By now a lot of you will have experienced the 'All-in-One Omnipotent Start Menu' thing that was first introduced with Windows Vista and can now be found in Windows 7. It combines My Computer, My Documents and your installed programs into one big, gribbly menu.

Some people love it. Some hate it. Personally, I like the all-in-one search/run input box... but that's about it. I much prefer the old drop-out menu, even if it is a bit stupid when you've got 500 programs installed. I still use icons on my desktop, rather than getting at everything through my Start Menu.

There have been a few tools that replicate the old Start Menu, but this one(aptly called 'Classic Windows Start Menu'), unlike the others, also works with the Windows Aero theme. Sadly, as you can see in the screenshot below, there still seem to be some bugs with the display (ironically, probably when you have a lot of stuff installed), but otherwise it all seems to work as intended!


So if, for some reason (and I'm sure there are lots of possible reasons) you don't like the Vista/7 Start Menu, why not grab this tiny little app?

Direct download link / developer's site (it ain't pretty, but you can find other-language versions there, if you don't want it in English)

[via Into Windows]

Believe it or not, almost 7 years after its initial release, the Foobar2000 v1.0 Beta is finally out, and with it comes a large list of changes. Most of them are much-needed interface fixes, but there is the welcome addition of built-in support for the streaming of Windows Media formats (ASX/MMS/RTSP). Other than that, it's much of the same.

Foobar2000, if you were wondering, is a very light-weight music player. It's incredibly flexible thanks to its modular design and fully-featured developer kit. There are mods and plug-ins for Foobar that make it one of the most useful music players: if you're the kind of music buff that likes downloading 'quadrophonic gold remastered' albums in AC3 format from Torrent sites, then Foobar is the music player for you. If you have a large MP3 (or FLAC, AAC, MP4...) music collection and simply want to listen to it, Foobar is also the one for you.

There's all the usual functionality there too, like ripping CDs or fixing ID3 tags. My personal favourite is the keyboard shortcuts that you can set to work globally -- so even if you're playing a game like World of Warcraft, you can skip and pause your music using a finger-breaking keyboard shortcut. Handy. There's also a neat Windows 7 shell integration plugin, if you're fortunate enough to be using Foobar2000 AND Windows 7!

If you're one of those old boring types that's still using the antiquated WinAmp, or you're using the slow-and-disgustingly-bloated iTunes, give Foobar2000 a go -- you'll be surprised at just how good it is.

Official download (torrent) / MajorGeeks direct download (seems link was broken -- fixed now)

Gladinet is an excellent way to plug your Windows desktop in to a number of cloud storage providers - like Amazon, SkyDrive, Google Docs - as well as your own FTP and WebDAV servers. They also recently added a nifty cloud-to-cloud backup feature.

In the update to version 1.4, Gladinet has built in the ability to selectively back up specific file types to your remote storage. Want to make sure you have a current set of your local files at the ready on Google Docs? Maybe zip all your photos up to LiveDrive? It's a breeze in the new version.

From your system tray, just right-click the Gladinet icon and choose backup my files online, and in addition to folder and Google Docs backups you can now select Documents/Photos/Videos/Music as options.

Pick one, and Gladinet quickly scours your hard drive for the appropriate files. You can exclude anything you want - for example, stray .GIF images that might be selected by default.

The new task options make backing up your most essential personal files a breeze.

If you're a believer in the cloud, Gladinet is a must-have free download and the pro version is well worth a look at $39.99 (home) or $59.99 (commercial).

When Google brought its amazing global map application, Google Earth, to the iPhone, it was a match made in heaven. (Okay, it was match made on Earth, but bear with with me, here.) The pinching and rotating gestures on the iPhone made exploring the globe on a handheld device fun and easy. Well, now Google Earth is back with version 2.0, which introduces some of the useful features you've come to expect from Earth's sister project, Google Maps. You can grab it from the app store now.

Although it's nothing earth-shattering (ha!), Google Earth can now access your saved maps - and other people's public maps - by logging into your Google account and using the My Maps interface. Bringing Maps and Earth even closer together, Google has also made it easier to search businesses, photos and places in Earth, just like you can in Maps. Also, in a move that seems fitting for an app that maps the entire world, Earth 2.0 supports 31 languages, up from the original 18.

John Haller is pretty well-known in software circles - he's the guy behind PoartableApps.com. What you may not have known is that he's a big Billy Mays fan. And like a lot of Billy Mays fans, John was a little misty when Billy shuffled off this mortal coil earlier this year.

What better way for a coder to commemorate a fallen icon than with an awesome app? Enter BILLY MAYS CAPS LOCK!

While it won't make your whites whiter or fix the broken handle of your coffee mug, it is one of the greatest remedies I've ever found for computer-induced boredom. Need a quick, random jolt to break you out of your ennui? Hit your caps lock key, and virtual Billy Mays will chime in with one of his trademark catch phrases.

It's probably worth noting that the app does override your caps lock's real functionality, but only overexcited douchebags on Twitter use it anyway, right? Haller does build in shift + caps lock as a workaround in case you do need to enable cruise control for awesome.

HERE'S HOW TO ORDER:

Sorry, I got caught up in the moment there. It's a free download and is available as an installer or in PortableApps format - so you can take Billy with you and fire him up wherever you've got Windows and a CAPS LOCK key.

Google Translate just got a lot better, with a nice, clean new look and several new features. The first thing you'll notice is that you no longer have to click to translate. Translate now works instantly, as you type. If you're trying to translate something into a language with a non-Roman alphabet (like Chinese, for example) Google will also show the phonetic pronunciation underneath the translated characters.

If you're translating into English, you've got an even better option: you can hear an audio pronunciation of the English translation. This feature is awesome, and I'm looking forward to a time when Google inevitably implements it for other languages, too. There's a new feature for English-speakers, too, though: if you type in the phonetic, romanized version of a word from a non-Roman language (Google cheekily gives Fake Steve Jobs' trademark sign-off, "namaste," as an example), Translate will attempt to show the proper characters in the original language.

It feels like it's been years since Microsoft released SyncToy 2.0. That's probably because it has been. But when you have a utility that's dead simple to use that lets you synchronize files between two folders, hard drives, or other storage media, why bother updating it? But SyncToy 2.0 wasn't exactly perfect, so Microsoft recently pushed out version 2.1 which features a handful of bug fixes and improvements.

Like earlier versions, SyncToy 2.1 lets you create folder pairs and decide how data will be synchronized between those two folders. In Synchronize mode, when changes are made in one folder they'll be reflected in the other. If you add a file to folder A, it will be added to folder B. Delete one from B and it'll disappear from A.

Echo mode makes sure that folder B is always up to date with folder A. But if you make changes to folder B, they won't be reflected in the first folder.

In Contribute mode, files will copied from A to B and any files that are renamed in A will be renamed in B. But no files will be deleted. So if you delete a file from folder A it will still live on in B.

All three modes are pretty handy for making sure you have a backup of your important data. You can backup your files to a local drive or a shared network drive for safe keeping.

Probably the closest thing to a new feature in SyncToy 2.1 is the ability to backup your folder pair configurations. Microsoft also says that version 2.1 features better performance, faster copy speeds, and more resilience against network and file system errors. A few bugs have also been fixed, including one that could lead to data corruption when using NAS drives.

SyncToy 2.1 is available as a free download for Windows computers.

[via Lifehacker]

We've told you before about Google Chrome's slick new bookmark syncing feature, available in the Windows beta version of Chrome 4. It automatically keeps your bookmarks synced across multiple Chrome installations, using your Google Account. Well, this feature has landed in recent builds of Chromium for Mac (that's the open-source project Chrome is based on). To enable it, you'll first need to grab the latest version of Chromium.

Bookmark sync isn't on by default. To use it, you'll have to pop open your Terminal and do a little command-line magic. You'll want to right-click Chromium, show package contents, and then find Chromium inside the MacOS folder. Drag that to the Terminal, and then add the argument --enable-sync. Chromium should open, and you should see bookmarking syncing in your preferences.

Sign in with your Google account, and your bookmarks will be synced automatically to any other Chromium/Chrome browsers that you sign into. If you want to see where they're stored on the web, check a slightly strange location: a Chrome folder in your Google Docs account.

I know it seems like a lot of trouble to go through for bookmark syncing, but such is the peril of being on the bleeding edge of browser development. Bookmark syncing will very likely pop up officially in the Chrome Mac beta scheduled for early December.

Who doesn't love a superficial pop-psychology tool? Analyze Words purports to reveal the personality of Twitter users by analyzing their recent toots tweets. The resulting analysis is broken down into three main categories: Emotional Style, Social Style, and Thinking Style.

Each main category consists of three or four ratings; for example, Emotional Style consists of Upbeat, Worried, Angry, and Depressed. Social Style's ratings are Plugged in, Personable, Arrogant/Distant, and Spacey/Valley girl, and Thinking Style's ratings are Analytic, Sensory, and In-the-moment.

Unfortunately, Analyze Words doesn't do any intelligent filtering - for example, retweets are analyzed along with regular tweets, so if you happen to retweet a lot of other people's content, the analysis won't really reflect your own words. But maybe I'm just being touchy because Analyze Words told me I'm a worried, arrogant / distant sensory thinker. Or something like that.

1. Selective sync. Ability to choose which files or folders get sync'd to which computers.

2. Watch any folder. Sync folders outside the My/Dropbox folder (thus essentially replicating the functionality of SugarSync). This would be sweet, though I wonder how it would affect the current simplicity and performance of the app.

3. Share folders without forcing other members to lose space. I'd be interested to see how they handle this one. It could open up loopholes for vastly expanded storage space for groups of people.

4. Email files to Dropbox. Use an email address to upload files to your dropbox space.

5. Mac resource fork support. Perhaps the most cryptic of the requests. The resource fork is essentially metadata attached to the file that helps the Mac OS understand the file better. It defines things like custom icons, window sizes, menu definitions and the like. It is also how Mac OS can do extension-less file names. These things are generally stripped by backup programs (like Dropbox). This would be an extremely useful feature for Mac users.

It frustrates me that so many different services have a calendar function, and yet it's still a pain in the ass to make sure that my personal calendar is up to date. More often than not I find myself manually creating events using copy-and-paste, instead of the event being automatically created for me by whatever service I'm using.

If you happen to be a Facebook Events user, a utility called EventSync can help you keep your iCal calendar application on your Mac up to date with your Facebook events. It's smart enough to allow you to choose to sync all events, or only those that you have accepted (amongst other options). Development is active on the utility too, and Hawk Wings reports that version 2.0 will include the ability to display the flyers and images associated with the Facebook events.

EventSync is donationware for the Mac platform.

It doesn't happen often, but every now and then I receive a customer's laptop which just doesn't want to believe it's no longer attached to an external monitor. And it never fails - some important app is going to appear in the display Twilight Zone.

If only there was some kind of digital shepherd to corral those errant windows. Hey, if not a shepherd, why not SheepDog?

It's a tiny, portable application whose sole purpose is to bring apps that have wandered back to the primary display. Fire it up, and the tray icon listens for a hotket combination to be pressed. In the options screen you can customize your key combo and also change the system tray icon.

Hit the hotkey (or right click the system tray icon and select reposition) and any offending application windows are instantly moved.

At only 20Kb, this baby is going straight on my USB flash drive with all the other handy utilities I need once in a blue moon.