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Our Hive Five asks readers to identify five of the best tools for any job, then vote for the absolute best. Here’s a look back at the winners from each week in the fourth quarter of 2009.
Every week we pose a question to you, the computer savvy readers of Lifehacker. Tirelessly we search for the next “Which is best?” question and through the hive mind we distill down your thousands of nominations into a list of the top five candidates. You vote on the best of the best and we return the next week to declare a champion.
The following list showcases the winners in each of the categories we covered in the fourth quarter of 2009. If a particular category catches your eye and you’d like to see the other contenders, click on the name of the category to jump to the original Hive Five post, clicking on the name of the winner will take you directly to the winner’s web site.
TweetDeck boasts the ability to monitor multiple social-networking services, in this case Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace. You can fight Twitter spam with a built-in spam monitor, follow topics with saved searches, and preview shortened URLs from within TweetDeck. You can use TweetDeck to manage multiple Twitter accounts from one interface and thanks to web-based TweetDeck accounts you can back up and sync your TweetDeck profile across multiple machines.
SparkPeople is a comprehensive weight-loss web site. A free membership gives you access to a variety of nutritional information and calorie-tracking tools, weight-tracking tools, and the enormous SparkPeople community. Personal pages, like mini-blogs within the SparkPeople site, help you publish your progress and connect with other users who have similar goals. You’ll find no shortage of ways to track and analyze everything from the types of food you eat to the amount of weight you lift-and lose!-in the reports section of the site. SparkPeople is available in a scaled-down mobile version for use on your web-enabled phone or as an iPhone/iPod touch application.
Process Explorer is the free and portable offering from Microsoft. Process Explorer is like the standard task manager on steroids. You still get a list of processes, you still see charts of your usage, but both give you significantly more information and control over the information. Unlike the default manager, Process Explorer makes it easy to track down which file is being held by which program and get to the bottom of computer mysteries like why a certain DLL or DOC file simply cannot be deleted. It also shows which service is performing which function so you’ll never look at a long and repetitive list of Windows system executables that are indistinguishable from each other-every one will be associated with its function.
The Advanced Packaging Tool, a.k.a. APT, is a free tool built into most Linux distributions and many variants that handles the installation, removal, and updating of software packages. APT is a tool that went a long way toward making Linux a bit friendlier to the masses who aren't comfortable installing or compiling software packages on Linux, but it runs from the command line, so it's still not all that friendly to folks joining Linux from the Windows or Mac worlds. That's where Synaptic comes in. Synaptic is a graphical front end to APT that makes the tool wildly more user-friendly, and—yes—it handles checking for and updating software with aplomb. (Folks using Ubuntu, <a href="the most popular Linux distribution among Lifehacker readers, take note: Synaptic will be replaced by the Ubuntu Software Center—another APT-powered update tool—in April of 2010.)
PortableApps is the Grand Daddy of portable application sites. Between John Haller—the founder of the site—and the dozens of developers, packagers, translators, and the hundreds of people that participate in the forums, the sheer number of people working to polish the PortableApps suite has resulted in a very comprehensive package. The PortableApps suite includes basics like Firefox for browsing and Pidgin for instant messaging but also includes—in the full package—Open Office. You could download all the individual portable components separately of course, but what really ties everything together is the PortableApps menu system. Seen in the screenshot above, the menu system is clean, includes a backup utility, and makes organizing your portable apps and documents simple.
A long time coming, Windows finally enhanced the standard taskbar, creating a swanky dock system to call its own. Windows users trying out Windows 7 for the first time are in for an extra big treat-the change from the old taskbar system to the new dock is huge. You can drag and drop to pin shortcuts to the taskbar, Win+# (where the # is the numerical position of the pinned icon) launches the application, and icons also have jump lists associated with them—quick access to routine features and commands for that particular application. Hovering over the icon of a running application gives you a quick peek and the ability to jump to the application or close it. Microsoft was late to the dock party, but at least when they finally rolled it out, they remembered to decorate with streamers and bring a cake.
The free offering from AVG is one of the lightest, feature-wise, among the nominations in the anti-virus Hive Five. That said, if you’re looking for a basic antivirus application that will scan your computer, keep an eye out for spyware, and keep you from visiting malware and virus laden websites (via their LinkScanner protection), AVG is a solid free offering.
Once you install Dropbox, a folder, appropriately called "My Dropbox", is placed in the Documents area of your computer. Anything you put into this folder will be synced with your Dropbox account. You can sync files, share files by making the folder they are in public, and restore a previous version of your file—Dropbox keeps a change log going back 30 days. All your files are also accessible via the Dropbox web site, which is great for those times you're at a computer where you don't have Dropbox installed, but you still want to access a document. If you want to sync a folder without putting it directly inside the main My Dropbox folder, you can do that with a little elbow grease, too. Dropbox doesn’t have an unlimited option like the rest, but if all you want to back up is your most important documents, it certainly works as off-site backup, and it provides data redundancy on every computer you install it on.
CamStudio is a free and open-source offering for the screencasting market. You can record all or part of your screen, customize cursors and text annotations, adjust the quality of the video output, and save screencasts as AVI or SWF files. The interface is easy to understand, and you won’t be overwhelmed with extensive options. In a nutshell, it’s a free and effective tool for creating screencasts without a lot of bulk or expense.
Amazon's wishlist system used to only support items that Amazon or affiliates carried—which, while limited, still gave you access to a large stable of items. When they rolled out the Universal Wishlist and its accompanying Wishlist Button, however, you got the ease of use of the Amazon wishlist system plus the ability to add items to your list that Amazon.com doesn’t carry. Anything from any web site can now be added to your Amazon wishlists, both private and public, using the Wishlist Button. Creating and managing your Amazon wishlist is free.
OneNote is a note-taking and organization tool that many Lifehacker readers have called Microsoft's best product. It's versatile—it's made appearances here, in the best note-taking tools and journaling Hive Fives—and the outlining functionality is well integrated and easy to use. One of the strong points of outlining in OneNote is the way outlines support the same drag and drop rearranging found throughout OneNote. Almost every single element in a OneNote page can be dragged, dropped, or easily manipulated with a context menu—the screenshot above shows an element in the outline right before being dragged into a new slot. Note: If you’re curious about the GTD context in the screenshot, read our guide to getting things done with Microsoft OneNote.
CCleaner isn't strictly a startup management tool. Most people use it to clean out cookies and other undesirable elements and to tidy up the registry. A secondary but helpful tool in CCleaner: it also allows you to delete entries from the startup file—hence its inclusion here. It's a bit of a one trick pony, though; you can't alter, tweak, or insert entries. You can only delete them. Still, it gets the job done if the task you want isn't advanced tweaking, but just to get that annoying program to stop popping up every time you reboot.
The last quarter of 2009 was filled with all sorts of useful tools and software to help you get things done. If reading over the list gave you an idea for the next great Hive Five topic, drop us a line at tips at lifehacker.com. Make sure to include Hive Five Idea in the subject so your idea gets forwarded to gnomes at mission control.
Google Chrome: If seeing what needs to be done next is a lot more useful for you than seeing where you usually go on the net, you’ll want to use Things To Do to transform Chrome’s new tab page.
There are no options or settings to Things To Do—simply install the extension, and your new tab page is taken over by a very simple to-do list. Type in items, "X" them off as you complete them, and have your web wanderings out of mind as a bonus.
Things To Do is a free download, requires a development build of Chrome on Windows or Linux (for the moment).
Windows/Mac/Linux (Adobe AIR): We’ve written about a lot of desktop clients that are essentially site-specific browsers (SSBs), but free AIR client Google Tasks helps you consolidate your clients by allowing access to most Google apps in mobile form.
Google Tasks may be one of the lesser-used Google services, but for those who like their tasks integrated with everything else Google in their lives, it certainly does the trick. Now, thanks to the same developer as Remember the Task (a desktop client for Lifehacker-favorite Remember the Milk), you can get Google Tasks in a small window on your desktop—plus so much more.
The really cool thing about the Google Tasks client is that, since it’s merely built on the Google Mobile API, you can actually access any Google app available as a mobile site from Google Tasks. Just scroll to the top and choose your app (or hit “more” for a larger list), and you can access Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and others within the same client, essentially making it an all-around Google Mobile client. If you feel like you have one too many SSBs open at any given time, this is a pretty nice solution.
Google Tasks is a free download for all platforms, and requires Adobe AIR.
Windows only: System information utility Process Hacker is an open-source, portable task manager clone with loads of powerful features.
While Process Hacker is meant to look and work a little more like the built-in Task Manager, being easy to approach for regular users, it actually has many of the same features as the popular and powerful Process Explorer that we all know and love.
Along with the normal features one would expect from a process manager utility, you can add or delete services, read and write process data memory in a hex editor, search through memory with a regex, inject DLLs into running processes, and pretty much every other feature you can imagine. Process Hacker is free and open source, available for Windows only.
Web-based task manager Remember the Milk stands out for its ubiquity, and a few of its users have suggested novel ways to use its tags, priorities, and separate lists as a multi-person household…
GoogleUpdate, ctfmon, iPodService—these rascally, auto-starting services and others like them can drive a memory-sensitive Windows user bonkers. Process Blocker does what it sounds like, with a DIY but simple method of choosing targets.
As noted in the instructions, Process Blocker runs as a system service, watching for certain processes and killing them off if it finds them running. The app won't provide you a list of background services or apps for selection, though—this is a text affair. If you look in your Task Manager (Control-Shift-Escape), or your super-charged Process Explorer replacement, and notice that, for instance, GoogleUpdate.exe refuses to stop starting up, even after you’ve told it not to do so with Revo Uninstaller or another app, simply add it to the list.txt file included in Process Blocker’s program folder. More detailed instructions on adding and re-starting the service are at the program site. You’ll know it’s working if you see a system tray pop-up noting that “SuchAndSuch.exe is blocked” when it tries to jump in and drink up a little memory.
You’ll definitely want to make sure the processes you’re trying to block can and should be blocked off, so making a few trips to Process Library wouldn’t be a bad idea. And if you just want to throttle back an auto-starting app’s memory use, not kill it entirely, try the previously mentioned Process Lasso, or dig through our guide to reclaiming memory by mastering Windows Task Manager. Process Blocker is a free download for 32- and 64-bit Windows systems (2000 and later).
Windows only: Free task managing application Process Manager for Windows adds options to the global context menu for all applications—adding quick access to control running tasks.
We’ve mentioned this application before, but it has since updated with more features including minimizing applications to the system tray, setting windows always on top, and assigning per-window transparency. Readers using Windows XP will also get extra features—the ability to completely hide a single window, or hide all windows except the current one behind the PMW tray icon—making this low-resource, portable application worth a look for anybody interested in better control over running processes. Process Manager for Windows is free and open source, available for Windows only.
