MediaMonkey 3.2 has been released and has made quite a few improvements. It now supports jumplist support in Windows 7, along with better compatibility with it as well. Additionally, it’s added support for directory monitoring in the free version, which was previously a paid only feature.
To see a full list of changes, go to their website here.
A great new feature in Outlook 2010 is Quick Steps. It lets you quickly apply a set of commands on an email. So, if you want to have a quick step to reply and delete the email, you can do it, or you can make a quick step to forward the email to everyone in your project team and then move it to a specific folder.
The best way to think of them is as highly configurable rules that can be run on demand. Outlook 2010 comes with a few examples, and makes it very easy to make your own. They can be accessed from the main ribbon, or by right-clicking on an email.
I just finished installing the Office 2010 beta, and it’s looking like they’ve made a ton of changes since the technical preview.
I’ve not had a chance to do too much with it yet, but here’s what I’ve noticed changes with so far.
First and foremost, most of the interfaces have been cleaned up a lot. Everything is much cleaner and smoother looking. Most if not all of the placeholder icons are gone, and replaced with actual icons.
Speed has been greatly improved. Outlook 2010 seems to be much snappier, especially on IMAP.
Outlook 2010 also has added a social connector bar at the bottom of your emails. To be honest, it looks very similar to Xobni, and is quite impressive. It has an option for other social networking plugins, so it’ll be interesting to see what kind of plugins are released.
Only real annoyance is that it doesn’t support upgrading from the technical preview, so you’ll have to uninstall that first. But, it’s not that big of a deal.
I’ll have further updates as I use the program more.
Garry’s Mod was an amazing free modification to Half Life 2 that allowed you pretty much unrestricted sandbox access to the game. People were using it to create impressive machines and Rube Goldberg-type creations, along with creating movies showcasing their works.
However, the creators of Garry’s Mod did away with the free version of the game, and started marketing a paid version with a lot more features. It’s not that much money at $10.00 for a copy, however, some people were happy with running the free version of the game. This was all fine until Valve changed the way that half life 2 mods were launched, which broke Garry’s Mod 9.
Here is a fix to that so that you may continue to enjoy the free version of Garry’s Mod. After installing Garry’s Mod, go to the Steam Game’s List, and do the following.
After doing that, you should be able to use Garry’s Mod 9 the way it was originally released. Enjoy the game, and don’t forget to get the new version if you enjoy it.
Recently, dotPDN released version 3.5 of their popular FREE image editor Paint.Net. I’ve had a chance to use it the past few days, and I’m impressed with it. While it’s not as powerful as Photoshop, it does offer a lot of features that most free programs can’t even touch.
It handles curves and levels, along with a fairly accurate auto-levels option as well. Additionally, it offers layer support as well. Its printing options are comprehensive, allowing you to print contact sheets, and picture packages quite simply. It keeps a detailed history of what you’re doing to the image, allowing you to effortlessly jump back and forth.
The user interface is very friendly. Much simpler to use than Photoshop or Gimp, in my opinion. It’s light on the system resources, which is good for older computers.
Normally, I would provide pictures of the program, however, my internet connection isn’t that stable where I am at the moment, so there aren’t any pictures in this review.
You can download the program here.
I moved all the reviews from the old FuryTech site over to Tech.Furytech in order to cut back on the amount of duplication of content.
X-Setup is a customizing program for Windows. It allows you to change many hidden settings in Windows, and to customize many of the dialog boxes. It is no longer freeware, instead there is a $8 registration fee after a certain amount of time. It is well worth it in my opinion.
The interface should be familiar to anyone who has used Windows for a while. It uses an explorer-tree like setup. On the left, there is a list of folders detailing different settings, and as you open them, it drops down into various settings that can be changed. When a setting in the tree view is clicked, the options for the setting appear in a pane on the right. If changing the setting could be detrimental to your computer, it will ask whether you want to make the setting read-only, so you can’t inadvertently change it.
There is a goback function as well, so if you change something that you didn’t want to, you can just revert to the old setting.
In the menu bars, there are quick links to various diagnostic and monitoring software that comes with Windows. This makes it easier to quickly jump among the different programs that come with Windows, but don’t have shortcuts.
For users who are new to changing settings, they have a wizard mode, which makes changing settings much easier, though it does take longer to get through it.
All in all, the interface is good.
This program lets you change virtually every setting in Windows. You can add links to your My Computer context menu, make bitmaps display as thumbnails, and many more things. For those of you who know what they are doing, there are various cache and registry settings to change around.
The best part of the feature list is the plug-in system. All of the settings are controlled by plugins, which can be updated individually. This means that when they release an update for one of the plugins, you just have to download a single plugin, and not the entire program.
There are many custom plugins out there that change various settings. One lets you change the name of your mayor in SimCity 2000. There are also some password removing plugins.
The plugins can be somewhat useless though. There are still a couple that only work with Windows 95 and 98. They are disabled for other operating systems, so you can’t accidentally mess with them but they do take up screen space. Also, there are a couple plugins for ancient versions of software, so you can just ignore those.
This is a great program, and is well worth the $8 to register it. Most people will only need to run it once, but the results of running it will have last much longer.
You can download it here: http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4083.html
Quite a few people use the Windows Live Messenger as their main IM client. Not only does it come with virtually every computer that is sold, it also is interoperable with the Yahoo messenger. It’s still not as popular as AIM, but it’s getting closer. While the program itself is decent, it is lacking in a lot of ways when compared to applications like Trillian or MirandaIM. Windows Live Plus aims to fix some of these holes, and it’s free.
It adds a ton of features to MSN, ranging from chat log enhancements to full scripting support. It gives the option of using either HTML or plain text for logs, and it can encrypt them as well. There are a ton of scripts out there that add various automation features and better contact management. It also adds support for tabbed chats, which can make carrying on multiple conversations a bit easier.
Installation is pretty pain free, it closes messenger, installs itself, and restarts messenger. At that point, a wizard walks you through setting up some of the more advanced features that the program offers.
Some of the more fun features, such as sounds, do not work with standard Windows Live Messenger; the other person would have to use Plus to hear them, however, that’s not that big of a deal. The only real downside with this program is that it does give the option to install some spyware. When you go to install it, it will ask if you want to install a sponsor program. Make sure that you select no, otherwise it will mess up your system a bit.
It’s a free download, and highly recommended if you use WLM a lot.
Anyone who has multiple monitors on their computer knows what a pain it can be to keep track of all their open applications. nVidia has software with their graphic cards that helps a bit, but it doesn’t do much to help out with keeping track of applications. This is where Ultramon comes in.
Ultramon’s number one feature is multiple taskbars. Each monitor can have it’s own taskbar, and only the applications/windows that are opened on that monitor show up on the taskbar. It makes keeping track of which window is where much easier.
You can also add buttons to the titlebar of the applications and windows to maximize across all screens, or to quickly move it to another monitor.
With Ultramon’s wallpaper program, you can set up a panoramic background across all your screens, or you can set up a different background for each monitor. You can do the same thing with screensavers as well. Having the Lattice screensaver from Really Slick spread across four screens is quite impressive.
Ultramon is pretty stable under Windows XP. However, it has a few more issues with Vista. The title bar buttons don’t show up most of the time, and the separate taskbars get confused a lot. They are working on releasing an update soon that will fix most of the Vista problems, but until then, it can be a bit annoying.
I’d highly recommend trying Ultramon if you have multiple monitors. You can download a trial here