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When you press Win + left/right it will now correctly occupy half the screen, which was annoying me for a while. Essential app.

2011-07-12 PuTTY 0.61 is released

PuTTY 0.61 is out, after over four years (sorry!), with new features, bug fixes, and compatibility updates for Windows 7 and various SSH server software.

via PuTTY: a free telnet/ssh client.

It’s always fun to discover new apps, and a good way to see which apps are used most is to look at the first home screen. So here’s mine, where is yours?

The apps you can see are (apart from the built in Apple ones):

1. Captio - Send yourself a quick note with just one tap.
2. Simplenote - An easy way  to keep notes, lists, ideas, and more.
3. Action Lists - Getting Things Done made easy.
4. moneyStrands - Personal finance software.
5. UK & ROI – navFree navigation software.
6. ShoppingList - The shopping tool for your iPhone or iPod touch.
7. Dropbox - Bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily.
8. Due - The missing reminder app fit for your homescreen (multiple alarms)
9. Instacast - Instant access to podcast subscriptions, stream or download episodes wirelessly, follow show notes and enjoy audio and video podcasts on-the-go.
10. Tiny Tower – Tower people management game

As a hobbyist music producer, I have a lot of samples of sounds. As I have decided to start organising these, I needed a quick way to fire off samples in wav and mp3 format through Windows Explorer.

So I created InstaPlay. This is a simple sound player. To install it simply unzip it in a directory that’s in the path, and then associate wav and mp3 files (and whatever else you want to use) with it.  It also has a few features:

1. Just double click or run a soundfile to hear it play.
2. Nice speaker icon in system tray while a sound is playing. Double click it to quit InstaPlay and stop playback.
3. Run  another sound file to switch playback to that instead.

This program will help you categorize more efficiently as you can move the sound that’s being played without pesky ‘file in use’ prompts.

Download Info
Download the latest version (v1.0 – updated 14/oct/2010)

Brian Wood presents an excellent Dreamweaver tips video on Youtube. Many people just use DW as a text-editor but it’s capable of a lot more even in code view. The following video might open your eyes:

Very nice.

I’d like to start recommending webservices  and software that I use frequently. Any product recommended has been evaluated for at least several weeks. In today’s recommended we feature Instapaper. (Recommendation articles are personal opinions with no benefit for the author)

What does Instapaper do? Instapaper facilitates easy reading of long text content.

We discover web content throughout the day, and sometimes, we don’t have time to read long articles right when we find them.

Instapaper allows you to easily save them for later, when you do have time, so you don’t just forget about them or skim through them.

http://www.instapaper.com/

Should simple software be free:

During the chat, the entire MacBreak Weekly crew discussed the danger to the music industry that comes from younger listeners having a built-in expectation that music should be free.

On this episode I believe [Leo Laporte] has inadvertently helped to perpetuate the same kind of thinking about software that the panel had just finished expressing concern about with regard to music: the idea that the hard-earned fruits of somebody’s creative labor should be free.

http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/481/it-should-be-free

What it does
I made a small AHK script I thought you might want to use: AltTab Fingertips. Press a configurable hotkey (F10 by default), and get a menu at the mouse with all the current windows on it. You can exclude processes using the tray menu.

Many thanks to ak_ for creating “menu at cursor” idea with FileDraft, which inspired this. It’s like alt-tab but quicker. A lot of code comes from my PutAside script.

Small screencast:

Changelog:
v1.3 – Recompile, shiny new icon, INI in the same folder as the script for portability!
v1.2 – startup message is now only shown once. Added “show desktop|restore programs” option to menu, (windows-d)
v1.1 – allows to exclude processes via system tray menu.

Download the latest version

Comments are welcome either here or on the related Donationcoder thread.