CloudShot
While Window’s built-in Snipping Tool is halfway decent as a program for taking screenshots, it lacks any precision, finesse, and control whatsoever, being very much of a partially implemented feature that never really got the attention it deserved. CloudShot remedies that by being an incredibly powerful one-click tool for capturing static screenshots as well as short screen recordings.
After bringing up the capture overlay by pressing the shortcut key, the area to be captured can be chosen precisely, by merely clicking a particular window to select only it, capturing an entire screen worth of content, or dragging to resize the area of the selection to get only the bit that is really necessary. The captures screenshots and recordings can be saved to files, uploaded to image-sharing sites or simply copied to the clipboard for pasting in another program, bypassing the need to save the image first. The user can also choose to save the images to predetermined local or online storage folders such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive.
CloudShot also comes armed with additional tools for highlighting and annotating particular parts of captured screenshots with basic shapes, lines, arrows and text boxes without requiring the user to resort to yet another program. As a whole, CloudShot’s usefulness cannot be overstated, especially in this age when screenshots often end up being as useful for work-related purposes as they can be entertaining when horsing around with friends.
Everything Search
While Windows has come a long way since its slow, unstable and buggy origins, it still has some lackings that its built-in tools struggle to cover. Windows’s native file search function, for example, is not entirely dependable, largely because of its laggy nature, as well as its strange tendency to often miss files when searching for them. This is where Everything Search comes in.
Bringing up a blank search window with a press of a system tray icon or a customizable keyboard shortcut, the difference between Everything and any native search function becomes immediately evident. The program’s lightning-fast and meticulous indexing allow matching results to be brought up almost instantaneously, even when using ‘wild cards’ to substitute for forgotten or lost characters. The search results change rapidly with the typing of each new character, and the search query is clearly highlighted within the filenames of the search results.
The program’s interface is about as clean as they come, and its laser-focused precision and breakneck searching speeds put even macOS’s highly lauded Spotlight to shame. In fact, one cannot be blamed for wondering why Window’s own search feature cannot be something like this in the first place…
SuperF4
Windows may have evolved, but many of its programs have not gotten the memo yet. Many Windows programs (particularly non-professional ones) are prone to crashing spectacularly at the slightest provocation from the user, or worse, getting stuck in a frozen state that is not just worth panicking over but also rendering the system partially to completely unusable during this time. UNIX-based operating systems (like Linux and macOS) ‘remedy’ these situations by allowing a user to identify and kill a problematic program using a terminal command or two, but Windows does not offer that luxury natively outside of its clunky Task Manager windows. SuperF4 changes that by letting the user kill an unresponsive app by selecting the problematic program and hitting Ctrl+Alt+F4, a slight variation over Windows’s general quit command for programs. It also allows the user to kill programs using a feature called skill, which lets any program be killed by SuperF4 simply by clicking its window with the mouse cursor.
While it may sound like a one-trick pony, SuperF4’s tiny size belies its usefulness. It can definitely get users out of a twist and potentially avert a computer-wide crash caused by a rogue program by allowing the user to kill it with minimal or no system casualties.
Pushbullet
It’s no surprise that we live in a more connected age than any generation of humans ever has to date. The advent of smartphones has made it possible for instant communication beyond mere voice calls, allowing messages, information, and files to be shared at the flick of a thumb. Unfortunately, this has also given rise to the accursed flood of digital notifications that permeate every waking moment of our lives. Be it from social media platforms, messaging apps or the device’s own system, every smartphone user has to burn through dozens of notifications a day. A solid stretch of work on a computer ends up being punctuated by dozens of unfortunate breaks brought along by said notifications from the user’s smartphone, and since it is shockingly hard for many people to ignore these alerts, it ends up severely hampering the user’s productivity in the process.
Pushbullet is a small program that, when installed in parallel on a computer (running Windows, macOS or Linux) and an accompanying Android/iOS smartphone and subsequently paired up, causes any notifications received by phone to show up as an alert in a corner of the computer’s display. This allows users to take in the contents of the notification with a quick glance without having to pause their work, which is immensely beneficial for one’s efficiency. Pushbullet even allows users to quickly send and receive links, text snippets images and small files from their phones to their computers and vice versa. It also allows users to directly type out replies to text messages received on the phone without having to leave the computer. Pushbullet has been around for a while, but it continues to remain one of the most useful apps in any power user’s arsenal.
While Pushbullet is free, a Pro version of it also exists, based on a monthly subscription model, which opens up a whole new slew of features, such as greatly increasing the supported size for inter-device file transfers, sending messages from the phone using a computer on messaging services such as Kik or WhatsApp, , and enabling text to be copied from one platform and seamlessly pasted in another.