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You know the drill. You and a bunch of co-workers are sitting around in a room throwing ideas out about how to make or do the Next Big Thing. People are capturing the essence of these and scribbling them on sticky notes, which are then fastened on every vertical surface in the room. It's pretty easy to move these around and categorize them, in a process called "affinity diagramming."

There are a couple of potential problems here. First, you might run out of sticky notes (or a gust of wind might send them all flying). Second, it's going to work best if everybody is in the same room, so they can see all the notes. Maybe it's time to check out an electronic version of this tried-and-true method.

StickySorter is a tool put together by the folks at Microsoft (you've heard of them, right?). To track your next great idea, just create a new sticky and type it in. Individual notes support multiple fields, so you can easily track title, author, and other sticky-specific information. Drag and drop notes to associate them with other related ideas. And if you've got a ton of ideas you've already entered elsewhere, you can import all your wisdom via industry-standard CSV files. You can zoom in to get a more granular view, or zoom out the look at the big picture.

Naturally, StickySorter is a Windows app. You should be able to run it under WinXP and later. You'll need to be sure you have version 2.0 of the .NET Framework installed as well.

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How many different ways are there to skin a cat? More than one, if the conventional wisdom is to be believed (sorry, kitty). In much the same way, there may be a lot of different ways to do a lot of things. A meter, for example, might also be expressed as 100 centimeters, 1000 millimeters, 1/1000 of a kilometer, 39.37+ inches, and so forth; temperatures expressed in degrees Celsius track to expressions in degrees Fahrenheit as well; we talk back and forth about bits and bytes. So how do you do all those conversions?

One way is with NumericalChameleon. This app can handle thousands of different units in dozens of different categories. If you can measure it–length, volume, mass, duration, value, and more–then you can probably express it in a different set of units with this tool.

NumericalChameleon is a Java application. That means that it will run on any machine that has the appropriate Java runtime installed on it, including Linux, Mac, Windows, and just about anything else you can think of that supports this technology. It's free download, too, so you won't have to worry about converting dollars-in to dollars-out.

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Do you drink tea? Whether you make it a pot at a time, or a just a single cup, you know that timing can be critical. If you let it steep as little as a minute or two extra you can turn a fine cup into a nasty, bitter mess. A timer is pretty critical here.

Messmer, a European tea company, has a timer you can download to your desktop to make sure you avoid that problem. Pick the type of tea from the dropdown list (in German–you remember that from high school, right?), click Start, and it will count down just the right amount of time for you and your selection, and then alert you with a little musical snippet when you tea is done to perfection.

The Tea Timer is available for both Mac and PC, so everybody can enjoy the perfect cup of tea. Unfortunately, you can't download any tea to go with it.

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When you're really zooming along, don't you just hate to have to take your hands off the mouse? You're flying along and everything's going great. You're copying and pasting to beat the band. And then it happens: you have to color outside the lines. Maybe you want to copy a path, or maybe you need to grab all the DOC files in a particular directory, or even open a DOS window. Everything grinds to a screeching halt as you take you hand off the mouse and start flailing through menus and dialogs looking for just the right command.

If this sounds familiar, you may want to check out Lammer Context Menu. An extension for Windows Explorer, it adds all kinds to extra functionality to the your context (right-click) menu. From a single menu entry, you can open submenus for Folder and File tweaks. Do bulk file renaming, open in Notepad, calculate checksums, and more.

Lammer Context Menu is a free download. It's a Windows app and runs under XP and later. You'll also need to make sure you've got .NET Framework version 3.5.

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When you write in Word, OpenOffice Writer, or any other high-powered word processor, you've got built-in spell checking, grammar checking, and more. But any more, lots of your writing doesn't take place in one of these desktop apps. Writing blog posts, creating Tweets in Twitter, and lots of other places have you composing directly in your web browser, where these types of tools aren't necessarily available to you.

You can add the ability to check spelling, grammar, and usage with After The Deadline. This tool is available as an Add-on for Firefox. Click in a text field on your online form, hit the After The Deadline hotkey, and it'll take a look a things and let you know what it thinks might need attention, highlighting spelling errors in red, problems with grammar in green, and even style suggestions in blue.

And if you don't happen to have Firefox, they've made the core functionality of this tool available as a bookmarklet that you can use with Safari and Internet Explorer.

After The Deadline is free for personal use. All you'll need to use it is a recent copy of Firefox and a dedication to making (and fixing) spelling errors.

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If you're writing code or creating web pages, you spend a lot of your life working with straight text files. For you, there's no such thing as formatting; you just type the text and let the compilers and servers do the heavy lifting. From time to time you may have occasion to need to change something you've typed into a file. Maybe there's a new URL you need to reference, or maybe somebody went through and changed the names of all the images that are included in your pages. You don't relish the need to go through all those files in order to do a search and replace to update that information. You may be stuck with that, however, unless you can come up with an easier way to take care of business.

Replace Text is a handy tool that lets you find and replace text. While there are lots of tools that can help you with that, this guy can work on multiple files at once. In addition, it's not limited to searching for just literal strings: it also supports some pretty heavy-duty regular expression searches as well. You can specify a particular file, a whole directory of files, or even build a mask to choose specific files—maybe all the TXT or HTML files in a particular directory. Your replacements can happen to the original files, or you can specify different filenames and directories so that you don't mess up your originals. It logs everything as well, so you can see that your work has been done, or take a look at what messed-up if things didn't go as smoothly as you'd hoped.

A free download, Replace Text is a Windows application.

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Macs are cool. Windows machines are cool. There are lots of similarities between them, and lots of differences. If your work or play takes you back and forth between the two platforms, the similarities can be helpful. As a rule of thumb, if your Windows machine does something by pressing the [Control] key and some other key—like copying to the clipboard via [Control] + C—your Mac will probably do similar things by pressing the [Command] key instead. PC is [Control], Mac is [Command]. Not too bad.

But then there are the differences. In Windows, you can start an app by selecting its icon and pressing [Enter]. On your Mac, once you select that icon, you've got to use [Command] + O to do the same thing. Not so helpful. But there are ways to work around that. One of those ways is PresButan.

This Mac tool lets you choose to use the [Return] or the [Enter] key (no, they're not the same on a Mac) to start applications. By employing some fancy sleight-of-hand involving enabling support for assistive devices via the Universal Access Preference Panel, you can add this Windows-y functionality to your Mac. As an added bonus, you can add one other tweak as well: the ability to delete a file by selecting its icon and pressing the [Delete] key. No more [Command] + [Delete] or right-click and "Move to Trash" with the mouse. Hey, it's not much, but it could be kind of handy.

PresButan is a Mac application. It requires OS X version 10.4 (Tiger) or later. There's also still an older version to use on your Panther (10.3) system if you prefer.

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When you want to create a new file, most of the time you just fire-up the application that works with those files, choose File >> New from the menu, and go from there. Make your edits, tweak your tweaks, and then save the document, picture, or code module to whatever directory you want it to land in. That's the way you've always done it. It's reasonably quick, but having to navigate up and down the directory tree to find your new file's ultimate location can be a bit of a pain in the neck.

If you've noodled around in Windows for a while, you know there's another way to create new files. In Windows Explorer, if you first navigate to a particular directory and then right-click your mouse. In the context menu that comes up, you see "New" down at the bottom. Mouse over that and you get a flyout menu that lists new file types you can create. Click on one of those and you get a new Word DOC, a new Photoshop PSD, or some other new file. It's quicker, it's easier, and your new file is in the right place right out of the gate—no more navigating all over the place when you save your file.

ShellMenuNew lets you play with the types of files you can create in this way. Fire it up, and you'll get a list of all the file types in your Registry that you can create "New" in this way. Want to disable one? Piece of cake. And if you're smart (or brave), you can go into the Registry and tweak the particulars for a given entry. Just remember, though, that editing the Registry by hand can do great things, or it can turn your nice computer into a not-so-nice boat anchor.

ShellMenuNew is a free download. It's a Windows application and will run under Windows 2000 and later.

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There are all kinds to timers, schedulers, and reminders out there. If you've got a hectic life (and who doesn't) then you probably either already use one of them or you are planning to sometime soon. They're great for human-centric events like meetings and appointments, but they can be more or less useful for automating actions on your computer.

Marxio Timer takes the idea of a reminder and applies it to your system. Schedule an action to take place at a particular time: shut your machine down, run a program, take a screenshot, or more. And you can base these on things other than clock time or elapsed time, maybe choosing to do something when a particular program ends (shut your system down after completing a backup?), or even when CPU usage hits a particular level or network traffic spikes. It puts a status widget in the System Tray so you'll remember that it's running without taking up a lot of on-screen real estate.

You can download this application for free and use it on your Windows system. Technically it's "donationware", so if you find it useful or use it often, you might throw a few coins at these guys via PayPal.

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Clipboard add-ons can be a helpful way to extend the functionality of one of the best features of modern GUI operating systems: the system clipboard. Copying and pasting between documents and applications makes life much smoother by letting us all work more efficiently. Added functionality makes it all even better.

Ditto is a tool that lets you extend your clipboard's capabilities. It can deal with both text and images, and even some formatting, and it keeps a history so you can paste not only the last thing you copied, but stuff you were working on a while ago as well. It's easy to search through all your clipboard entries to find what you're looking for. It lets you edit information on the clipboard, and you can paste plain text into an application, even if you copied it as formatted text.

Ditto is a free Windows application.

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