Here are a few things that make Windows 7 neat.  Big thanks to Tim Sneath for most of these.

1) Windows Management – in XP, your choices on what you could do with arranging windows on your screen was somewhat limited.  You could maximize a window to take the whole screen, you could manually shrink it to the size you wanted and move it to the side, iconize it, etc.  In Windows 7, several “docking” features were introduced that make moving things around on your screen really easy.  If you press the Windows key, then the left arrow, the current window will dock to the left side of the screen.  WIN+right arrow will dock to the right, WIN+up arrow will maximize the window, WIN+down arrow will restore the window.  In addition to the WIN shortcuts, you can drag windows to the top to maximize it (double clicking the title bar still works too), or you can drag the window to the left or right to dock the window there.

On a related note, in a multi monitor setup, you can move windows from one screen to the other using WIN+SHIFT+right or left arrow.  Now were talking!

2) Get rid of the noise – Have you ever been working on a document and been annoyed that all of you other open windows are just in the way?  Press WIN-Home in Windows 7 and all windows but the current are minimized.  Press WIN-Home again to restore the windows.

3) Browser load times – This is really an IE8 tip, but I’ll include it here.  If IE is taking a long time to load, it may be because of the add-ons you are running.  Go to Tools/Manage Add Ons and you will see  a list of what IE loads at startup.  The neat thing is if you scroll to the right in the list, you can see the load times for the Add Ons.  This is a great way to see where the bottle necks are.

4) Quick start for taskbar apps – you can use WIN+1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 to quickly go to or start any of the first 5 apps in your taskbar.

5) Look at the desktop – Another helpful feature is WIN-space bar.  This combo lets you look at the desktop and see any icons or widgets you have.  You can also click on the rectangle all the way in the lower right hand corner – this is the old “show desktop” icon.

6) Additional instance of an open application – there are a couple of ways to do this, but by far the fastest is to hold the shift key while left clicking on the taskbar icon.  Way better than going through the start menu again, or right clicking and choosing to open the app.

7) Running with elevated rights.  If you hold CTL-Shift while clicking on a taskbar app, you will bring up a new instance with full administrator rights (assuming your account has permissions).  When Windows 7 is deployed in an enterprise, this will be GREAT.

8) Specialized Window switching – this one I love.  If you are like me, you have tons of windows open all the time.  In XP if you want to switch between windows you can ALT-Tab through them all, or you can click on the taskbar icon and guess which window is the one you want.  In Windows 7, you can essentially Alt-Tab through all of the open windows associated with a specific application without scrolling through every open window.  You do this by holding down the CTL key, then clicking on the taskbar icon for the application you want.  Windows will “scroll” through the open windows as you click the icon.  This is great if you want to scroll through all of your open Outlook windows, for example, but don’t want to run through everything you have open.

9) Move focus the taskbar – this is neat keyboard shortcut.  If you press WIN-T you will move focus to the taskbar.  You can then use the arrow keys to move through your taskbar apps to choose the one you want.  For keyboard shortcut junkies, this is great.

10) Open windows explorer keyboard shortcut – Press WIN+E.  This will open up and explorer window at the Computer Node.  Note that SHFT+click on the explorer icon opens at the Document Library Node.

More to come -

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One of the neat features of Gmail is that you can use it to aggregate all of your email addresses to one inbox.  You add the email addresses to your gmail account, and they connect via POP or IMAP to your other accounts and everything is in one place.  Until this past Thursday, when you replied to a mail that was not to your mail account, Gmail would put your main account in the “Sender” field so that your mail would not be kicked as spam.  What the recipient would see is a message that the mail was send “on behalf of” the intended address “from” your main account.  While this is ok in most instances, if you are trying to mask that Gmail is the tool you are using for all of your mail, then this can be annoying.

Thursday, Google introduced a way to route your mail through the SMTP server of your choice instead of their SMTP servers, so your mail will look like it is comming from the system you choose and the “on behalf of ” messages will go away.  Neat!  If your office allows POP/IMAP and you allows remote SMTP then you are golden.  If not, well then you have to live with the “on behalf of” messages.

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What is Growl?  In their own words:

Put simply, Growl lets you know when things happen. Files finished downloading, friends came online, new email has arrived – Growl can let you know when any event occurs with a subtle notification. The rest of the time, Growl stays out of your way.

Along with letting you know when things happen, Growl also gives you full control over how you are notified and what action (if any) you want to take in response to the notification. You can choose to be alerted with a visual indicator or an audible alert, both, or neither. You can choose the type of display that is shown, whether the display remains on the screen, the importance of the notification, and even if the notification should be forwarded to another computer. You can have notifications that trigger an email, run a script, launch a program, or are read out loud.

Growl has been available as a MAC application for some time now, so their foray into Windows land is a welcome addition to help you manage your machine. All of you have Windows Update on, right?  Well now you have a tool that you can configure to notify you and/or take action on lots of other things on your machine.

How does it work?  The setup is somewhat manual, but this is a good thing, since the whole point is that Growl is unobtrusive.  Once you install the application, the software sits in your system tray waiting to be told what to do.  You download pluggins from the Growl site for the applications you want.  There are tons of apps there – Firefox, iTunes, Outlook, Gmail, even a system monitor.  You run the setup for the app you want and let Growl do the rest.  What you get is a configurable pop up window for whatever application you choose.

You get configurable reminders for things as they happen – new emails, calendar appointments, what the tune you are playing on iTunes is (they have Pandora too).  New apps are being added all the time, and there is a GNTP library and command line tools that you can use to work with almost any API.

Neat stuff.  Not perfect, but I like it so far.

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They are referring to the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore application processor.  According to the ARM site, the new chip deisgn will provide faster processing with lower power consumption for all but the most CPU intensive applications.

“The Cortex-A9 MPCore processor is the first ARM processor to combine the Cortex application class architecture with multiprocessing capabilities for scalable performance and provides enhanced multicore technology that includes:

• Accelerator Coherence Port (ACP) for increased system performance and lower system power
• Advanced Bus Interface Unit for low latency in high bandwidth devices
• Multicore TrustZone® technology with interrupt virtualization to enable hardware based security and enhanced paravirtualization solutions
• Generalized Interrupt Controller (GIC) for software portability and optimized multicore communication“

source: AMD product description

White paper on the Cortex-A9.

There are already phones on the market that make use of the ARM A9 single core chip, namely the LG Renoir shown at CES in January (video here).  The phone looks great in the video; the ARM Mali-55 GPU really makes the user interface smooth, with Vista like windows features.  Without the phone in hand I can’t comment direcltly, but I imagine streaming video would look very nice on this phone.  Of course, this phone is not available in the US (why would it be?) but it has some amazing features – 8 Megapixel camera, touch focus, several still shot modes, Dolby Mobile, DivX playback, Slow-Mo video recording, GPS, 3G, WiFi and will play Flash.  It is so irritating the the US mobile companies are just shamefully behind the curve with mobile devices.  I have to believe that most people don’t know what they are missing, so they don’t know to complain.

Since ARM is just the chip designer and not the manufacturer, it’s difficult to tell exactly when these chips will hit US phones, but if CNET is correct, we could see the chips in new phones next year.  If true, then I will NOT buy a iPhone 3GS until I know what Apple is doing with regard to the new ARM design.  Why would you invest in another 2 year contract when you know that the new chip is out there?  If they combine the CPU with the updated GPU chips, then the iPhone’s sluggishness could go away completely.  Now that might be worth $199.

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According to Google’s release, Gmail will sync to the device in 60 seconds.  In field testing by eWeek, contact and calendar “do not get pushed to the device like e-mail does, but instead they piggyback with push mail.”  According to Google, this is to save on battery life.  Sounds like a nonsense explanation to me, but who am I to question.

I like the sound of this, but coming from a financial technology background, I don’t see it as being adopted by any finance firms because of the email retention and compliance rules.  Google Apps does have Postini for retention and compliance customization, and for legal searches, but I’d be surprised to see a finance firm releasing email control to any third party.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Gmail, and I think there are huge advantages to Gmail for the enterprise.  I have, in fact, recommended it to a client of mine.  That said, there is just no replacement for native MS Exchange.

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Application delivery to multiple devices is always a challenge for organizations.  An enterprise with 1000 machines will, without proper controls, have 1000 different configurations.  With IT resources stretched to their breaking point in the current ecconomic environment, it is not practical to sneaker-net software delivery.  What can you do?

You can package applications to create installable MSI’s then use a delivery tool like Landesk or Alteris.  This should be part of the solution, but packaging to MSI’s is not always easy, and done correctly takes lots of time and energy.

For smaller applications you can use auto delivery tools like ClickOnce.  These are great tools – they allow the application to check its version against a “gold” copy and if it is out of date, the new version will be delivered to the desktop automatically.  The problem with these types of tools is if an app has other software dependencies (Adobe, Office PIA’s, whatever) a simple upgrade via ClickOnce will not be enough.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply copy an executable (a la Linux)  to a machine that contained everything an app needed?  Well, you can with Thinstall.

ThinStall puts a shell OS and whatever components you want around an application then compiles them into a single executable that you can copy to any machine.  When you run the executable, it starts up a VM with its own registry and virtual C drive located in the user’s profile space (no worry about admin right here).  The target machine’s OS can be different than the OS the application needs.  This can be great for legacy apps that are not compatible with newer OS versions.  Also, since the executable runs in  it’s own space, you can run differing versions of the same applicatoin on a single machine.  For example, you can run IE6 and IE7 side by side.

The advantages of this technology are many.  In a Citrix environment, if you run standard installs and have to upgrade MS Office for example, you will have to go through the install on every machine in the cluster.   This can mean downtime and is time consuming.  If you ThinStall the Office suite, upgrades are just a file copy away.  Another advantage is that you can have the executable on a file server and just put shortcuts  on desktops.  Do that, and you only need to update a small number of copies to upgrade large numbers of people.

There are downsides, of course.  The executables are huge when compiled.  Half a gig for a single executable is not uncommon.  There are quirks to the software too – not all applications will work, especially those that require interaction with other applications on the desktop.  For example, if you have an application that uses Excel or Word components, it is difficult to get them to work right.  Also, if you have an application that contains code that can be used by another application on the desktop (think spreadsheet addins included with many market data applications) these too are difficult to get right.

Most applications are a breeze though – use Vmware to run a clean OS, start the Thinstall capture, install the components and the application you need, run the post capture and compile and you are done.  Many apps take less than 15 minutes to complete the package.

This is seriously good stuff.

• Windows 7 - First impressions So far so good - I installed the beta on a couple of laptops in the last month, and so far I like what I see.  It's very much Vista centric, but without the sllllloooooowwwwwness.  Boot time is much improved (under a minute) and there are some added features that......
• SVCHOST.exe - What is it and why are there so many of them? I get asked this a lot.  When you run Task Manager in XP and look at the process list, you see tons of svchost.exe processes running.  You can't kill them (you don't really want to) and there's no obvious reason that there are so many of them. What are they? ......
• Dual core processors for mobile devices? ARM dual core chips for iPhone, Palm Pre next year CNET is reporting that ARM, the company responsible for designing the architecture behind most mobile comuting CPU's said  that mobile phone makers will be delivering devices that run on ARM"s latest dual core CPU's as early as next year. They are referring to the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore application processor.  According......
• 10 Windows 7 Tips So far, Windows 7 is the bee's knees.  The more I find out, the more I like, which is saying a lot - with operating systems, it's usually the other way around! Here are a few things that make Windows 7 neat.  Big thanks to Tim Sneath for most of......
• How do I find my Windows Product key? Another issue I come across now and again is finding the windows product key for a client who doesn't have the original software his machine came with.  In many cases, the OS product key is on the Microsoft label right on the machine, but if you need the Office product......

• Running Windows applications under Linux There are a number of Windows applications that may not have suitable replacements under linux. I know a lot of people that have considered switching, but there was "one program holding them back." Fortunately there are several options on how to keep that one application from holding you back. Well......
• Why I'll Try to Buy a Palm Pre Tomorrow If there are supplies at my local Sprint store, I'll be the owner of a new Palm Pre on tomorrow morning. With Sprint pricing it at $199 (after a $100 mail-in rebate and a renewing of contract for two years), it's a decision that I didn't even have to think......
• New wine and new bottles this month for linux users to run windows applications Well, one of the big items in the last span in linux news has been related to WINE... (Wine Is Not an Emulator). WINE of course in the context of linux is a layer of compatibility to allow Windows applications to run under linux without a virtual machine such as......
• Increase Traffic Software To Boost Precise Website Traffic And Revenue Increase traffic software can help anyone looking for ways to increase internet website traffic and visitors dramatically. Of course there are ways to do it but the very best way to increase visitors is with free and cost efficient techniques so that you can increase your ROI. PPC campaigns can......
• Free Business Software - Open Office Vs Microsoft Office   For many small businesses Microsoft Office is a GOLD standard software package. It includes Excel for accounting, tracking inventory, developing spreadsheets, etc. I have been working with Excel since it was introduced and it has gotten better and better every year. With someone who knows what they are doing......

I set up the Calendar as a test – ActiveSync is a proven technology, so I expect this to work well.  So far it does.

Detail instructions on the setup are here http://www.google.com/mobile/apple/sync.html.  The setup is very simple, just set up an exchange account on your iPhone, give it your google credentials and sync to m.google.com.  

Only contacts and calendar are available at the moment – it will give you an error if you try and choose to sync your email.  That said, I wouldn’t be surprised to see google turn up  activesync for email too.

This is the kind of thing I love about Google.  Most other mail providers would not go the extra mile to allow contacts and calendar sync without a cost.  This is totally free and works well.  Score!

• Growl for Windows Growl v2.0 beta 18 was recently released for Windows - should you care?  If you are like most people, it is getting harder and harder to keep up with everything happening around you on the web.  Twitter, facebook, email, calendar, IM - the draws on your attention are almost overwhelming. ......
• iPhone 3.0 installed I've been using the iPhone 3.0 software for a couple of days now and other than a minor installation glitch (my fault) the upgrade was painless.  Everything seems to work as advertised, and so far, I like what I see. WiFi improvements - One of the things that really bugged......
• iPhone Tips - 10 things you may not know Here are 10 things you may not know how to do on the iPhone. Web Clips:You can create a short cut to a web page as an icon on your iPhone.  To do this, tap the "+"  when on a web page, then tap "Add to Home Screen."  This will......
• Outlook for the iPhone? eWeek is reporting that a Microsoft Executive, Stephen Elop, while speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo hinted that Microsoft will eventually release a version of the Office suite for mobile devices, specifically the iPhone.  I think this is important for a couple of reasons.  It further emphasizes MS' current move......
• iPhone 3.0 release date - June 17, iPhone 3Gs details released Apple announced at WWDC 2009 that the iPhone 3.0 software will be available to current iPhone users on June 17th.  At the same event Apple announced that the iPhone 3GS will be available for purchase June 19th, 2009 in 16GB and 32 GB models for $199 and $299 respectively.  They......

• Is this Being Frugal, Cheap or Stealing? We've looked at some other questionable behavior and now I'd like to get some feedback about a situation where I tried to pay for something but accidentally got my money back. How far do I have to go to give 'found money' back? I bought glasses recently through an online......
• Google Voice Can Save You Money A few weeks ago, I found out about Google Voice, another service by Google. It has a lot of great features that are very useful and can potentially be used to save a lot of money. I signed up immediately, paying a few bucks on Ebay for an invite, and......
• There Is No Undo in Google Wave My good friend Bwana was kind enough to nominate me for Google Wave, and I finally received the invitation yesterday. With all the hype surrounding Google Wave, you may be surprised to learn that it still lacks one very simple piece of functionality that one might take for granted until......
• Have You Noticed Google Advisor? I do a lot of reading in Google Reader. I have about 50 blogs I read consistently, so each morning I just scroll through all the interesting articles. Recently, I've noticed one ad in particular: Google Advisor. Of course, I got interested, so I clicked over, and what did I......
• Comprehend The Greatest Rewards With Proper Exchange Links Backlinks are the single most significant aspect of search engine optimization since with out them you might not get out of the starting gate. In order to increase your ranking and get your internet site to a fantastic a position in the search engines like google, you will need a......

Until now.

Enter TweetDeck, “A Simple and Fast Way to Experience Twitter”.   TweetDeck organizes your tweets in a simple columnar format so that you can run through posts quickly and easily.  You can also group people you follow into categories so that you can, for example, separate friends from colleagues.

Replies are also separated into a column so that you can see them easily.  This is really neat – a friend of mine replied to a tweet I posted a month or more ago and I missed it.  Once I loaded tweetdeck, the reply was right there and I was able to respond, belatedly, to him.

Additionally, the application will post an on screen notification (similar to outlooks new mail notifications, when a new tweet arrives.  This is helpful if the application itself is closed but you want to know when new tweets are posted.

Overall I’m really happy with the application – it makes browsing through my tweets much more efficient.

• Well that didn't take long - iPhone 3Gs jailbreak is released Independence day for iPhone 3GS users is here.  George Hotz has released an application that will unlock the 3GS so that you can install whatever applications you want, not just what Apple wants you to have.  The blog post with instructions is here.  You need Windows (but not windows 7),......
• 10 Facebook Privacy Settings You NEED to Know. I will summarize here, but the full article by Nick O'Neill from www.allfacebook.com is a great read, and something I wish I had written.  Facebook is a great tool, but in a world where information and identity theft is rampant, you need to know how to protect yourself from, well, yourself.......
• Windows 7 - First impressions So far so good - I installed the beta on a couple of laptops in the last month, and so far I like what I see.  It's very much Vista centric, but without the sllllloooooowwwwwness.  Boot time is much improved (under a minute) and there are some added features that......
• Twitter is mostly useless drivel A couple of recent studies on Twitter and people who tweet point out that over 40% of all tweets fall into the category of "pointless babble".  Pear Analytics put out a report with these and other interesting findings.  I'm sure it comes as no surprise that 75% of all tweets......
• Eye-Fi How cool is this?  This is the Eye-Fi wireless memory card for your camera.  It wirelessly transfers photos and video from your camera to your computer and/or to your favorite photo site whenever you are in range of the wireless network you specify.  No more cables, no more uploads, just......

• Etiquette for Hunting Forums When you visit hunting forums there are some things you should keep in mind about how to behave and how to go about posting and answering questions. Many people go to forums and message boards and jump right in without looking at the rules of the board or knowing very......
• Blogging For Money {Sponsored Post} I've been talking about people who blog for money. Well I've been making some money off advertising at the bottom of my blog. Well I've been paid to post this article on Responsibility In Pay Day Loans. What do you guys think of people who monetize their blogs in this......
• Blog Love I have really come to love blogging. It's a great outlet for me to write down the things I am thinking, both serious and personal along with the ridiculous thoughts that cross my mind throughout the day. One of my favorite things of the day is when I check my blog......
• 10 Ways To Connect Better with your Blogs Followers [/caption] 10 Secrets to Connecting to People through Blogging Blogs can be fantastic vehicles to connect to others on both a personal and professional level. But with thousands of blogs out there, your blog has to compete with others to gain attention. Here are 10 secrets any blogger can......
• The Twitter Fallacy - Social Media Strategies That Don't Work. You can follow these few steps to recalibrating your social media presence right away, by making a few simple changes to both your Twitter account, as well as your "approach" to accumulating followers on Twitter: 1. Start Tweeting! I find thousands of people on Twitter who don't tweet anything......