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If you use a Mac, then you know all about Finder, the program manager you love to hate. Sure, it gets the job done, but why are some things just so darn hard? The cavalry has just arrived.

TotalFinder gives you a bunch of features that Apple probably should have already put in Finder but didn't. Like tabs. Everybody's got tabs, but not Finder. Instead of having half-a-dozen Finder windows open on your desktop, open just one and fill it with tabs. A hot key brings up the Finder window from wherever you are; no more hunting for an icon to click on. And it deals with the dreaded .DS_Store files in a way that makes more sense. It'll even show you hidden files if you want.

TotalFinder is a free (for now) Mac application. They're threatening to start charging at some point down the road, so you may want to grab it while you can. It requires OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) to run.

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When you're busily working away on your computer, you've got a bunch of windows open. You're working on that big report, you're crunching some numbers in a spreadsheet, you're surfing the web, and you're taking a look at the latest viral video on YouTube. As your focus changes, you're moving between windows. At some point you're going to want to rearrange them on your desktop, so you click-and-drag on the title bar to move them around. Did you know there's an easier way?

Taekwindow is a tool that lets you click and drag from anywhere on a window. Just hold down the [ALT] key while you click and drag with the mouse button, and you're moving the window into a better location. And if you want to resize that window, press the [ALT] key again and now drag with the right mouse button. Along with this, you can drag maximized windows between monitors, scroll through windows that don't currently have focus, and more.

A free Windows download, Taekwindow runs under Vista and Windows 7, and probably earlier versions as well.

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Your computer has all kinds of important and sensitive stuff on it. Financial information, proprietary work files, names and addresses of all your contacts, and more is just sitting there. This is all well and good while you're using it, but at some point it all needs to go away. Maybe you're upgrading your box and want to donate your system to your kid's school, or you're planning to make a few bucks by putting it up on Craigslist. Or maybe it's gone beyond its useful life and you're going to be conscientious and recycle it. No matter what the reason, you want to make sure all your data is cleaned off the drive.

Just deleting files isn't enough. You need wipe that hard drive clean to make sure that your data is completely gone. Eraser is a tool that can help you do just that. Not only does it "erase" your data, it actually overwrites it with other data in such a way that it's really, really gone. Now you can sleep better at night knowing that your personal information isn't going to fall into somebody else's hands.

Eraser is a free download. It's a Windows app and the latest version runs under XP and later; they've also got an older version that still works with Win98, ME, NT and 2000.

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The drummers are rarely the flashy ones. Their job is to sit in the back and keep everybody else in line. If you lay down a steady, consistent beat, then it's up to the rest of them to make or break a performance. While it's not the same as a drummer, a metronome plays much the same role in practice sessions. That steady "tick-tick-tick" gives you a point of reference and hopefully keeps you on track.

Weird Metronome is an electronic version of that old wind-up contraption that used to sit on top of your piano dictating the tempo for your practice. This one, though, does more than just click for you. It takes advantage of all the standard MIDI percussion voices, so you can mix things up a bit to try to fight off boredom. In addition, you can set all kinds of interesting or even syncopated rhythms, something you can't do at all on that old tabletop pendulum model metronome.

Free to download and use, Weird Metronome is a Windows application.

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Some people have a great sense of design and color. Show them a paint chip or a fabric swatch and almost instantly they can design a room, an outfit, or just about anything else from it. I am in awe of those people. Where they see cranberry, magenta, rose, crimson, scarlet, or puce, I see red. I need Color Schemer Online.

With this online tool, all you need to do is enter a single color, and it will give you back over a dozen others that will go well with it. You can enter your color with individual RGB values, or you can type or paste a hex value, much like you might use on a web page. Once you get your colors, you can then further tweak it by lightening or darkening your original color and the suggested color scheme colors as well. Click on any of the suggested hues and you'll get back another list of colors that would go well with that. Use one of these palettes in your next project and people won't even remember that your personal favorite color is plaid.

Color Schemer Online is a free service. All you need is a web browser and a desire to see something other than red.

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Data can be messy. It doesn't always come to you in an organized form—kind of like a pile of Post-Its on your desktop, everything's on the same level. But that's not how people always think. Lots of times it's easier to understand and remember important things if we can impose some kind of organization to them. A stack of business cards has much of the same stuff that you might find in an address book, but the book makes it easier to find information on a particular contact, and may make it easier to keep track of which of those phone numbers is an office number, as opposed to a fax line, cell phone, or something else.

TreeLine is a tool you can use to help organize these little bits and pieces. As its name might imply, you can create tree-based hierarchies, allowing you to drill-down to get to more and more granular pieces of information. You can store just about anything in here, including plain text, HTML, and more. Keep things free form, or impose some order on the chaos by defining data fields to help you better organize your info. TreeLine stores its data in XML files, so you can access your stuff without using the program, and can import it into other tools as well.

TreeLine is available for both Windows and Linux.

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Everybody's got stuff that they want to keep private and secure. Maybe it's a list of passwords, or the winning numbers to next week's Lotto drawing, or maybe just some personal thoughts that you don't want your co-workers or kid sister to get hold of. There are all kinds of encryption programs out there to hide your stuff, but here's one where the program and the data become one.

Crypditor looks and acts like any old text editor—it's even got tabs to work on multiple items at once. You can just type straight into its editor window, or you can import text from other files. When you save the file, it just jams your now encrypted data into the executable itself. That means that not only is your private info private, but you can bring it with you—on a USB stick, as an email attachment—without having to bring along a separate tool to unlock it. Your data should be safe, since Crypditor uses 256-bit encryption. And it's even got a password strength tool, to help you decide whether you maybe want to use a password a bit more secure than "password".

Crypditor is a free download. It's a Windows app and should run under Win98 and later.

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The advent of the Universal Binary was a stroke of genius for the folks at Apple. During the transition period from the Apple-IBM-Motorola PowerPC chip to Intel's x86 line of processors, they realized that apps that could run natively on one platform wouldn't work on the other. This left them with the unappealing situation where every software developer who wanted to serve the whole Apple community would have to release two different versions of each application, one for each platform. Needless to say, it's hard enough to roll-out software anyway, but if you then had to maintain two separate but functionally identical code streams, everybody loses their minds. The Universal Binary fixed this problem.

In a Universal Binary file, both the PowerPC and Intel versions of an application are included. The computer figures out which pieces to use and simply ignores the rest. That's great for you getting your work done, but it doesn't save any space, since each program file is now something like twice as big as it really needs to be, since roughly half of the code in each program won't run on your machine. So how do you gain the abilities added by the Universal Binary but not lose the storage space? Slimtool is one way.

This app will strip out the pieces you don't need for your machine. You can put your files on a diet individually by dragging-and-dropping them into Slimtool, or you can turn it loose to find suitable targets on its own. As it turns out, there are also some Universal Binaries that will break if you do this "strip the other stuff out" routine to them, and for such files, there's a blacklist that prevents Slimtool from trying to tweak—and potentially break—them.

Slimtool is a free Mac application. Even though Universal Binary files can be run on systems running OS X 10.3.9 and later, you need to be using 10.5+ to
take advantage of Slimtool.

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Everybody's got a different way they prefer to interact with their computer. Some folks swear by the command prompt. Others like WYSIWYG but don't want to take their hands off the keyboard. Then there are the mouse aficionados, who would rather double-click their way through life. The next group, those who would prefer to just wave their hand to make things happen, will be interested in MouseWrangler.

This tool lets you use gestures—movements of the mouse—to initiate system events. Once it's installed, you just hold down the right mouse button and then move your mouse around the desktop. You can associate movement in various directions—up, down, left, right, and even diagonally—with particular commands. Start or stop apps, enter chunks of text, or just about anything else you want to do. Couple with with your own keyboard macro tool, and you can drive the whole system with the wave of your hand. You'll feel like like a Big Deal as Windows quakes before your awesome might. Or at least you'll get more work done.

MouseWrangler is a free Windows application.

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You know the scenario: you're sitting there in front of your computer, not doing a thing, and all of a sudden the hard drive light starts furiously flashing on and off. Or you're doing some trivial task, like reading an email message that you have already downloaded to your machine, and all of a sudden your CPU usage peaks at 100% and stays there for what seems an eternity. Has your machine been possessed? Is your computer about to melt down? What's my computer doing?

As luck would have it, that may be the solution. What's My Computer Doing? is a tool that lets you know what's going on behind the scenes. When you bring it up, it shows all the programs currently running on your system, with details about who's reading and writing to and from the hard drive, and what's using up all your processor cycles. Newly armed with that information, you can decide whether it's all legit, or that maybe you'd like to kill that program. If you really want to calm things down, you've even got the option to uninstall a particularly troubling application.

What's My Computer Doing? is a free download. You can run it on Windows systems using WinNT/2000 and later.

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