Shankar Ganesh

Docks are little applications that act as program launchers. They hold the shortcuts to your applications for easy access at anytime. Macs have a dock application in-built, but Windows doesn’t.

The advantages in having a dock:

• Docks make your desktop pretty
• Applications can be accessed instantly, saving time
• You need not necessarily go to the desktop every time you want to start a program
• Application indicators on the dock tell you whether a program is running or not
• High Quality Icons: Docks support PNGs
• Windows are minimized to docks, and your Windows taskbar is no longer necessary

Docks have drag and drop support, so you can always drag an .exe to create a shortcut in the dock. They have zoom and transition and other animation effects that add a lot of eyecandy.

ObjectDock
This is one of the best dock applications available for Windows. It’s bundled with a pack of quality icons, so you need not hunt for high quality icons on the net. This one will make you say ‘Wow’ with its amazing features. And when coupled with Windows Vista, you get live preview thumbnails of minimized application and folders.

RocketDock
RocketDock is a feature rich application, complete with real time window previews if you’re on Vista. It’s got support for a wide number of languages, and is Unicode compliant. RocketDock supports multiple monitors too.

RK Launcher
This is my favourite, that’s got most of the features that other Windows Dock Apps have. By default, RK Launcher adds a shortcut to every new application that’s launched, and you can turn this feature off if you wish.

Y’z Dock
Yz Dock is a developing dock application, and is being improved constantly. You could look out for new features soon.

So what’s your favourite dock? If you know any other good ones, share with us in the comments.

Your USB drive has a lot of portable software placed on it. You have to navigate to reach the .exe files to start up your applications, but how about a tiny little application called PStart that makes your job easier?

PStart allows you to start the applications on your portable device with ease. You can create shortcuts to the applications, folders and files located on your removable disks , and also easily launch them with this tray tool.

PStart uses relative paths, meaning that, even if your portable drive gets a different drive letter on another computer, all shortcuts are perfectly accessible.

If you have a long list of applications on PStart, you can even search them and add notes. PStart is extremely configurable, and you can change the configuration by going to the Settings menu. You can also install PStart on your local hard drive too.

Download PStart here and the screenshots are here

Time for another batch of links…

• Atul tells you how to convert Youtube Videos to MP3
• News Blog has some adsense optimization tips
• Nirmal talks about the Firefox Speed Dial Extension
• Thilak has an article on why you should leave real names in comments
• Madhur tells you how to resize several images with as single click
• LyteByte has a good article on using different profiles on Firefox
• Rishi tells you about a Show Yourself widget
• Shashank tells you about an online encyclopedia that aims to list all lifeforms on earth
• Gili tells you how to rename the Recycle Bin in Windows Vista
• Easy Tweaks Blog tells you about checking Gmail messages from your Vista Desktop
• Vivien explains the Technorati Blog Authority
• Ilker has article on how to get your name in 5 different scripts
• Don’t miss out this awesome CSS Dock Menu

Have fun!

Your WordPress Control Panel is a pain to navigate through.

For example to edit a particular page, you have to go to Manage >> Pages >> Select particular page to edit: which means 3 clicks and 2 pageloads. Irritating.

How about a plugin that eases your Control Panel Navigation?
Less clicks, faster navigation.

Lighter Admin Drop Menus is for you. This plugin provides CSS based drop down menus for easier and speedier navigation.

Have a look:

Cool, isn’t it?
Save time, Increase Productivity: Get the Lighter Admin Drop Menus Plugin

Ubuntu Studio is a multimedia flavour of Ubuntu. It’s aimed at the creation and editing of multimedia: for audio, video and graphic enthusiasts and professionals.

Ubuntu Studio has a whole lot of open source software packages for the multimedia user. They include audio creation softwares, players, sequencers, recorders, music synthesizers, typesetters, video editors, graphic editing programs like Inkscape, GIMP, Blender 3D Modeler and whole lot more. A complete list of available packages is can be found here.

Here’s a screenshot:

More screenshots can be found here

The website seems to be jammed as of now, so you’re lucky if the page loads!

Ubuntu Studio | Ubuntu Studio Download Page | Ubuntu Studio Wiki

Well, this evening, I just logged in to my Gmail account, only to find something happening wrong. It was actually a temporary error, Google told me, and I was lucky enough to get back into my Gmail account within minutes. But what if my archived messages were gone? Some important ones! What if….

The worst thing might happen at anytime. Nothing is cent percent perfect. So why not take up some precautions?

Well, I earlier set up my Gmail account such that it forwards all emails to a private Google group and I established it, thanks to this tutorial on Google Tutor. When this is done, there’s a copy of all your arrived emails in a private Google group, accessible only to you. So when something’s wrong, you can access your emails – safe and sound – on Google Groups.

…Posts that were part of the Top 5 Group Project by Problogger
Make sure you read these links from Day 3:

Top 5 ways to keep your WordPress Blog valid
Top 5 steps for choosing a blog theme
Top 5 reasons to start a blog
Top 5 Gradients for blog design
Five reasons to love Ubuntu
Top 5 reasons to Live
Top 5 Productivity tips people know, but do not follow

A simple RSS Button:
A simple RSS Button on your sidebar is more than enough to lure visitors to subscribe if you have good content. You could get a standard RSS Feed Icons set here.

Drop Down Chicklets
These chicklets allow your visitors to subscribe to your blog’s RSS Feed in their own favourite feed reader. People can click the button corresponding to the feed reader of their choice. You can get chicklets here, here or here.

Under Individual Blog Posts:
Requesting visitors to subscribe to RSS Feeds by displaying the feed link with a message like ‘If you liked this article, please subscribe to the feed here’ may get you more RSS readers.

RSS Tickers
You could display a latest posts ticker on your sidebar to grab your visitors’ attention to subscribe to your feed.

This can be placed on the top of your blog. You could make one such widget here. If you provide a Feedburner feed, you can get the headline animator for your posts under the Publicize tab in your Feedburner Dashboard.

Under Individual Posts (2):(Secret Tip)
Well, this is one thing my friend Rishi and I have been experimenting with recently. And it seemed to help. Appealing readers to subscribe via a Post-it sticky note It helps! Display a sticky on single post pages and check for yourself. It grabs visitors’ attention. But you have to make sure that this will suit your blog’s theme. Here’s a Post it note generator.

This post is a part of Darren’s Top 5 Group writing Project. Do you have any tips? Share them in the comments

It’s now possible for Linux users to mount Wikipedia as a Virtual Filesystem in their computers, thanks to a project called WikipediaFS.

Wikipedia editors can now create and edit any Wikipedia page in their text editor or word processor, without any hassles. This translates lesser reloads in browsers.

Cool, isn’t it? But there’s no idea how this is gonna help newbies.

This entire project is based on Filesystem in Userspace or FUSE and this even gets more interesting. A variety of FUSE-based tasks can be found in this page.

[Via Digg]

I’ve been using Twitter for the past few days and I’m hooked. I searched for some Greasemonkey scripts for twitter and found these. If you don’t have Greasemonkey, download it here.

Twitter Add, Follow and Leave links
This script puts ‘add’, ‘follow’ or ‘leave’ links in a twitter user’s page for you to utilise.

Twitter Last Twitter Preview
This script will display your friend’s last twitter when you hover your mouse pointer over his or her image in the twitter sidebar.

Post2Sbm
This script has an UI to help you post your bookmarks to twitter

Twitter Profile Pop up script
This script displays your friend’s profile details when you hover over his/her picture in the Twitter sidebar

Twitter Lite Client
This is a little twitter client that functions inside your Firefox browser. Hit Shift + T to bring it up in the bottom corner. Another such Greasemonkey client is here. If this didn’t work for you after installation, go to Tools >> Greasemonkey >> Manage User Scripts >> Twitter_Lite >> Click ‘Add’ under included pages and Type http://* and click ‘OK’ and then use Shift + T to check whether this works.

Know what? This client has many useful and hidden features? Check this comment

Twitter Friend Name Helper
This script will show a list of your friends’ names when you key in ‘@’ or ‘D’

Browse with Twitter
Updates your twitter status to ‘Browsing: Document’ whenever you load a webpage :S

Twitter Mod

This script improves the User Interface of Twitter’s Webpages. It’s got a lot of features which beautify and add some functionality. There’s a search feature available when you install this script, which allows you to search for a particular string in twits. Another notable feature is the TinyURL handler, which brings up the original URL when you click on a TinyURL, so that you can decide whether to move to that page or not. In real terms, it’s actually many scripts blended into one.

Twitter with Meebo
If you use both Meebo and Twitter quite often, then this one is for you. This script shows up a twit box on your Meebo page where you could type in your messages. You can also set your Meebo status message and your twit at once, in a single click.

Note: I found some of these scripts not working, but still, you could try them and check whether they work for you. And this post will be updated constantly. Make sure that you’ve bookmarked it!