Tag: MOUSE

Accidentally hitting the wrong key or mouse button at the wrong time can be a giant pain in the butt - for example, when it causes you to tab out of your favorite FPS just as you were about to pull off a sweet headshot. It's annoying for kids as well. I can't count how many times I've been watching my son accidentally bump a button and cause his Flash-based game to lose focus. Kid Key Lock is a ...

I'm a big fan of applications that extend the power of my keyboard, but I like being able to to teach my mouse some new tricks as well. Hot Corners is a application that allows you to assign a number of actions that occur when your mouse hovers over the corners of your desktop. Choose to show your desktop, lock your workstation, activate a screen saver, or launch any program on your computer. In ...

Sometimes you want your mouse to be zippy as possible, allowing you to scroll back and forth across a screen for a quick game of Pong or Arkanoid. But when you're trying to make precise movements in an image editing application, precision might be more important than speed. If your mouse is too fast, you might have a hard time drawing straight lines, for example. That's where SlowMousion comes ...

Firefox is like a box of chocolates-- No, let me try that again. Firefox is one of those applications that's so hard to write about, because there may be little tricks and shortcuts I've been using for some time, and someone will discover one and say, "Hey, that rocks! Why didn't anyone tell me?" Then light dawns over my marblehead that it is a useful trick, and I should have pointed it out. So ...

VolumeTouch is a utility that replaces the sound icon in the Windows system tray with a volume meter that gives you a live preview of your volume settings. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The program also lets you adjust your system volume using your mouse. Here's how it works, you hit the Ctrl+Shift buttons and then move your mouse scrollwheel up and down to adjust the volume. If you ...

Microsoft has just announced a bunch of new peripherals including an expensive ($250) wireless keyboard and mouse set due out in time for Vista. The set features Bluetooth connectivity (30 feet), back-lit keys, rechargeability and easy navigation buttons. There is a less-pricey version without the sexy trim for $150. This is part of Microsoft's plan to help users transition to Vista, by having the ...

As a laptop user, I work in many different environments, sometimes with external speakers, sometimes with headphones, and sometimes (sadly) using only my laptop's tinny little speakers. In each of these different configurations I have different ways of controlling volume, or at least I did. Now I use Volumouse. Lifehacker pointed to this extremely useful little utility, which allows you to use ...

I'm not really sure what to make of this one yet, but that said I suspect it's going to make a welcome addition to many Windows Media Center PCs out there. Triggerfinger is an application that was developed to allow a game controller to be used in place of a keyboard and mouse. This could also be very useful to UMPC devices that don't typically have a keyboard, and I could even eventually see a ...

KatMouse is a useful little application for Windows that makes your mouse's scroll wheel even more useful. It changes the behavior of the scroll wheel to let you scroll any window on the screen, not just the active one. So if you're, for example, entering text in one window while reading from another, you can scroll down in the latter without changing the focus away from where you're entering ...

I think "mouse odometer" apps, which track how far your cursor has traveled plus other useless but somehow fascinating data, have been around about as long as the mouse itself. OdoPlus such an app for Windows. In addition to tracking your cursor's travel in pixels and meters and counting how many times you click with each mouse button, OdoPlus generates a cool graphical click ...

We've featured more than one tip on how better to make use of your PC without being tied to your mouse, but Life Without Mouse is probably the most comprehensive guide I've seen to ditching your mouse entirely. The author starts us off with some shortcut key tips, gets a little more advanced with some apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux that let you create your own time-saving shortcuts, and then ...