Monday, September 17, 2001		Downloads of the week

It is a little program that will maximise every new Internet Explorer window that you open as long as you are running this program in the background. It will place itself in the Systray when you hit ‘Minimise.’ If you for some reason have changed your Internet Explorer Title (registry change) you should type the last eight characters of the new title into the textbox where it says ‘Explorer,’ which are the last eight characters of "Microsoft Internet Explorer." When minimised you can control the program by right-clicking on the icon in the Systray. Then you’ll have the following options: Enable - Enables the maximise function, Disable - Disables the maximise function, Restore - Opens the main window, Exit - Exits the program. It also has a function for hiding or closing all IE windows with a hotkey (Ctrl+Alt+Q). You can specify a particular IE window that won’t be hidden or closed when you use your hotkey. It has a set-up dialog where you can make the program start when your computer starts and you can also choose to automatically minimise the program when it starts. The latest version 2.1 has a function that deals with popup windows. You can either close or leave them as they are. By setting a maximum size for popup windows you can control the popup function and have the program to close all kinds of popup windows. You can now also choose to open all new windows in Internet Explorer’s "Full screen" mode. If you click the "Auto" button next to the textbox where the IE title should be, the program will automatically try to detect the last eight characters of IE. If you have a custom version of Internet Explorer with a different title bar text you can now set it to default using this program. You can download it from www.hem.passagen.se/jzoon/program/iemaximizer/ie_new_window_ maximizer_21.zip 

If you are a Web designer, you can add cool, colourised scrollbars to your Web pages in a snap. Only users of Internet Explorer 5.5 or later will be able to see the scrollbars in colour, but statistics show that this is the most widely used browser. A cool, graphical interface allows you to choose which parts of the scroll bar you wish to colourise simply by passing your mouse cursor over a portion of the pictured scrollbar example and click. You can then type in a hex colour value for that part or choose a colour visually from a palette by clicking the button next to the selected text box. As you choose or define colours, the graphic is updated automatically with the new colours. You can also see an actual size preview of what the scrollbars will look like on your page in the program’s built in ‘mini-browser’ (if you have I.E. 5.5 or later installed on your system) by clicking the "Actual Size Preview" button on the main program interface. You can now just define a base colour and let I.E. automatically colour all scrollbar elements in shades based on that colour when the end user loads your page. The big scrollbar sample image on the main program interface is not updated if you use this option, but you can use the "Actual Size Preview" mentioned above to see the results. Once you define the colours of your scrollbars, one click copies the needed code to the Clipboard for pasting into the HTML code of your page. You can also now save your scrollbar colour schemes to a file and re-load them into the program at a later time to change any colour values or re-generate the code for another page should you lose your original code. Download available from www.harmonyhollow.net/download/coolscrl.exe 

Atomica is an innovative online resource for retrieving information. This reference tool lets you look up words that appear in Windows applications, such as text on a Web page. This relatively small Windows companion delivers an impressive amount of information. By simply Alt-clicking a word, Atomica instantly queries an online dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopaedia. Atomica is also connected to news and sports sources on the Internet. While browsing, you can also retrieve stock quotes and read corporate profiles. Atomica works with any Windows application, so there are many uses for it. It’s excellent for writing research papers because it works almost seamlessly with your word processor and Web browser. Atomica appears as a simple pop-up window, so it won’t distract you from your work. You can also use it to provide insight and new perspectives into articles. A great feature is you can explore and discover specific terms within entries. Hypertext links take you to corresponding encyclopedia and dictionary entries, as well as other applicable web sites. This program offers an easy way to find accurate reference information. International

users will appreciate Atomica’s support for six languages. Windows ’95 users should note that the program requires Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher for their systems. Download it from www.rocketdownload.com/dnload/atomica.exe 

Backing up files, like checking for computer viruses is a task that every personal computer owner should routinely perform, but often neglects until it is too late. Every computer should have an automated backup system that is easy to use, and yet they do not. Windows ships with the Microsoft backup program. It has a nice interface, but is not widely used for one primary reason: it cannot be scheduled nor can command line parameters be passed in from a scheduling agent. TaskZip is a system agent that will automatically archive specified files and folders into a single

zip file (pkzip compatible format). You can backup across a network, from computer to computer, or even to a zip or jaz drive (note that disk spanning not supported at this time). You can create and schedule an unlimited number of backup jobs, each containing as many folders or files as you want(up to 2GB). TaskZip has a simple, step-by-step wizard to guide you through selecting files and folders, backup locations, and backup scheduling. The program’s scheduler can run backups at any time, and you can set recurring schedules for running daily, weekly, or monthly backups. For each backup job, you can even maintain up to 99 older (grandfathered) backup copies of each zip archive file. You can password protect the zip file archives. When data loss occurs, you can highlight a backup job and with the click of a button, bring up your default windows zip shell (Winzip, Enzip, Freezip, etc.) to restore the corrupt files. You can also forego compression and just backup files and folders directly. Download from http://jupiter.drw.net/matpie/Downloads/TZip.zip 

— Raman Mohan