Sure.

From time to time I encounter someone's programming work that seems particularly well-written, well-executed, or just really clever and handy. Since I'd imagine that you might want to know about it too, and since I'd like to help the authors of cool utilities, I'm building a collection of my favorite "gizmos" created by other people. See what you think!


TrayIcon.zip (131k)

I use this more than any other Windows add-on. This perfect little Win95/98/NT utility simply places a few (as many as you want) small icons down in the "system tray" in the lower-right corner of your screen. You then simply click an icon to launch an App. It's tiny, painless, well behaved, and perfectly written. I recommend it most highly!

TClockEx.exe (72k)

Okay, I admit it: I never know what day it is. So I'm always floating my mouse cursor over the Windows tray clock down in the lower right corner of my screen. Then I wait for the yellow tooltip to pop up, telling me when I am. One of the readers of this page pointed me to a fabulous little program that replaces the tray clock with one that's totally customizable. It was love at first click. The image above shows how I run mine, showing just the date and time, but you can design your own "format string" to show something like "Sun, 9 Aug 1998 20:15:58" or whatever you like. Note that all the other junk to the left are programs I run all the time, brought to you courtesy of TrayIcon -- see the program above this one. You can check out the author's site for newer versions and his other stuff. The download is 379k since it also includes a setup routine, but the actual tclockex.exe is only 72k. Very nice.


WinDrag.zip (6k)

Windows 95 users must purchase the Plus! Pack in order to get the "Full Window Drag" feature that refreshes the contents of windows as they're resized and moved. Without that all you see is a gray outline while performing moving windows. Well, this HOT little DLL works the same magic for Windows 95 users WITHOUT all the other overhead of the Plus! Pack. (NOTE: Windows NT 4.0 has this "turned on" by default and Windows 98 has it built in, so NT 4.0 & Win98 users need not bother!) And the darned thing is just 6k! -- Very cool!


Vault (418k)

I've long been a fan of "outlining" as a way of organizing and structuring information. Several years ago I was looking for something that would help me to hang onto and organize miscellaneous scraps of text, random bits of information, and random stuff. My search ended when I discovered a somewhat funky but totally useful tool called "Vault". It's the second most useful add-on I've found for Windows. Today, years later, Vault is keeping track of all sorts of text blobs for me. When I need to store something I fire it up, create a "topic" to locate it in the future (and sometimes sub-topics underneath something I've already created), and drop the text into the "vault" for safe keeping. If that sounds interesting to you, check it out. The program's author, Eric Bergman-Terrell, has written a whole bunch of other goodies that you might also find interesting: http://www.personalmicrocosms.com/html/32bit.html


http://macros.com (web site)

For some reason, Microsoft has never given any of their Windows platforms a useful keyboard macro facility. But if you spend lots of time in front of your machine there are probably many things that could be easily automated. I've been using Keyboard Express (which has recently become Macro Express) for quite some time and I can vouch for the program's quality and trouble-free operation. It's quite feature packed and I recommend it without reservation. It's available on a 30-day free trial basis. Give it a look if you've ever thought that your UI to Windows should be more programmable and powerful!