Look & Feel

VirtuaWin can best be described as “sparse”. It has been a while since I used such a tiny application – the portable version weighs in at 145KB. If we’d still be using floppies, I’d have no trouble carrying VirtuaWin on my nerdy “great utilities” floppy. The flip side of that tiny footprint is that it has no bells and whistles; you won’t find any funky 3D-looking desktop transitions, or any other trippy graphics for that matter.

The main UI you’re going to get consists of a tiny system tray icon which represents the currently active desktop in the default 2×2 configuration:

In my case, it’s the top-left desktop.

Configuration

As you may expect, the main configuration interface looks quite utilitarian:

You can configure the “shape” of your virtual desktop space, i.e, set how many desktops the “width” and “height” should consist of. If you decide to change the default 2×2 config, the system tray icon turns into a number rather than a visual square showing the currently active desktop.

The hotkeys tab is where all the action takes place:

The list of available actions is so long, it actually exceeds the area of the window. That’s a good example of VirtuaWin’s minimalistic approach. Out of a zillion possible actions, the application only comes with six pre-configured hotkeys. The rest is up to you. You can use VirtuaWin to make windows always-on-top, temporarily pull a window into the current desktop and then “dismiss” it back to the one it came from, and perform numerous other operations.

Performance

On my mid-range computer, switching between desktops was very fast. There was one area of noticeable lag, though: My “main” desktop had nine open windows (and thus, nine taskbar icons). When switching to another desktop, the windows would quickly disappear. They would also quickly reappear when I switched back, but the taskbar icons would take several more seconds to reappear. The lag was noticeable, with the last icons popping up on the taskbar about four seconds after I switched back to the main desktop.

As VirtuaWin doesn’t even attempt to provide any flashy graphical effects, I can’t compare it to Dexpot’s cool 3D-looking transitions. I would expect it to be ultra-snappy, and if you don’t mind the taskbar issue, it does feel quite quick. The Expect configuration tab contains several workarounds, including a couple of taskbar specific options:

Playing with these options made no noticeable difference in the lag issue. One interesting option in the Expert tab is “Hide system tray icon”. I guess this one comes in handy for sneaky employees.

Usability & Extensibility

One graphical option that’s sorely lacking is a graphical display of all of your desktops and the windows they contain. I guess that’s a pretty demanding operation which doesn’t mesh well with VirtuaWin’s general minimalism. Fortunately, you can always extend and customize your VirtuaWin installation using so-called Modules, which are basically just plug-ins.

Specifically, there’s a module called VWPreview which provides a basic graphical preview feature, along with some equally-based graphical transition effects. The effects were nothing to write home about, but the preview looked like this on my system:

That’s just one pane (I had two 24″ monitors, creating a desktop that’s a tad too wide for a screenshot), but you get the general idea.

Bottom Line

This is one for the minimalists. If there was no irritating taskbar lag, I would bill it as a higher-performance Dexpot alternative. As it is, I cannot honestly say it feels faster, at least on my own system. Both Dexpot and VirtuaWin are very capable applications, each in their own way.  Let us know what you think of VirtuaWin or if you prefer one of the alternative apps.

Is there other must-have virtual desktop software you think I should review? Or do you know of a way to make VirtuaWin feel faster? Let me know in the comments.

Dexpot is an established player in the Windows virtual desktop space – if you’ve ever looked for a virtual desktop software solution for Windows, you may well have come across it. It is under active development, with the latest version released on June 29th this year.  There’s also a portable version which you can take along on a USB stick.

Out of The Box Functionality

When you install and run Dexpot, you will instantly see a few subtle changes to your system. The first thing you may notice is that the application’s taskbar icon provides instant access to four workspaces. It looks like this:

If you click on any of the alternate workspaces, all of your currently running tasks will instantly disappear off the taskbar. This can be a real “a-ha” moment when showing the app to someone – it’s an instant demonstration of how it can radically alter your working style and unclutter your desktop.

The next change you may notice off the bat is that Dexpot adds its own menu entry for the Window menu of every app running on your system:

This is one way you can instantly get a feel of Dexpot’s power. The menu lets you do all sorts of operations with the window, not all related to other virtual desktops – you can set it as always on top, or minimize it to the tray, too. But obviously, using the menu on a day-to-day basis would not be the easiest way to enjoy Dexpot’s power, so now would be a great time to dive into the configuration interface and find some keyboard shortcuts!

Initial Configuration

As can be expected for such a mature app, Dexpot’s configuration interface is chock-full of options, tweaks and settings. I won’t take you through the whole interface (half the fun is exploring!) but let’s look at some of the more common options.

I like how Dexpot does not automatically set itself to start with Windows – that’s very polite and un-intrusive. But if you’re serious about using the app, you would definitely want to check the box that says Start with Windows. Also, if you’re just getting started with this whole virtual desktop idea, four desktops (the default) may be too much. I changed mine to three – I have a dual-monitor system, so plenty of windows can fit onto a single desktop, and I think three should be enough for me. Speaking of dual monitors – a “desktop” includes both monitors. It’s your entire workspace, however large it is.

Now, let’s get back to those keyboard shortcuts I promised. You can find a boatload of these under Controls:

As you can see, the default key for switching desktops is Alt+number (Alt+2 for desktop 2, and so on). And to send (move) a window to a different desktop, use Alt+Shift+number. You can also switch workspaces using the mouse, and Dexpot also offers a complex interface for configuring what happens when you interact with a window’s title bar:

Bells & Whistles

The last thing I’d like to discuss is Dexpot’s optional plugins. Most of these are disabled by default, but they can add lots of functionality. For instance, the Dexcube plugin enables a Compiz-like rotating 3D cube effect for switching between desktops:

On a dual-monitor system, the cube only shows up on one monitor. But on my system (which is not a monster gaming rig) the cube transitions were impressively smooth and quick. There are lots of other plugins, as well.

Final Thoughts

As usual in reviewing such powerful apps, I have only skimmed the surface of what Dexpot can do. I haven’t even discussed customizing per-desktop wallpaper, desktop names, and lots of other things you can set and tweak.

It is not often that I get to describe an application as “humble”, but that’s the first word that comes to mind when I think of Dexpot. Installing it is like meeting a new person who doesn’t look like much at first, but then you start talking to them and discover how truly deep they are. Out of the box, Dexpot’s defaults are very sane – conservative, even. But as you dig into its myriad settings and options, you will discover it offers fantastic customization options. Simply put, this is a very powerful virtual desktop software solution. Highly recommended.

Before we begin, what is a hacker? Well, Wikipedia defines a hacker as “a person who heavily modifies the software or hardware of their own computer system” while Google defines a hacker as “an enthusiastic and skillful computer programmer or user“. I bet most of you here fit that second description at least.

jEdit

This is less known than Notepad++. It supports many advanced features, such as syntax highlighting, which is a must if you’re a programmer. It also has features such as a built-in macro language, which allows it to be incredibly extensible. It’s written in Java, which allows it to be cross-platform.

As a programmer, you are constantly removing code to optimize your program, to fix bugs or any number of other reasons. Sometimes, you may need it back. The so called “Kill Ring” stores deleted text, so you never have to worry.

It supports 130 languages, including AppleScript and Objective-C, which surprised me. So even as a stranded Mac developer, it’s worth a go. It comes with a nice amount of documentation that’s easy to understand, so if you’re ever stuck, don’t worry. It’s a powerful text editor that no Windows programmer should go without.

FireBug

FireBug is the number one free web development tool for Firefox which allows live inspecting and editing of webpages. It is is a powerful tool for testing your websites and fixing problems without having to reload the page all the time. Similar to Safari’s built-in ‘Element Inspector’ but for Firefox. Safari is not extensible enough for a web developer, though that may change with Safari 5. For now though, Firefox is the way to go for web development and FireBug makes it even better.

One use for FireBug is downloading page elements, such as Flash games.

Jorge covered how to install Firebug on other browsers than Firefox back in 2009, and James also covered it in his recent CSS tutorial.

AutoHotKey

This is like TextExpander for Windows, although it goes much further than that. It’s a macro utility which runs in the background and intercepts any key or mouse presses you have ordered it to. It is easily script-able and allows you to do many things, from reversing your scrolling, to auto-correcting text, to the aforementioned text substitution.

I can have it set to substitute “@habib” with “habib@makeuseof.com“. I can set it to do it after the space, or immediately. My choice. That’s the beauty of it: everything can be tweaked. Here’s one line of code that replaces @habib with my email:

:*:@habib::habib@makeuseof.com

The block of text can be as long as I want. I can have pre-written email responses. For the budding coder, you can set it so that +ifelse writes out an if, else statement for you. Then just enter the condition, statements, and other elements. It’s obvious how this can speed up development substantially. In fact, with AutoHotKey, you can optimize a machine for any task, from development to gaming. If the game doesn’t allow you to choose the controls, just fire up the associated AutoHotKey script.

Tina wrote about ac’tivAid, a set of useful AutoHotKey scripts, last year.

VirtualBox

This is a no-brainer for web developers, especially if you run a geeky-type website, where a lot of visitors use Linux. Mac OS X can be installed, albeit without support and you’d be breaking the license, which is illegal.

Some of you may be asking why not just install Linux here and dual-boot, or even replace Windows and have all these tools available out of the box, or with a better alternative? Well, some people are required to run Windows and may not want to keep VirtualBox running all the time, while dual-booting would be a pain in the ass. These tools allow you to have some of the power and extensibility of Linux without having to give up your job, dual-booting or keeping 2 whole OS’s running. VirtualBox allows you to test your websites with other OS’s, or develop for Linux in your spare time. If you are trying to port an application, virtualization is a lifesaver.

This app has been covered many times on MakeUseOf, e.g. two posts by Jorge in January and February 2009, while Justin wrote about VirtualBox’s seamless mode last year.

What do you think of these tools? Do you have any other suggestions? Did you already know of these tools, and their uses? Are you going to consider retrying some of these programs? Tell us your thoughts in the comments section below!

Image Credit: Alan Toniolo de Carvalho

You might think it’s extra work to isolate these applications because you always keep your antivirus software updated and won’t ever think of downloading obscure software anyway. Yet practicing this type of caution by using special isolating software will likely be more beneficial in the long run. Having a computer overrun by viruses will not only be hair-splitting, but may also lead you to spend money to replace a machine that could have perfectly lived longer.

Let’s see then how you can protect your machine by isolating potentially unsafe applications.

Running Programs In Isolated Sandboxes

We first took a good, long look at Sandboxie here, where we discussed how this Windows-only program creates virtual layers upon which programs can operate normally, that is, can perform read and write operations without permanently affecting your hard drive. Sandboxie basically runs your applications in isolated instances, namely sandboxes, so you can safely test drive even new or little-known programs that could potentially be unsafe.

After you install Sandboxie and its system-level drivers, you’ll see a yellow icon on the system tray and you’ll also be offered an online tutorial, which should open up in a web-browser that you can run sandboxed or not. Aside from letting you run a sandboxed web browser, Sandboxie lets you run sandboxed email programs, programs from the Start menu, executable programs or even from Windows Explorer.

Sandboxie might be useful in many cases where you simply aren’t sure of how safe a program is, but you’re still curious to try it. Since it isolates that program from the rest of your system, you’re pretty much safe to install it and dispose of it if you don’t like it or encounter a problem. Destroying that sandbox is a matter of either closing the running programs in that instance or removing the specific sandbox.
Even if you have many programs in that sandbox, the entire session is cleaned up with a one click.

Additional uses for Sandboxie could be loading up a program that you don’t really need to have installed but might need to use it once in a blue moon, like ImgBurn or uTorrent. You could also use Sandboxie to load up additional instances of a running program, like a second instance of, say, Firefox so you can log on to your secondary Google Account and what not. It’s a pretty nice way to use programs safely since they fully work without limitations or incompatibilities. In fact, it’s pretty hard to tell apart from a regular, non-sandboxed running application. The only way to distinguish the sandboxed program is by looking at the title bar of the window.

Sandboxie is free for personal use, but the free version allows not more than one sandbox running at a time. While Sandboxie is pretty popular, there are similar applications that can provide a sandboxed environment for a program. Among these are Evalaze, GeSWaLL, BufferZone Pro, iCore Virtual Accounts, and the former Altiris Software Virtualization Solution (SVS), for which I’ve found no way of obtaining a personal license.

Undoing System Changes After Installing A Program

Returnil System Safe Free is a program for Windows that basically lets your machine revert back to its original system status after a reboot. Download it here. What Returnil does is it clones your operating system, creating a virtual environment, which will be loaded in lieu of your original OS when you restart your system after installing Returnil. This will allow you to run or install even the most obscure programs without getting your computer infected since it will undo everything and return to its original state on the next system restart. Though it uninstalls any program you might have installed in your virtual environment, you can still save documents and files to a flash drive so you’ll have those even after a restart. Returnil might be one of the easiest ways on this list to roll back the system after you’ve tested out potentially unsafe applications, as all you need to do is restart the system, but a drawback is that you cannot install programs that require you to reboot after installation, which will promptly revert back to the original, unadulterated state.

Forget Installing – Just Run Windows Applications From Your Browser

If you don’t want to install another program to help you isolate applications, you might want to check Spoon, a website that runs a type of revolutionary virtualization software to stream desktop applications to your Windows machine. We have covered it in detail before. With Spoon, you can run any of the supported Windows desktop applications using just your browser and the downloadable Spoon plugin. Supported applications include popular web browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox, even productivity apps and games. The selection of supported apps consists of mostly popularly-used applications on Windows, for which you won’t notice the differences compared to a natively-running Windows application.

We also discussed a different type of application virtualization with Cameyo, VMLite VirtualApps Studio, and Enigma Virtual Box, all of which are free programs that let you create portable applications from programs you already have installed. On a related not, see also our homebrewed workaround to create a portable version from Skype, and also see how to build your own portable OS with Slax.

Do you tend to download lots of applications on your primary machine? If so, do you use any of these programs?

Image Credit: Returnil, Everaldo Coelho

We first talked about Spoon here, but in short, Spoon is a revolutionary virtualization tool that lets you run applications that you would normally need to download to your desktop by just using your web browser and a plugin. Once you’ve created an account and downloaded the plugin, you can select from a variety of applications in its directory, which features a number of the more popular software.

While this browser-based virtualization tool isn’t available for Mac or Linux (I tried Spoon in Ubuntu with no luck), it’s a great tool to have if you’re into trying new applications but don’t want to clutter your registry with unnecessary additions from programs you may not keep later.

Let’s see what applications you can try right now even in your Windows machine after getting the plugin, which is a 2.5 MB download.

Here are the more popular applications you can find in the Spoon App Directory that we’ve mentioned in our MakeUseOf Windows Pack or have made it to other must-have lists.

Office Suites

OpenOffice and OxygenOffice Professional are both available on Spoon. OpenOffice is the office suite included in Ubuntu by default (as well as in our list of 15 must-haves) and probably the most popular open-source office suite out there. OxygenOffice Professional is an enhanced OpenOffice clone, with additional templates, fonts, clip art graphics and images. Here is how the latter looks virtualized.

While the previous apps launched within 10 seconds or so, OxygenOffice took a few minutes to buffer.

There were also a few hiccups when I was testing OxygenOffice that I didn’t get while testing other Spoon apps, but considering I’m only emulating software components to stream this huge office suite, the hiccups (OpenOffice Writer froze a few times) weren’t too bad.

Browsers

It might be redundant to feature browsers when you’re running it from a browser, but there are times when you just really need to use a more established browser other than your favorite one. Say, if you’re a web or graphic designer that wants to test your projects in another browser, or maybe your online banking site or university’s online database system (a big problem for me as my school’s degree audit website doesn’t display information properly in Chrome) doesn’t support your current browser, you’ll have the options to run either Firefox 4 Beta, 3.5, 3 and 2, as well as Safari 5 and Opera 10. That might save you from having to use portable apps in your hard drive too.

Useful Productivity Programs

Foxit Reader

Launching Foxit Reader was ultra fast, and there was even a popup asking me whether to set the reader as the system’s default PDF viewer. I don’t think that’d be quite possible but it just goes to show how close to the real application you are even though you’re just using your browser to stream the application.

Abiword

This is a great, open-source word processor that you can use in lieu of the whole OpenOffice suite, with most features you’d expect to find in the OpenOffice Writer. It’s more feature-rich than, say, online distraction-free writing environments and you can still run it from your browser only!

Notepad++

An excellent text editor for programmers, Notepad++ offers a lot of features for heavy users. It’s so many steps up from Windows’ built-in Notepad that if you’re constantly taking notes using the latter, you should really consider trying Notepad++. It’s got multiple tabs, keyboard shortcuts for almost everything and more.

In my machine, it even picked up folders from my previous Notepad++ installation. Even virtualized, this app acts like the real deal.

Useful Utilities

RocketDock

You might have heard a bunch of positive things about RocketDock and now you can try it without worries! It’s been raved about in this article on how to make WinXP look like WinVista. This one’s really just about eye candy but could also help save time, as well as navigate around folders and bookmarks in an easier way.

You can probably deduce that the screenshots will not contain anything new, as you’ve probably seen screenshots of the real programs elsewhere. Additional programs you can find that aren’t really geared for productivity include:

• Pidgin/Trillian: Two popular multi-protocol IM clients, which you can even use to tweet.
• Skype: A highly convenient VoIP and video-call service.
• Tweetdeck: A handy Twitter client that even works in Linux.
• Audacity: A great audio editor that was featured in our portable apps list.
• AnyVideoConverter: An excellent video conversion program that you should check out.
• Irfanview: One of the very best and most lightweight image viewers, converters and optimizers out there.
• Blender: An open-source animation suite and video editor that’s responsible for many open movies.
• GIMP: Another open-source application that seriously shines as an image editor with so many features you can do without Photoshop if you really teach yourself.
• Paint.NET: More advanced than Windows Paint, and almost as good as the paid image manipulation apps.
• VLC player: This multi-faceted media player (that you can even use to watch non-MP4 files on your iPhone) probably needs no introduction.

As you can see, there are many popular programs that you’ve probably always heard about supported by Spoon. If you want to try any of them, Spoon would make things much easier. You get the same features as you would with installed desktop programs but they won’t even reside on your hard drive.

What do you think of Spoon and what applications have you virtualized?

This week, we’re giving away 15 copies of Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac worth almost $1200 in total. If you’ve always wanted to buy one but never got around to it, here’s your chance to win it for free!

The recently updated Parallels Desktop 6 makes it easy to install Linux and Windows from a disc or an .iso file. The installation process is completed with an easy-to-follow wizard, taking you through a few simple steps to getting another OS working on your machine. When you want to create a new installation, select the source file, whether from your optical drive or from an .iso file on your computer.

If you want Parallels Desktop to determine the settings for you, select Express Install, and enter the product key if necessary. This will take all the hard work out of the process, leaving you only with a few choices such as how you want to work with your Windows applications and the location of your Virtual Machine.

Deselecting Express Install will give you the same choices, such as your Mac integration, along with the ability to determine exactly how your OS will be set up.

When choosing a name, and selecting the location for your Virtual Machine, make sure that ‘Customize settings before installation’ is checked.

As the Windows set up launches, you will be able to determine the exact settings for your Virtual Machine. First you can determine how much RAM the machine will use. For Windows 7, you’ll need at least 1 GB (1024 MB).

Next, you can determine various options including how Parallels will behave on startup and shutdown, determine the performance optimization, security, sharing options and much more.

Lastly, you’ll be able to determine the hardware settings, including boot order, selecting your optical and hard drive, network and printer settings, amongst others.

If you’ve installed several different OSes on your machine, launching Parallels Desktop will give you a convenient menu to select the OS you want to launch.

Just about any OS will work out of the box, meaning that if you want to try out the latest Linux distro, you don’t have to worry about configuring settings, and will run seamlessly within your OS X installation. When plugging in USB devices, you have the choice to use them either on your Mac OS, or in your virtual machine.

Another huge advantage to using Parallels Desktop is the ability to easily drag and drop files from one OS to the other. You can take this one step further with Parallels with the option to run Windows programs in Coherence mode, as though they were part of your Mac OS.

Windows programs can be accessed from the dock.

And they will run side by side your Mac apps seamlessly.

If you’d prefer, you can keep the two separate, running your Windows OS in a separate window, identical to any Windows OS.

While Parallels prompts you to choose your preference during the setup, you can easily toggle between the two after installation.

For those of you who already have Parallels Desktop, what will the latest update bring you? Most of the changes are subtle, or under the hood, but some of the surface changes are the ability to search for Windows programs using Spotlight and support for new OSes including Ubuntu 10.04, Fedora 13 and Windows Server 2008. Under the hood, they’ve been working on a faster Windows launch time, and an increased speed to allow for an even better gaming experience.

We’ve got 15 copies of Parallels Desktop 6 to give away this week and here’s how you can win one.

How do I win a copy?

It’s simple, just follow the instructions.

This giveaway begins now and ends Saturday, January 29th at 2100hrs PST. The winners will be selected at random and announced via email.

Spread the word to your friends and have fun!

MakeUseOf would like to thank Parallels Holdings Ltd. for their generosity while participating in this giveaway. Interesting in sponsoring? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via email.