Tag: SHELL

While I know there are plenty of good replacements out there for Windows Explorer, I'm not ready to jump ship just yet. I don't really need any really advanced functionality, but there are a few things I'd like to add. Vista-style breadcrumbs and tabbed browsing, for example. QuizoApps has coded two small extensions that do the job quite well with a minimal impact on resources. Both addons are ...

The Windows Explorer shell is great and all, but I've written before about some of it limitations and omissions - and offered up some downloads that help patch the holes. DM2 is yet another solid choice: it's free, tiny, portable and it's got a ton of useful tricks up its sleeve. DM2 looks like any other shell enhancer at first, offering all the expected tweaks: it'll minimize apps to the ...

One of our beefs with Windows is that there are some pretty obvious customization options missing. Little things, but things we'd use if they were there. Fortunately, NuonSoft's Shell Enhancer packs a bunch of these features into a single 2.5MB installer. What can it do? For starters, it allows you to "roll-up" windows (display only the title bar), make any window transparent, minimize ...

There are plenty of things the Windows shell does really well, but there are other relatively minute details that have been overlooked since Windows 95 that really piss us off - like the ability to click and drag taskbar buttons. Thankfully, this 600k app that will let you do just that. Taskbar Shuffle is 32-bit Windows-only (it works on all versions, 95 to Vista), obviously, and it gives you free ...

Search engines don't get much easier to use than Google. You type what you're looking for into a text box, and the web site will spit results back at you. But if you're looking for a slightly geekier experience, you owe it to yourself to check out goosh. Goosh has the look and feel of a Unix or Linux shell, but the site is powered by Google. If you want to conduct a web search, just enter a ...

digg_url = "http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2008/02/04/cairo-windows-shell-replacement-coming-soon/"; Cairo is an upcoming Windows shell replacement. What exactly does that mean? There are plenty of programs that change the way you launch programs or perform other basic functions in Windows. And Cairo started out as little more than a Windows taskbar replacement. But it's since evolved into a ...

Earlier this week Microsoft released the final version of Windows PowerShell 1.0. PowerShell, formerly known as Monad, is a powerful text-based command shell for Windows, basically the command prompt on steroids. Though I can't for the life of me find a changelog for the latest version, there's a wealth of information at Microsoft's TechNet web site as well as the official PowerShell blog. I'm ...

The Windows Client team, the division of Microsoft responsible for the user interface in Windows Vista (and previous versions), has finally jumped on the bandwagon and started a blog: Shell: Revealed. The new blog is a place for Microsoft's UI developers to talk about the changes in Vista and communicate with developers and enthusiasts. So far the blog hasn't revealed anything especially stunning, ...

The first two fall under "taskbar enchancements," and the last is a nifty new virtual desktop manager. One of my biggest pet peeves in Windows is the management of the taskbar. First, I should be able to reorder the items in the taskbar. Enter Taskbar Shuffle, which allows you to simply drag-and-drop the items as you see fit. What a concept! Now even if I've got Photoshop lined up first (even ...

Remember Monad, the next-generation command shell that was supposed to be part of Windows Vista? It's still not going to be part of Vista, but development continues and yesterday saw the arrival of the first release candidate. Microsoft has given it a new name, Windows PowerShell (I gotta say I liked Monad and MSH better), and given it its own web site where you can learn how to use it and even ...

Tactile 3D is another attempt at providing a three-dimensional interface to navigate your Windows computer. The most common 3D paradigm is that of a house or building with many rooms containing objects we would expect to see in the real world: file cabinets, picture frames for photo files and TVs for video files. Tactile 3D takes a different approach, turning everything into a very high-tech ...