Grupenet

Ever notice those little arrow overlays over every shortcut in Windows? Do they bother you as much they they bother me? Glad we’re on the same track. Thankfully I recently discovered a great little application which will get rid of those little arrows. The program I’m talking about is called FxVisor.

After you’ve downloaded and installed FxVisor, launch it and you will immediately be given the choice of removing any arrow overlay from shortcuts or replacing the overlay with a different style which isn’t as much of an eye sore.

If you have removed the arrow overlay, FxVisor will also allow you to re-enable the default overlay. All in all, FxVisor is a great little application which will be of much help to any users who use desktop shortcuts to launch their applications, though I still recommend using differents methods for application launching.

Update
Apparently this will only work on Windows Vista. For those of you using Windows XP, the TweakXP Tweaking Utility will allow you to remove the arrow overlays, supposedly.

Have you ever found yourself adjusting the volume frequently when you set your MP3 player to shuffle your songs? I’ll show you how to normalize the volume on your music library so you don’t have to reach for that volume button every couple minutes. The application I will be using is MP3Gain.

After you’ve installed MP3Gain, open it. Click the Add Folder button and point it to the folder which contains all your music. MP3Gain will then proceed to scan for all your music.

Once it’s finished scanning all your music, press the Track Analysis button. MP3Gain will now analyze the volume levels of each track. Any tracks that are highlighted in red have a volume level that is too high and may cause distortion when you try to use the equalizer on your MP3 player.

After that’s done, click on Track Gain. The DB of all your songs will be altered to the value in the “Normal Volume” field. Any changes made in MP3Gain can be reversed. To do this, select Undo Gain changes from the “Modify Gain” menu.

That’s all there is to it! Now all your tracks will have a consistent volume level.

One of my biggest gripes with iTunes is that it is only capable of syncing with the iPod. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise since Apple doesn’t want you to buy any other MP3 player other than the iPod. I’ve run into several people who love using iTunes to manage their music library, but would rather use a different brand MP3 player. Up until this point there hasn’t been a solution to achieve this, at least on the Windows side of things.

Thanks to Binary Fortress Software, syncing your MP3 player with iTunes is now possible with iTunes Sync. This application is only available for Windows. If you’re a Mac OS X user, check out SyncTunes.

To date, iTunes Sync will work with most players by Cowon, Creative Labs, Dell, iRiver, JVC, Samsung, and Sandisk. A full list of known working MP3 players can be found here. Sorry Zune owners. The developer says it will be next to impossible to add support for the Zune.

People who use Windows daily know that launching applications isn’t always the easiest thing to do. Instead of filling up half of your taskbar with Quick Launch icons, why not try something else? In this article I’m going to focus on a couple of my favorite freeware application launchers, which include Launchy and RocketDock.

Launchy

Launchy is my personal favorite application launcher out of the bunch. The basic idea behind Launchy is to use your keyboard to access your applications instead of your mouse. Using Launchy is as easy as typing the first few letters of the application you’d like to launch and pressing Enter. Launchy is not just limited to applications either. It is capable of finding files and even performing search queries on Google for you.

RocketDock

RocketDock is an application launcher which is very reminiscent of the dock in Mac OS X. Instead of using keyboard access, RocketDock allows you to launch applications in just a single click and in a visually appealing manner at that. Surprisingly, you can also choose to minimize your programs to RocketDock, eliminating the need to manage your open applications using the Windows taskbar.

There are many other application launchers available for Windows besides the two I’ve mentioned. A couple others I’d recommend are Enso Launcher($19.95) and ObjectDock(free).

Are you already using an application launcher? If so, which one are you using and why?

Yesterday Apple released a Safari 3 Public Beta for Windows. After installing it, I am greeted with a browser that displays absolutely no text.

I quickly find that I am not the only one with this problem. The problem happens if you have a large amount of fonts installed on Windows. After hours of digging through comments on blogs of people having the same problem with no solution, I decided to try my hand at fixing it myself. Eventually I found a way to fix the issue, so here’s how to do it.

First, navigate to the following directory. You should see a file named Fonts.plist, though it may not exist in every case.

• C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Local Settings\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari (Windows XP)
• C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Apple Computer\Safari (Windows Vista)

Download this Fonts.plist and replace your old one with the one you just downloaded. Now, open the Properties for the Fonts.plist file and set it to “Read-only”.

If some fonts still don’t show up correctly, open your Fonts.plist in Wordpad (uncheck Read-only in the properties first) and edit the locations of the fonts to match the location of the fonts on your computer. Make sure to set the file to “Read-only” when you’re finished editing, otherwise Safari will overwrite it the next time you launch it.

If you followed this tutorial closely and edited everything correctly, Safari should look something like this.

If you’re still having problems with fonts showing, navigate to C:\Program Files\Safari\Safari.resources and make sure there are two fonts files named Lucida Grande.ttf and Lucida Grande Bold.ttf. If they do not exist, download this ZIP of the fonts and place them in the Safari.resources directory.

Update (06/14/2007):
If you have updated Safari to version 3.0.1 you may need to replace your Fonts.plist file again and set it to read-only.

Update (06/22/2007):
Apple has just released Safari version 3.0.2 which fixes the font issues. Please make sure the read-only option on your Fonts.plist file is unset. Go download the new version!