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You are at tk here: Free: miniMIZE, lingro

Offtopic: Yeah, no freebies yesterday. Didn't feel like it. :P

miniMIZE

miniMIZE captures all your minimized windows and displays tiny thumbnails of them on your desktop. Think of it as Exposé without the fancy animation, Thumbnail preview in Opera 9 or tab preview in Firefox 3. As miniMIZE sits in your system tray, it'll monitor for minimized programs and stick them onto your desktop, freeing up your taskbar. Double click on each thumbnail and the application pops back up in its original state.

Although miniMIZE can be customized to your liking, there were several quirks that I experienced. For example, if you press WIN+D (Show Desktop) or WIN+M (Minimize all windows) while an application is in focus, it'll not show up as a thumbnail. In fact, it'll just disappear into oblivion. Fortunately, Alt+Tab will bring the missing program back to life.

A workaround for this is to set a hotkey in miniMIZE to miniMIZE all your windows. You'll have to live without two windows shortcuts, but at least it works. I highly recommend assigning hotkeys for all three functions in miniMIZE as they'll come in handy.

miniMIZE runs only on Windows XP and is in beta.

lingro

lingro claims to be "The coolest dictionary known to hombre!" and I can't say I disagree with them. lingro is an open source dictionary that relies on the work of other dictionaries as well as its own user submitted definitions to provide translations for thousands of words.

Other than its online dictionary, lingro also hosts what it calls a web viewer and a file viewer. Viewing websites through the web viewer will allow you to click on any word to retrieve its definition, while the file viewer allows you to upload files and do exactly the same thing.

Whether I'm using its web viewer or online dictionary, lingro is always fast and responsive. Its definitions are on par with competing closed source dictionaries and if you don't understand a word in the definition, just click on it twice to get its meaning. This can go on infinitely and before you know it, you end up learning about a ton of different words.

After my experience with lingro, I won't be surprised if lingro becomes the de facto online dictionary in time to come. In fact, I'm already wondering if someone has come up with a greasemonkey script or Firefox addon so that all web pages come lingrofied.


Check out the lingrofied version of this blog. :)