Last November, I covered Conceal, an encryption tool for windows. Right-click Encrypter is a similar software that encrypt any private file of yours with a password. Its main strength is the integration with Window's right click context menu, making it quicker and easier to encrypt files. Once installed, the application is immediately available via right-click context menu. Just right click the file you want to encrypt and choose "Right-Click Encrypter" from the pop-up menu. Enter and confirm the password then hit Encrypt button. The process will replace the file's icon indicating that the file is already encrypted.
To unprotect the file, just double click any encrypted file, enter the password and hit Decrypt. To uninstall the program, just click its desktop shortcut.
The program runs on all versions of Windows including Windows 7 where I tested it for this article.
The more windows cluttered on your desktop, the more harder to focus on a single task at a time. To make things better and more organize you can use the help of Desktops. A software that allows you to organize opened applications on up to four virtual desktops. You can divide your applications in such a way that you can read emails on one desktop, browse the web on the second desktop, work on your spreadsheets on the 3rd and do some personal work on the last virtual desktop. Unlike other virtual desktop utilities that that shows the windows that are active on a desktop and hiding the rest, Microsoft Sysinternals Desktops uses a Windows desktop object for each desktop making it very lightweight.
But using the desktop object has some disadvantages too such as Desktops doesn't provide a way to move a window from one desktop object to another. Upon launching Desktops, you can create a new virtual desktop by left clicking its tray icon. You can also assign hot keys for quick switching, just right-click the tray icon and click Options.
Desktops works on all Windows-based OS. I tested it under Windows 7 Ultimate Edition.
3 Months ago, I covered two website monitoring tools, Uptime Robot and WUMP. Both tools notifies webmaster and administrator if one of their sites goes offline. For today's article, I will share similar tool called SiteMonitor. It is free portable tool to monitor your websites or hosts at regular intervals and alert you when they are down. To add a new website to watch, just click the Add button from the main interface. Enter a name you want to label the site, URL and HTML to match to ensure that the returned content is the actual page. Hit the Add button to save it. HTML to match feature is useful to detect hacked websites where hackers usually change the home page with their own content.
Most of us value our personal privacy even at work. We often do something outside our job routine which may include internet surfing, playing games, reading ebook and other non-work related tasks. These side activities may not be acceptable to other co-workers or even your boss so we decide to do it discretely. To help you perform such tasks unnoticed, you can use panic button/boss key softwares such as Magic Boss Key. It is a free software that allows you to hide active program window instantly using a hot key. It hides all active windows like the browser windows,folder windows,applications windows, and even desktop icons and taskbar when somebody else you don't want to see your screens comes in.
You have two options to hide the windows, either by pressing the left and right mouse buttons at the same time, or by pressing F12. Pressing the same keys again will restore the windows on their exact original location. The program reacts so quickly so no one can notice the hiding process. The program works on Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7. I tested it under Windows 7 Home Edition.
Web applications/services becomes more and more popular nowadays as a replacement for traditional desktop softwares. Before to develop your own website, you should have softwares such as FrontPage, Dreamweaver or a simple text editor. Now with online tools like ShiftEdit, you can create your website without installing any software on your computer but instead just by using your favorite web browser. ShiftEdit is web-based IDE that enables you to develop websites from any computer or operating system. It supports web development in PHP, HTML, CSS and JS (Java Script). You can even upload files through built-in (S)FTP client, and modify previously accessed pages.
To start using ShiftEdit, you just need to have a Google Account. From the ShiftEdit home page, click Access ShiftEdit link and enter your Google account details.
The main interface is divided into 2 panels, the left panel is like a explorer window that shows files and folders, and the main window where you can perform basic operations like creating & editing web pages, uploading files, etc.
ShitEdit also supports language syntax debugging in real time, bookmarking, revision tracking and time saving code snippets.
Here is a short video to demonstrate further the usage of ShiftEdit.
Sometimes for whatever reason you have, you need to get the screenshot of a scene on a video. Of course you can always use the nifty print screen key method but if you want a better method where you can watch the video frame by frame and select the portion you want to save as image then you can use ImageGrab. It is a free software that allows you to extract images from any kind of videos such avi, wmv, mpeg, SVCD and etc. You can load the video either by drag & drop or through pressing the folder button (or CTRL+F). The video that have been loaded can be played, jump to specific position in the video and perform other things with the common playback controls. To choose the folder where the screenshots will be saved, press CTRL+S.
Pressing the left-click on the video or hitting F12 will grab the image from the current frame and will appear as a thumbnail and the image gets saved on the local system. Pressing Ctrl-C will copy the screenshot to the clipboard instead and you can paste it on any image editing tools you prefer. Take note that ImageGrab requires the Haali Media Splitter or ffdshow to be installed on your system. Don't worry the software will remind you after the installation if both codecs are not installed.
ImageGrab is available as portable software which eliminate installation. You can use it as soon you download it. It works on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.
If the classic Windows notepad is so plain and boring to you then you might be interested with an alternative editor that supports Text To Speech and Auto Typing. Yes you can have these cool features in World Wide Notepad. It is Microsoft's notepad alternative that has additional useful features such as auto typer to make typing the same sentence or word more easier and text to speech feature which reads all text in the current open document and speaks it out load to you. All the basic features are accessible from the top toolbar but unlike the classic notepad there is no straight way to change font face and size. However, you can use Ctrl+Mouse Wheel combination to change the font size.
Aside from Auto Typer and Text to Speech, World Wide Notepad also supports drag & drop and detection of URL in a document. It requires Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 and works on Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7; testing was done on Windows 7 home edition.
Last November, I covered Conceal, an encryption tool for windows. Right-click Encrypter is a similar software that encrypt any private file of yours with a password. Its main strength is the integration with Window's right click context menu, making it quicker and easier to encrypt files. Once installed, the application is immediately available via right-click context menu. Just right click the file you want to encrypt and choose "Right-Click Encrypter" from the pop-up menu. Enter and confirm the password then hit Encrypt button. The process will replace the file's icon indicating that the file is already encrypted.
