Portable Fiasco

Maybe you've heard about one of the new features of Windows 7, called Windows Snap. It offers a way to resize windows to exactly half the screen size very easily, which can be very useful with large monitors.

Windows Snap looks useful, but trivial enough that I wonder why it wasn't included in Windows sooner. And on its own, it's hardly compelling enough to make upgrading seem worthwhile.

It seems there's a free program called GridMove which offers a much more advanced and customizable version of this feature for any version of Windows. It can be used to imitate Windows Snap, or it can be set up to offer more complex window arrangements. As you drag a window around the screen, GridMove shows a shaded rectangle indicating the size and position the window will snap to if you drop it there. And you can still resize windows by hand if you wish.

On my newish Vista-based PC, GridMove is so responsive that it feels like it's built in to the OS. On my eight-year-old old XP system at the office, it's pretty sluggish, although it's still quicker and more accurate than dragging windows around by hand.

GridMove is configured with simple text-file scripts that divide your screen (or screens) into rectangles called triggers and grids, which go together in pairs. Drop a window on a trigger, and it will snap to the corresponding grid. In simple configurations, triggers and grids are the same size and shape; in more complicated arrangements, they're often different. Several grid scripts are included with the program, and it's easy to write more. There's even a forum thread devoted to user-created grids.

You know you're dealing with serious camera gear when the accompanying photographic advice is along the lines of "And remember... lift with your knees."

As for image quality, even wide open it's quite lovely. Stopped down to f/8 and f/11 it's actually quite remarkable. How remarkable? From midtown Manhattan we were able to read the street signs on the corner of JFK Boulevard East and 43rd St. in Weehawkin New Jersey when viewing image files at pixel resolution.

If Google's reckoning can be counted on, that's probably about 1.75 miles. Not quite spy-satellite territory, I guess, but much closer than most of us will ever get.

(via kottke.org)

Are you stuck with happily using Windows Vista? Are you jealous of the ultra-slick ease-of-use innovation that is Macintosh OSX Exposé?

Well then, you need a small, free program called Switcher, which does for Vista what Exposé did for the Mac, and thoroughly outdoes Microsoft's tame, slow, uninspiring Window-switching solution into the bargain.

In the past, it was my habit to turn this sort of animated Windows eye-candy off. That's partly because I wanted my computer to be fast, and partly because the eye-candy in older versions of Windows just wasn't very good. With Vista, though, for the first time I feel no urge to do that. Everything the GUI does is so fast and smooth that I don't feel it's slowing me down at all.