This is a collection of tools with no particular theme other than the fact that I use these all the time and, like the tic-tac advert, they give me a “little lift” as I go about my everyday tasks.  Perhaps there is something here that you will find useful too.

1.    Xobni

I get a ton of email each day (and I don’t mean the ones offering anatomical enhancements either) and I keep all significant messages for at least a year – there are over 16,000 messages.  So how do I find the conversation I had with someone a couple of months ago or the file they sent me?  Simple – Xobni finds it for me!  In essence, this tool is a search engine for your email files.

Take a look at www.xobni.com

2.    Fences

Before fences, my desktop was a mess of icons: shortcuts to programs and folders, documents I was working on, files I had dragged out of an email to look at … Anyway, you get the picture.  Now, though, everything is neatly fenced in.

Take a look at www.stardock.com/products/fences/

3.    Plaxo

Although the Plaxo website has now become yet another social media site, this is actually a distraction from their main offering which is contact and calendar management.  Plaxo can hook into Outlook, Gmail, Aol, Yahoo, Hotmail, and other email clients to ensure your calendar and contacts are automatically updated in all places when you make a change in one place.  You can also accept the changes that other Plaxo members make to their own contact details so you are automatically up to date. 

Take a look at www.plaxo.com

4.    Winamp

The open source alternative to Windows Media Player.  I find Winamp to be much less cluttered and easier to use and customise.  I particularly like the “windowshade mode” which reduces the Winamp Window to a title bar containing the essential controls – allowing me to find the pause button quickly when I need to take a phone call.  Also, the lyrics plugin is great when I want to sing along.

Get Winamp from www.winamp.com and the lyrics plugin from www.lyricsplugin.com

5.    Last.fm

Winamp is great when I want to listen to certain songs or a particular album but setting up playlists for general background music is just too time consuming.  Install the “scrobbler” on your desktop and it keeps track of what you listen to.  Then, when you feel like something random, it will play tracks based on your personal listening preferences.

Begin by registering at www.last.fm

6.    Google Earth

Ok, so it is great fun looking at satellite pictures of your home town but this program does have serious applications as well.  For instance, I use the terrain height exaggeration to quickly identify potential sites for radio transmitters and I use the place-marking tools to create fully annotated maps and plans for various projects.

Download from earth.google.co.uk

7.    Tweetdeck

I fully understand why people do not “get” Twitter.  When I visited the twitter.com website, I didn’t get any sense at all of the power of this thing.  However, I soon found out that almost everybody uses a Twitter client rather than the website.  Tweetdeck allows you to track multiple social networking sites in one place, organise the messages into columns for different interest groups and automatically alert you to messages related to your chosen keywords – so you will know within minutes when someone is looking for information about your products and services.

More information at www.tweetdeck.com

8.    Secunia PSI

Keeping up to date with all those pesky software updates can be a real chore.  Often it does not get done at all, which gives crackers an open invitation to attack your machine using one of thousands of well-known vulnerabilities.  This handy piece of software keeps track of all the applications installed on your machine, alerts you when updates that address security issues are available and makes it easy for you to download and install those updates.  It is a must-have in my opinion.

Get it from secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/

9.    Spybot Search and Destroy

This program finds and eliminates the spyware, adware and other nasties that are not routinely detected by anti-virus software.  It also “immunises” your web browser against common attacks and monitors your system for the changes that malware likes to make – asking you to approve anything it sees as suspicious.

Get your copy at www.safer-networking.org

10.    Read It later add-on for Web Browsers

When I am doing research on the Internet, I often come across pages that are interesting (sometimes even useful) but not related to what I am looking for right now.  I used to bookmark these pages to go back to later but that just led to my bookmarks list getting completely cluttered up.  With this add-on, I can mark a page with one click and come back to it later.  Once I have finished with it, one click marks it as read and it is taken out of the reading list.  Specific version are available for Firefox and the iPhone or you can use the website from any browser.  You can also synchronise your account so that pages you find on your phone can be read on your desktop and vice-versa.

Find out more at www.readitlaterlist.com

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