Philonoist.net

After reading Brian’s & Boris’s tech musings this morning at alwaysBeta, two amazing tech revelations happened to me.

The first was that I learned a nifty hack already included in Better Gmail, a free extension from the folks over at Lifehacker. Like Brian, I’m a big user of Gmail and Google Reader, and speed is the key to my interactions with these products. So imagine my surprise when I found (after sticking my wireless mouse in my pocket and moving locations) the right-click conversation preview option, as below:

This is by far the most useful thing I’ve found in Better GMail: it’s bound to the “v” key (easy to remember, analogous to show original in GReader), it marks the item as read, and it’s smart enough to usually make itself the right size. One minor issue is that it doesn’t have an option to view images in preview, but that’s a pretty minor thing.

The second came about when I tried to take some screen caps for this post: I’ve long been tired of doing the PrintScreen->Paint/Photoshop/Gimp->Crop. SnagIt 8.2 is a great product, but it’s expensive: nearly $40 for a tool that I don’t/won’t use all that often. There are some okay open-source alternatives out there, but nothing that works quite as well as SnagIt. But surprisingly, TechSmith, the company that makes SnagIt, gives away an older version of the product (7.2.5, available from OldApps). Apparently, this is for readers of UK’s .Net Magazine, but putting in the US as an option works. Make sure you remember the name you use for the sign-up: the product key is bound to it.

I absolutely adore neat stuff.

Technorati Tags: screen capture, lifehacker, gmail