Productivity enhancing Software - Part II

This is Part II of the series. Today I'll cover following utilities:

1. WordWeb: Offline dictionary
2. SlickRun: The magical floating 'Run' bar

WordWeb: Offline dictionary
English is not my native language, but I've gotten better with it over a period of time. My 3.5 yrs in US may have helped a lot in that respect. But I still I am unaware of a LOT of new words, that I come across. I think wordweb is a very good way to help with this problem.
You can highlight a word in ANY application and then invoke WordWeb using a hotkey. Default is Ctrl-Alt-W, but you can define other is you want. It also shows the phonetic spelling of the word in each context, helping you to prnounce it correctly as well.
I think best part I like about WW is that it is available all the time, even when one is NOT connected to internet. That is where it scores big time.
Note: While I was writing that you can use wordweb with ANY application, I realized that it didn't work with gvim7

Slickrun: The magical floating 'Run' bar
I have always been a UNIX person so to speak, because my career started working on Solaris. I have always used and worked on Windows machines as my primary workstation, but was always comfortable with command line and other UNIXy things like vi. In fact this entry is also being written in gvim 7.0, but more about gvim later.
So I do prefer and use windows "Run" bar to invoke various utilities from time to time, say calc, notepad etc. I came to know about SlickRun thru one of the Productivity websites,can't remember which one. I tried it and was hooked onto it instantly.

Slickrun as I mentioned, is a floating toolbar. One can defined a hotkey which will invoke this floating toolbar, that is the first way to reduct reduce the mouse click. Slickrun comes with set of predefined magicwords, and with the ability to define your own ones. magicwords are shortcuts for various frequently used programs that you need to invoke. It lets you customize the appearance, like the background of the flatong bar, the font size, colour etc.

Initially I added the most frequently used programs in the magicword list, and as and when notice myself using particular program frequently, I'll add it to the list.
New Magicword tab of Slickrun has one cool feature called a dropper. You can drag the dropper to a already running program and it will automatically grab the pathname. You can also pass parameters to the binary , and test the new magic word to see if everything works. Slickrun is not limited to invoking programs alone, it can let you open a folder as well.
One more feature I like is auto-completion. It works for the magicwords as well as for filenames. So invoking a frequently used program can take as less as two keystrokes. One Hotkey and then first alphabet of the magicword.

To be continued ....

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Productivity enhancing Software - Part I

This is first part of series of posts, in which I will be writing about the software that I use on day to day basis. These software help improve my productivty and I hope that these will help you too.

Some background
I like to experiment with new stuff. I'm always trying to improve myself personally as well as improve my productivity. This leads me to try various tools/utilities that would help me achieve either of these two goals. So I download a lot of software, I install and try most of them, I keep very few of them. I keep the ones which I find myself using regularly. Others are uninstalled and downloaded version deleted, to make space for more downloads :)

I have been doing this for quite some time, so over a period of time, some of these tools are my personal favorites, ones I can't live without. I have changed my primary work machine three times in last 10 months. So each time I get a new machine, I install these "must-haves" on them the first. Off course that is right after I change my WinXP to look more like Windows Classic. I hate WinXP default look. To each his own.

So without further delay, lets talk about the software.

Browser
First and foremost is installing "Firefox". I will install whatever version for which I have the downloaded copy, and them firefox will update itself to latest version. At times, when my copy is really old, I'll download the latest copy.

I'll make it my default browser and set the home page. I used to leave it blank, rather than connective to our corporate web site. But recently I point it my personalized google page.

The Extensions
Next thing I install my favorite plug-ins. Now, here also I keep experimenting. Try new ones I read about and leave the ones I use regularly. So the firefox extensions I must have are:IE Tab: Useful when some sites won't work or behave nicely with firefox. Mostly banking sites and internal corporate sites. It has an option either to render the existing page in IE rendering engine, or open IE as external application. I use both these options as and when required.

Tab mix Plus: There is only one word to describe this extension. Awesome !!
It lets you do some cool things with Tabs. Some of my favorites are undo close tab. I needed this only few times. But when you do, it is life saver.
The other feature of this extension, which really deserves to be separate extension of its own, is Session Manager. It can save all open tabs, when you close firefox with multiple tabs open. This is definitely handy and I use this a LOT.

Gmail Manager: It sits in the status bar quietly monitoring the gmail accounts. I have my personalized google page set as my home page. This already has gmail, so why would I need Gmail Manager ? For one thing, I may not be on my home page all the time. But more importantly, Gmail manager can monitor multiple gmail accounts. Now that's neat.

Then there are others like Aardvark, which lets you remove elements from the web pages. Extremely useful for printing just the contents of the page, leaving out the Ads. Get clean print outs and save some toner in the process.

I've also installed All-in-one Gesture, but don't find myself using it as much. May be I'll just remove it.

More to come ..

Part II

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