These are a few of my favorite things ...

Just thought I'd share some cool little utilities I found recently.

First, I've been hooked on the concept of virtual desktops ever since I ran them on an X workstation long, long ago. They are well supported on Linux, but not Windows. There is that free "powertoys" thing but, IMHO, it is a piece of crap. I have tried various other utilities but they have either turned out to be slow, unreliable, quirky or some combination of the above. Recently I tried goScreen, and I've finally found my virtual desktop manager for Windows! It's $20 to register but there is a generous trial period so you can see if it's right for you. I have no connection to these folks other than being a happy, registered user.

I also recently discovered a nifty little minimalist system monitoring utiltity called simeter. It's also shareware, only $10. I'm still playing with it. It's cool, but I am not sure it's something I'm going to really use enough to pay for it. On the other hand, it is only $10!

Finally, one of my favorite little utilities which is, best of all, FREE, is FreeShade. Apparently this concept is common with the Mac (never used one!) but I was first introduced to the concept of a "windowshade" when I was playing with WindowBlinds. Certain of the themes in WindowBlinds supported this extra button on the titlebar which allows you to "roll up" the window and just have a floating title bar. It worked great, and WindowBlinds is cool, and I even registered it a few versions back, but I just found that although it looked pretty, the performance penalty and memory footprint wasn't worth it (for me). Really the only thing I hated giving up was the windowshade feature. I tried finding another program that did _just_ the windowshade feature. I didn't have much luck, and the ones I did try really kinda sucked, with the exception of FreeShade. It has a small footprint, is simple, and does exactly what I want. I can't believe it's free!