Playing with cool software has always been something I really enjoyed. Primary reason being it allows you to admire the works of a talented set of people. They are a manifestation of the fact that there are so many problems in the tech world which I am not even aware of and the kind of creative solutions people come up with to solve them. Without further ado, I present the few toys (as I like to call them, though most of them have high utility value) that have caught my attention.

1.      MSN Desktop Search - Unless you were on a sabbatical which kept you away from the Internet, you must have surely heard about it. Everyone is talking about it. Scoble has a great collection of reactions from the Blogosphere here. Desktop search is a boon from heaven for people like who have tons of information but not the acumen to keep it in an organized manner. Google, Copernic, AskJeeves have similar offerings and after having tried most of them, I still feel MSN’s offering is the most comprehensive and powerful. The best part is that I don’t have to use the MSN toolbar in IE. I use the toolbar in windows explorer and it works awesome. Only shortcoming is the email search – it is still not as fast as LookOut.

2.      LookOut – Indispensable tool if you use Outlook. The speed of its search is amazing. And it has the most transparent indexing among all its contemporaries. All desktop search offerings have a lot of work to do to come close to LookOut as far as Outlook integration and speed of search is concerned.

3.      Desktop Sidebar – This is THE tool to have. One of the best products for Windows. I am sure you can tell from the words that I am a big fan of this. It has everything you want and is fully customizable (both aesthetically and functionally). I use it for – a clock, stock quotes, toolbar to launch applications, system perf indicator, weather, enhanced command line, RSS aggregator, calendar and windows media player. Sidebar works best if you have the screen real-estate to afford. I use a dual-monitor config and hence can afford the real estate it demands. You can check out how I use Sidebar here

4.      PhotoStory 3 – We all take digital pictures; we all host them online for our loved ones to enjoy. So what’s the problem – since everyone does it, it is no longer COOL. Photostory gives you just that – an avenue to be cool. In simple steps, you can create a movie from your static pictures, all cool transition effects, add background music (or record a narration) save it as a WMV file. You can then import this file in CD creator software and burn it as a VCD to share it with loved ones.

5.      Picasa – Google purchased Picasa and the good news – they made it available free. It is simple-to-use software to manage the myriads of digital pictures and perform simple manipulations. The cool feature is that you can view the Timeline for your pictures. The interface and design are a pleasure to behold

6.      Irfan Viewer – One more must-have on every computer. This is the lightest, simplest and richest image viewer. I cannot even list all of its features. The ones I use most often are for image resizing, cropping and batch conversion. With a download size of less than 1 MB, this is one of the smallest image viewers. Its power and versatility has to be experienced, word just don’t do enough justice

7.      Streets and Trips – Whole of Mapquest and Yahoo maps on my laptop. Exceedingly simple to use. With the GPS hardware, it is unbeatable. Stick the GPS hardware to your windshield, attach it to your laptop’s USB and entrust it to your girlfriend sitting in the navigator’s seat and you are done. And yes, your girlfriend doesn’t need to have a CS degree to use it.

8.      Plus! DMD – It is an assorted collection of a lot of cool toys. My fav is the Plus! Dancer (you can download one dancer for free from here). You can select from around 10 dancers to download from. When music is played, you can see your selected dancer perform his/her moves on the screen. The cool thing is that the dancer moves to the beat of the music (most of the times, at least). I have seen make quite an effect when used sparingly during presentations. It sure has the OOMPH! Factor

There are quite a few more, but that’s for some other time. Please note that the views mentioned are solely mine and are not representative of the company I work for.

Happy Holidays!!

Mayur