Hard drives are about as dependable as a teenager promising to come home by midnight. That leaves my ViewSonic LCDs out in the cold. And the tool works only with monitors that can be managed by software (they must support DDC commands). There are two limitations: If you have a dual monitor display, Display Tuner will support just one monitor and ignore the second one. You can also set profiles for different viewing situations, say, watching videos, or reading text. Display Tuner lets you do those adjustments - such as geometry, color, and brightness - from within Windows. And I really don’t like fiddling with those silly, hard-to-use buttons on the front of the monitor. I never seem to get either of my ViewSonic LCDs tuned just right. (Or formatted your drive, or caused your spouse to leave you, for that matter.) Monitors are weird and even the program’s author has a stern warning for you. So before you read about Nicomsoft’s free Display Tuner, I want you to know that you can’t write me to complain the tool turned your LCD into one side of a 21-inch bookstand. Listen, you know why the subtitle is geek alert? It’s because you need to like to take computing risks and you need some semblance of knowledge about LCDs. Play with them, see if they fit your working style, and maybe you’ll find a couple of keepers. I know you like new tools to try (I do too), so here are a stack for Windows. If you give either or both of ’em a try, let us know what you think. So I’m attracted to anything that might help me keep them in some semblance of order, and I’m keeping BumpTop on my Mac and planning to try out the Windows version. The desktops of my computers tend to be appalling messes–a trait they share with my real desks. The basic version of BumpTop is a free download–and if it sounds at all intriguing, it’s worth your time. BumpTop Pro, which goes for $29 also lets you flip through stacks of items, use multitouch gestures to perform tasks such as resizing icons, create unlimited sticky notes, and find files by typing their names. You can shrink and grow icons individually, letting you make important items humongous and minor ones teeny-tiny. It also lets you auto-stack similar files (such as JPG images) to clear up desktop space. More important, the 3D stuff is only part of what makes BumpTop interesting. BumpTop’s version isn’t bad, though–at worst, it’s inoffensive, and at best it’s a cool effect that might help you tidy up your desktop by letting you place different sorts of files on each wall. I’m instinctively skeptical about 3D interfaces–software companies have tried them for years without proving they’re more than a gimmick that saps resources. Today the company released a Mac version, and I’ve been playing with it and enjoying it.īumpTop substitutes its own desktop for the standard one you get in OS X or Windows, and the most instantly striking thing about it is that it’s in 3D: You can drag (or just toss) icons off the “floor” in the center of the screen onto a wall, or even knock them into each other like pool balls. When the file-management utility known as BumpTop arrived on Windows last year, I somehow missed it. Posted by Harry McCracken on Januat 4:36 pm
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