Before I get on to my recent big change in technology platforms I wanted to mention a few apps that I found extremely useful for the windows platform.

1) The first one was one that was covered by Russell Beattie, who, unfortunately, recently stopped his very insightful blog on happenings in the mobile world. In one of his posts he covered the Yahoo SMS bookmarklet . This little beauty makes it extremely easy to take little snippets of data with you on the road through your cell phone. All you have to do is highlight some text, click the bookmarklet, and wait for the SMS containing the text to arrive on your phone. A small modification to the javascript hardcoded my cellphone number into the applet in order to avoid having to type it every time.

Applications for this tool include:

- Quickly sending directions or addresses to your phone.
- Quickly sending someone’s contact info from the web to your phone
- Sending websites to your phone as you are on your way out the door.

2) The next little marvel is Synergy I had seen a friend using a Mac share his mouse and keyboard between two computers over wifi, but I never looked into it in detail for Windows. Amazing! Given my extreme disability when it comes to logging long hours at the keyboard (my hands go numb, shoulders get sore, etc) I wanted an easy way to avoid the tiny keyboard on my laptop without preventing me from using my desktop. Synergy, with the click of a few buttons, had me using my ergonomic desktop keyboard to control both my laptop and my desktop. A wifi virtual KVM switch dictated by whatever screen your mouse is currently operating on. I’m sure I was late in learning about this application, but it a great find for me at the time that increased my productivity in the house.

3) Last but not least is an application called Launchy , yet again an app inspired by functionality taken for granted by many Apple users. Launch is a snappy and free application launcher similar to Spotlight or Quicksilver on the Mac OSX.

Though it does not quite have the power of its Mac counterparts, it is fairly configurable and lightweight. Prior to finding Launchy I was using an app called Colibri, which claimed to a more significant feature set, but in my experience just took up too much memory and stalled my whole system for 10 minutes on every boot up.