Taskbar Shuffle is a very handy Windows utility that allows you to move buttons around on the Windows taskbar, as well as icons in the system notification area.  I know this doesn’t sound sexy, but it really is the utility that I find myself using more often than just about every other Windows utility combined.

Windows has this really annoying habit of “losing” icons on the taskbar.  For example, I’ll have Firefox, Explorer, and Outlook open, and for whatever reason, one of those taskbar buttons will just disappear from the taskbar.  If you alt-tab or mouse click to make that particular program active, it’s taskbar button will reappear, but at that end of the taskbar.  To a normal person, this probably isn’t that bad, but I’m not a normal person, I’m a Virgo.  I don’t necessarily believe in this stuff, but Virgo’s have traits that make them, among other things, “meticulous”, “fussy”, and “perfectionists”.  I guess it’s these traits that make me want to have control of the taskbar so that the buttons are always in a certain order.

When I use Windows, either at work or at home, I always want certain programs first on the taskbar so that I can get to them as quickly and easily as possible, without having to hunt around for them.  For example, I open Outlook first, then Explorer, then an MS MMC, then Firefox…I do it this way so that no matter what’s going on, I can find those programs very quickly because they’re my core programs.  If their buttons get moved around due to the quirkiness of Windows, then I find myself getting annoyed that things aren’t where they’re supposed to be, especially when I need them.  So much so, in fact, that there are times where I’ve closed every program open in the taskbar so that I can reopen them in the correct order.  I know…it’s a sickness.

Apparently, I’m not the only one, because someone (Jay) made a utility that allows this quirk in Windows to be vanquished with the flick of the mouse.  I’m very grateful.  I’m going to have to donate.

I was cleaning and found this disk.  Based on the system requirements, and the fact that it names the PCjr., I’m very sure that it’s version 2.0 from 1984 (there’s no copyright date on it).  I can’t test it since I don’t have access to any 5.25” floppy drives, but I’m going to guess it won’t work.

Check out that Microsoft logo!

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I found something the other day that’s a little annoying about the Mac.  Since I only reboot once in a great while, usually when a security update forces me to, which isn’t very often, upon each reboot I am usually confronted by a lot of my software notifying me that updates are available, which causes me to spend the next little while downloading and installing said updates.

I’ve gone weeks, even months between reboots and also between application launches, and am annoyed when some applications have gone through five or more updates, mostly bug related updates, that I was not aware of.

This is not a problem with the Mac, per se, but rather with some of the automatic software checking libraries that are used.  In fact, I blame lazy developers.  There is a free, open source, library out there called Sparkle that a developer can add to their application to accomplish update checking, and many do.  From a quick scan of the documentation, I gleamed that, by default, Sparkle checks for updates on application launch.  Upon further quick glances, I further gleamed that it seems to be relatively easy for a developer to implement periodic checks, and that said periodic checks could be user configurable.  The fact that some developers do not do this is just lazy.

I’ve been very happy using Safari most of the time.  When designing web pages, it does a very good job of rendering the layout (after all, it is Acid 2 compliant, but only in a every specific sort of way).  I have only one complaint.

The built-it pop-up blocker is actually quite good.  It does a good job of blocking unwanted pop-ups and allowing the wanted ones (the one’s you click on something to launch them).  The thing that kills me about it is that it doesn’t give any feedback when it blocks a pop-up.

Both IE and Firefox put a bar at the top of the page that alerts you that a pop-up was blocked.  This is a nice feature so that you know when you click something and nothing happens, you can see that a pop-up was supposed to open, but the browser blocked it.  Safari does not offer this.

This has only really been seen when a site uses Flash and launches a pop-up through a Flash link.  Some sort of visual evidence that a pop-up was blocked would be most welcome.

I use a program called TreeSize Pro at work to show me how a directory is being used.  It’s really useful when I ask a user to clean up their home drive and they come back and say, “I need everything that’s in there and it’s all work related!”.  After using the program and showing them that 90% of the space is taken up by MP3 and MPEG files, they generally change their tune (no pun intended).

I found a program for my Mac that’s even better.  Disk Inventory X inventories your hard drive and shows you a map that shows you relative file sizes and sort of groups them based on the type and location of the files.  Using it’s map, I was able to clean up about 15GB of unneeded data in about 5 minutes (damn GarageBand loops!).