Anyone who is spending a considerable amount of time on the web will probably agree that mastering keyboard shortcuts can make a person a lot more productive. The same can be said about the mouse. The more you master it the better it gets. So here are some cool tools and tips to add to your mouse scroll button.

The internet, a network spanning the globe. Today around 20% of the world’s population is connected. That’s over 1.4 billion people, a number with ten digits and it’s growing. Imagine each of these individuals would contribute only one sentence per day and one file per week.

And now think again. How realistic is that? How many sentences and files do you put online on an average day? Does that put Google’s name choice into perspective? Google is said to be named after the number googol, i.e. 10¹⁰⁰, a one followed by 100 zeros. It’s funny how back then they obviously didn’t care about the correct spelling, and today the verb google is found in many contemporary dictionaries.

Launchy, previously mentioned as a Windows start menu alternative, is a powerful keystroke based launcher for your Windows computer. Using Launchy, you can start programs, view files and folders, access bookmarks and perform other such tasks.

In this post, I’ll talk about how you can use Launchy to stay more productive throughout the day. Trust me, once you get the hang of it, you’ll never touch icons or your start menu again. It just rocks. Before you go about using it, let’s have a look at some basic configuration options that you can alter to make Launchy work better for you.

Google Gears is a free open source application and browser plugin that you can use to sync web applications to your computer for those times when you do not have internet access. It also has the capability to work on both Firefox and Internet Explorer web browsers; and Linux, Windows, Windows Mobile and Mac operating systems.

Like most Google products, Google Gears is still in beta, but it definitely gets the job done!

If you’ve been a geek for any time now, you’ve no doubt ran into a problem with not enough desktop real estate. Maybe you don’t like to minimize all those windows, or maybe you just don’t want your application bar to be full of minimized programs.

WinRoll easily takes care of that for you.

Before

After

WinRoll was made so that it could “roll up” the current window into its title bar. Thus producing a very small window of an open application.

I spend a good deal of my working day living inside Google Reader. It is my research assistant, bringing me stories from multiple sources all over the web that I may want to follow up on later. But the continual problem with “multiple sources” is the increasing “noise”, the information overload and the increased likelihood that in among all those stories crowding into Google Reader is the one truly great story, the gem that is going to get trampled by the crowd. That is why AideRSS is becoming an interesting assistant to my assistant!