptop and only run it on battery.  You don’t have to do anything at all, this program will just auotmatically switch that Windows feature on and off as needed when you plug the power in and out.  Simple, easy and a brilliant idea.  If you have Windows 7 then you will definately want to install this program – check out the link for download details – OH and did I mention the program is FREE??  Very cool.

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