Nice features, especially for the price. Definitely worth a look at if you are in the market.

Thanks to Jim Edwards at EdwardsDesign for the hookup on the new host!

My apologies for being gone so long.  I do hope to get back to more regular postings.

Thanks!

Movie Maker is much improved.  It may not be iMovie, but it’s the best free movie program in Windows in my opinion.

Photo Gallery has made a HUGE jump forward.  Live Photo Gallery was already a fabulous tool for windows, but this really is amazing for a free program.  The easy of confirming faces to identify people is great.  The multiple built in ways to quickly post to Flickr, YouTube, SkyDrive, Facebook, etc. is very friendly.

Messenger isn’t nearly as annoying as it has been.  Sorry, but in the past it was horrible about the ads and junk in the way of the interface.  Much cleaner now.

Not making this a long post, but check it out at: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-beta

Muppets on YouTube

Quick item:

Not sure if I’ve recommended it before, but ImgBurn is my favorite tool for ISO files if you are running Windows.  Even though Windows7 now (finally) has support for burning ISO files, it’s nice to create them as well (guess will have to wait another 10 years for that eh Mr Softy?).

Did I mention it’s FREE?  I’m sure I mentioned it.

Get it now from The Official ImgBurn Website

I’d be glad to here your favorites!

It is beautiful in Vista & 7.  Much like Tweetie, you have simple selections for favs, directs, mentions, etc.  The animations for moving to the settings feels a lot like the attention to experience you get in Mac programs (very nice).

So as you both know, I’ve been playing with Mac OS X at home and finally downloaded a blog client to test out. I’m kind of a client minded person (maybe it’s my age).

My previous posts have almost all been in Windows using Live Writer (highly recommended). This post is being done in Ecto

Simple enough interface. We’ll see how it goes, but since Live Writer is free and awesome, it will take more than I’m seeing at the moment to make me want to spend my birthday money on a blog client.

Later all!

(The below picture of the dogs has nothing to do with this post. They are just too darn cute, that’s all.)

Safari (on the left) is my favorite for this view style.  If you select the view menu and choose to hide the menu bar, toolbar and the bookmarks bar.  Since the new 4.0 beta puts tabs on top, you get maximum viewing space within the window.  To go to a new address, a simple CTRL+L will drop down the toolbar so you can search or enter a site.  After you press enter, it hides again very nicely.

For FireFox, you get just slightly less screen since the tabs are not part of the window title bar, but still very nice.  You can use CTRL+L like Safari to go to a new site, but it doesn’t give you the whole bar, it gives you a separate open dialog box.

Sadly, for all the good improvements in IE8, you cannot seem to hide the location bar at all.  So I didn’t bother with a screen shot.

Shane Par-Due | Candidate for Alderman in Ward 1 of Raytown

I’m not a very politically active person, but wanted to add to the possible Google & search engine hits for Shane.  If you found this page and are in ward 1 of Raytown you need to meet him.  He’s a God fearing man with a passion for this town.

For a very long time, only on a Mac did it seem you had an option to turn this off via some command line tweaks, but it seems those of us still stuck in Windows finally have relief!!  I recently searched again for options and found the following…

1. Hold down the Windows key and press R.

2. Type %appdata% and click OK. (Yes, you could manually navigate there, but why?)

3. Open the Apple Computer folder.

4. Open the iTunes folder.

5. Open the iTunesPrefs.xml file using Wordpad. (Not notepad, Wordpad will be much easier to read the file as it formats it much better.  You can right-click and choose Wordpad from the Open with… dialog.)

6. Scroll down to the User Preferences section. There should be a couple of lines that say:

<key>User Preferences</key>
<dict>

7. Below that line, type in the following (I personally copied & pasted):

<key>create-filenames-with-tracknumber</key>
<data>
AA==
</data>

8. Save and close the iTunesPrefs.xml file. iTunes will no longer import track numbers on your imported CD’s now.

I would expect you should do all this while iTunes is closed.  I didn’t try while open & expect that could cause issues.

I must give credit to the first site I found this on, Technipages.  My apologies if someone else was the original person to discover the trick.  I’m just glad this nightmare is over.  Apple, if you are listening, please focus on adding features, not removing them.