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One of the greatest advantages of a graphical user interface for an operating system, as opposed to a straight-up command prompt, is the ability to copy, cut, and paste things from here to there. Grabbing something and moving it is a lot easier than typing torturously long path-and-filename combinations to specify that you you want to move a file or directory from here to there. Unfortunately, if you need to move a lot of things, it can still take quite a bit of time, since your clipboard can handle only one item at a time: grab this file at its original location, stick it on the clipboard, paste it into the new location, repeat. Several times, if you're not lucky.

With Piky Basket, you can grab all the files you want to move, drop them all into the clipboard, and them go paste them en masse into the desired new location. Instead of copy-paste, it's copy-copy-copy-paste. It's great for moving files and directories around, and outstanding if you need to drop those files into multiple locations—like in burning a CD, making a back up, and so forth.

Piky Basket will work with just about any 32-bit version of Windows, from the oldest Win95 up to the latest release of Vista.

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Ever since the beginning of time—or at least Windows 95—we've all used Windows Explorer to get around in the Pride of Redmond. (I always kind'a liked Program Manager, but that's the 16-bit solution that's come and gone.) If you don't want to live your life at a "C prompt", you need a desktop manager, and Explorer is the canned solution that comes with Windows.

XYplorerFree is an alternative to Microsoft's idea of how to get around in Windows. It incorporates the main functionality of Windows Explorer, but then adds more. With the use of tabs, you can browse multiple directories or volumes, without having to open multiple windows on your desktop. How about integrated search? Rather than having to use a dedicated "Find" functionality, you can enter search queries directly into the address bar, and it supports Boolean searches and regular expressions as well, so you can really find just what you're looking for, without having to dig through a bunch of stuff you're really not interested in. Color coding files allows you to visually group your work, so you can pick out your mist important documents.

XYplorerFree runs under Windows, requiring Win98 or later. Note that the download link for the free products is at the bottom of the page.

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We're always looking for a way to get more organized and try to stay on top of all the "stuff" we've got to keep track of. If this sounds like your situation, here's a tool that may help you to finally get organized.

Hott Notes is a slick little application for your Windows system that lets you create virtual "sticky notes" to help you keep track of what you need to keep track of. Your notes can be one of three types of reminders. There's a message note, freeform text to remind you to pick up that carton of milk on the way home. You can create a checklist note, that allows you to enter text into multiple fields, each prepended with a checkbox so you can keep track of what you've accomplished and what remains to be done. And finally, there's the scribble note, a note where you can draw pictures or write your notes freehand—great if you have a stylus to work with.

A note manager allows you to deal with your notes: organize them, delete them, archive them, or perform batch functions of them.

Hott Notes is a Windows application. It requires Win2k/XP/Vista.

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At its base, an address book—whether a paper list, or a software application—is charged with keeping track of all the names and phone numbers we need to make it through the day, both personally and professionally. There are a whole range of tools out there that handle that responsibility nicely.

Open Contacts takes that basic functionality and adds to it. Along with the canned fields and categories offered, it allows you to add new fields, and to define relationships between people. It's easy to grab whole groups of people—work contacts, family, vendors, and more.

An exhaustive search capability makes it easy to search on any, or multiple, fields, so you can find everybody with a birthday in March, or everybody who lives in Springfield.

You can import contacts from your address books in many popular email applications. You can export your contact info in several useful formats (Excel, CSV, HTML), and you can print contact lists and labels.

Open Contacts is self-contained, and with a small footprint, you can put the whole app and your database on a USB thumb drive and take it with you.

Open Contacts is a Windows application. It requires Win98 or later.

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If you run multiple systems, you probably long ago ran out of desktop space. With a keyboard and mouse for each machine, your work space probably looks more like a used computer store.

Input Director is a tool that allows you to run multiple systems with just one keyboard and one mouse. You can transition from one machine to the next by hitting a hotkey, or you can simply move your mouse cursor from one monitor to the next.

One slick feature that Input Director offers is a "shared clipboard." This means that you can copy-and-paste from one machine to the next. The clipboard supports both text and images.

Input Director is a Windows app, and it's free for personal use. It requires Windows 2000 or later, and all your machines must be networked.

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If you live in the world of cut-and-paste, then you know what a pain your system's clipboard can be. With only one chunk of text, or one image, you have to do a whole lot of back-and-forth to really get anything done. What if you could work with multiple clipboards? Wouldn't it be nice to grab all the pieces you need and just go from there?

ClipX is a clipboard manager for Windows that allows you to grab multiple text and image items and keep track of and use them. Sitting in your System Tray, ClipX can keep track of hundreds of clipboard entries and call them up as you need them. No longer will you need to copy and then paste into a text editor to keep track of what you're working with.

Configurable hotkeys let you customize ClipX to work best for you. There are bunches of plugins available to extend the functionality of this helpful tool, as well as a software developers' kit (SDK) that allows you to customize it even further.

ClipX is a Windows application.

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There's always a need for more computer programmers out there, but unfortunately not everybody's thrilled at the prospect of keeping track of semicolons and curly-braces. With this in mind, the folks at Carnegie Mellon University created Alice.

Alice is a development environment that allows for error-proof programming. Using a drag-and-drop interface, users write code by dragging onscreen tiles that fit together into programs. As the result of fitting these pieces together, students actually create 3D animations. While interesting in their own right, these animations allow immediate feedback to the user, showing how re-ordering a series of tiles (instructions) impacts the behavior of the resulting program.

While users think they're creating animations and games, they are also seeing how languages like Java and C++ work, since the tiles correspond to statements in those types of high level programming languages. They claim that upwards of 10% of all computer science programs in American colleges use Alice in their curriculum.

Alice is a free download, and is available for Windows (Win2k or later), Mac (OS X 10.3+), and Linux.

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As you work your way through revision after revision of a document, have you ever realized that you just shouldn't have made that last change? How do you go back and undo it? You may just be out of luck, unless you're using Keep-It.

Keep-It is a real world archive tool that sit somewhere between a version control system and a file archive system. You don't need to check documents in and out, so you don't have to remember to do anything—hey, if you remembered, you wouldn't have gotten into this situation to start with!

Archives comprise "snapshots", a moment-in-time capture of your document. You can create them as needed, or schedule them in advance, so you're always protected. Keep-It compresses the archive it creates, so you aren't filling up all your spare disk space with changes. Browsing through your snapshots is easy, using its Windows Explorer-like interface.

Keep-It is a Windows app and requires Win95 or later.

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Do you run a website? Do your customers need to communicate with you? Is email too slow for your needs? How about adding Live Chat to your site?

ChatStat lets you chat with your visitors—soon to be your customers—in real time as they work through your website. Not only can yo chat with visitors through your site, but since it supports the major IM clients (AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, GoogleTalk, and Skype), you can chat with virtually anybody. This free version supports two operator seats, so you don't have to be tied to your desk all the time.

For the ultimate in security, ChatStat supports 128-bit encryption. This means not only are all your sessions private, but you can put chat buttons on secure pages without getting the dreaded "there are secure and non-secure items on this page" message.

ChatStat is a Windows application and requires that you be running Windows 2000 or later. You must also have the .NET 2.0 Framework.

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Okay, so you've been reading all about Linux, and you've decided maybe you'd like to try it on for size. You've got a huge investment—money, sweat, and tears—in your Windows system and don't want to kill it just to try Linux, but you don't have a spare box lying around to load it on either. Maybe you should give Wubi a try.

Wubi is a Linux installer for Windows systems. Rather than having to reformat your hard drive—and lose all your applications and data—Wubi will let you install a fully functioning Ubuntu Linux system on your machine without having to mess with your current partitions and data. Instead of a separate partition, Wubi puts the entire Linux into a file in your Windows filesystem. It simply adds a Linux entry to the Windows boot menu. At any point, just reboot your system, choose Linux, and you're off and running. It comes with all the goodies you'd expect on a Linux system.

As a simple installer, you just run Wubi like any other Windows app—there's no need to burn ISO disk images to CD, or anything else like that. And at the end, if you decide you don't want to keep it on your system, you can use Windows' own uninstaller to remove all traces from your system.

Wubi is a free download for Windows, and supports all flavors from Win98 and later.

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