Stex Toys

A new update to my favourite wallpaper changer has added two rather impressive feature I just love.

John’s Background Switcher

Number one, it can now link up to Facebook, to not only access my photos, but also those of my friends! This is a lovely feature, I can select a few of my best friends and have their pictures parade around my desktop, bringing me into contact with a lot of shots i didn’t even know where out there!

Secondly the scrapbook has a new option where it doesn’t try to fit the images to ‘polaroids’ (spelling??) , which although look cool, doesn’t always come off given the dimensions of the standard snap. So the new mode gives a much greater level of quality to the effect.

Here’s my current desktop after my first pull of Facebook data! Might have a few too many maybe, but that can be adjusted if I want a less busy screen

Came across this neat little app whilst browsing Alan Lepofsky’s Blog which allows you to tag your local files, much as you would these blog posts or your del.icio.us bookmarks. Why would one want to do this? Well tagging makes searching all the more easy. Quite often you know what file you want to open, what it’s about, what type of document it is etc.. but not a clue where you saved it in the ever growing folder structures on our PCs. With tagging, ‘where it is’ becomes redundant. What’s important is how you tagged it. So long as you use your tags well you will be able to quickly locate that file you are looking for in but a few moments by typing in the name of a tag you know will be associated with the file you are after.

You might think you could just do this by being careful with your folders, however the major drawback there is a file can only ever exist in one folder.. true you could copy it but then you would actually have two files, and once you changed one and not the other you’re in trouble! With taggin files can have as many tags as you like.. so a document might be tagged with ‘Chicago’ but also ‘Expense’ and ‘Networking’ then searching any of those terms will return a list containing the file in question.

Once you are used to tagging it’s hard to work without it, so if you feel like trying it out head on over to Tag2Find and check out the application. The product is presently in a technical preview, but the long term aim is to make it open source.

Interesting side note.. Windows Vista should have had this type of functionality built in, but the manic cutbacks and product crippling that took place removed the WinFS (Windows File System) from the product spec, part of which would have allowed this sort of tagging and searching.