AddictiveTips » Fawad Mir

25 Best Windows 8 Themes & Visual Styles

Fawad Mir — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 15:00:23 +0000

Anyone would get bored looking at the same computer screen day after day. Changing the look of your system with new wallpapers and themes every now and then makes it feel fresh. Applying new themes isn’t all that hard; it’s looking for the perfect theme that takes a fare bit of time. Back in 2009, we compiled a list of great themes for Windows 7, and now, after a long time, we have put together for you a collection of awesome Windows 8 themes. While the themes remain roughly the same, a major (and much needed) addition in Windows 8 personalization now allows you to apply a different wallpaper to the each display in a dual-monitor setup. In what follows, you’ll find some of the best themes from deviantArt and Windows’ own downloads page, plus a little surprise for our dual-monitor users.

Windows 8 doesn’t allow you to add custom or third-party themes by default without modifying or patching three system files; themeui.dll, Uxlnit.dll and uxtheme.dll. You needn’t fret though, as you can easily patch these files via UltraUxThemePatcher. Simply download the application and then follow some simple on screen instructions to install it. The files will be automatically replaced during the installation, though you will have to restart your PC for the changes to take effect.

Now, you can simply download any of the themes included below and copy the .theme file and its pertaining folder to:

C:\Windows\Resources\Themes

Third-Party Themes & Visual Styles

If you want to give your desktop a complete makeover, then what you want is a full skin or visual style, which replaces system files to provide you with deep customization instead of merely changing the wallpaper. deviantArt is probably the best place to look for such themes, but it’s a huge community with a lot to offer. So, to spare you the hassle of having to browse through countless search results and portfolios, we’ve picked out some of the best themes from there.

Aero By Design (by ~LiveOrDieTM)

Ourea (by ~neiio)

Simplex (by ~link6155)

Areao4.8 (by ~neiio)

Platinum (by ~ZEUSosX)

Alduin (by ~charleston2378)

Work for Windows 8 (by ~neiio)

Dark 8 (by ~Gr8StyleX)

Dumbass V8 (by ~neiio)

Gray 8 (by ~gsw953onDA)

Incomplete VS (by ~sinopt)

Night Smooth (by ~neiio)

Space Blueberries (by ~neiio)

TwentyThirteen (by ~Sand-And-Mercury)

Windows Themes

If you are not a fan of customizing every UI element and just want a pack of some cool looking wallpapers, you might be interested in the themes on offer on the official Windows website. Below are our favorite themes from the collection.

Spectacular Skies

Limited Edition Artist Series

Cobblestones and Corridors

AddictiveTips Windows 8 Metro Walls Theme [Watermark-free version]

Panoramic Themes (For Dual-Monitor Setups)

Panoramic themes are a little different from the regular ones in terms of how they are displayed on your screen. In a dual monitor setup, instead of displaying the same wallpaper on both screens or a different one on each screen, a panoramic wallpaper extends across both monitors if they have the same resolution.

Bridges Panoramic

Cityscapes Panoramic

Forests Panoramic

That’s it for our Windows 8 themes compilation. Make sure to comment about the ones you liked best and feel free to share great themes that you think we’ve missed!

If you liked this list, you might also want to check out our compilation of our very own Metro-themed Windows 8 wallpapers and guide to getting the Windows 7 look and feel on Windows 8.

Waqas Ahmed contributed to this post

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List Of Windows Services That Can Be Safely Disabled

Fawad Mir — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 13:30:18 +0000

Windows Services are executable programs that run constantly in the background and perform specific functions on their own. Users with administrator privileges can choose a default startup behavior for these services. For instance, they can be set to start at system boot, paused and restarted whenever required, or simply disabled. While some services come with the operating system by default, at times different third party software also add their own services. While leaving the services running in the background allows certain tools and utilities to function better, disabling the ones you don’t need can also increase the performance of your system. In what follows, we’ll guide you through the process of starting, stopping and disabling Windows Services.

How To Disable Windows System Services

Before you start or stop a service, it is important to know its function so that stopping it does not disrupt any important Windows feature or task. If you know the exact nature of a particular service, you can disable it if you don’t need that feature. For example, if you do not use Bluetooth devices with your system, there no need to have its service running all the time and you can easily disable the Bluetooth Support Service without an issue. Since you can start or stop a service anytime that you like, you can even use this feature for the services that you use very rarely to keep them disabled or stopped and enabling them only when required. Continuing with the aforementioned example, if you connect a Bluetooth device to the computer once every two weeks, you can turn on the service whenever needed and keep it off by default.

You can easily access the Services dialog box from the start menu to view and control all services. Moreover, third party tools, such as Windows Service Monitor and Services Monitor can also be used to manage Windows services, both locally and remotely.

In order to start or stop a service or choose its startup type, open the Services dialog box by searching for ‘services’ in the Start Menu search field.

It will open the list of local services installed on your system. Look through the list for the required service and double-click it to open the properties dialog box.

In order to be able to manually start and stop the service, change the Startup type to Manual and click OK. This is useful if you don’t want the service to automatically run and consume resources all the time, but still be accessable on demand whenever required by any operation you perform.

Now, you can easily Start, Stop, Pause, Resume, and Restart the service at any time you like.

Safe-To-Disable Services

As stated earlier, knowledge about the services that can be disabled without a problem is very important. Here is a list of Windows Services that can be safely disabled without any adverse effect on your computer.

Tablet PC Input Service (in Windows 7) / Touch Keyboard and Handwriting Panel Service (Windows 8)
Windows Time
Secondary logon (Will disable fast user switching)
Fax
Print Spooler
Offline Files
Routing and Remote Access Service
Bluetooth Support Service
BitLocker Drive Encryption Service
Encrypting File System
Certificate Propagation
Microsoft iSCSI Initiator Service
Netlogon
Parental Controls (in Windows 7) / Family Safety (in Windows 8)
Remote Desktop Configuration
Remote Desktop Services
Remote Desktop Services UserMode Port Redirector
Smart Card
Smart Card Removal Policy
Windows Connect Now
Windows Firewall
Windows Error Reporting Service
Remote Registry
Windows Defender

Head over to the source link to know the details of each service and its Safe setting.

[via 7Tutorials]

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Easily Download & Launch Sysinternals & Nirsoft Utilities With WSCC

Fawad Mir — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 12:00:05 +0000

Having too many applications installed on your computer can eventually slow it down. You may already know that different programs and their associated services running in the background consume system resources, adversly effecting the overall performance of your computer. Having individual applications installed might not seem like that big of an issue but having complete software suites such as Puran Utilities - – a collection of various tools to perform different operations such as cleaning junk data, managing files and uninstalling software – installed on your computer can have a bigger impact on system performance. Instead of installing a bunch of utility suites, you can just use WSCC (Windows System Control Center). It is a portable application that lets you install, update, execute and organize tools from different software suites, as well as several built-in Windows tool, all from one interface. Other than the available utilities, it lets you install and automatically update several other tools from within the interface as well. Keep reading to find out more about WSCC.Since the application is available in both portable and installable versions, you have the freedom to download the variant of your choice. When you launch the application, the Option dialog pops up, allowing you to configure the general as well as software, network and console-related settings of the application.

Next, you are shown a list of applications that can be installed on the system. There is a huge problem with this list though, that all the apps are selected by default and you cannot uncheck all the apps with one click, meaning you have to go through the whole list and manually uncheck every application that you don’t want, to keep it from getting installed on your system. The developer should add an option that allows you to uncheck all the tools in one go, otherwise it just seems like a huge waste of time.

The main interface contains a bunch of apps divided into several categories accessible from the left side, namely All items, Sysinternals Suite, NirSoft utilities and Windows. There are further categories the main ones to help you quickly locate tools that can be used for a particular function.

Each tool is listed with a description that explains its exact purpose. Clicking the icon in front of the description launches the tool.

If you are looking for a particular tool, or tools that can do a particular job, you can search the whole library by entering your query in the provided search field at the top-right region of the main interface.

WSCC works on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.

Download WSCC

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How To Get The Windows 7 Look & Feel On Your Windows 8 PC

Fawad Mir — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 14:25:33 +0000

Change has always been hard for most people to accept; they generally want things to keep running in a set pattern that they are used to, and any deviation from their regular practices can cause them a lot of panic. That is exactly what happened with Windows 8. With such a huge shift from the conventional Windows UI, Microsoft managed to displease a lot of people, including some critics as well as a significant user base. However, as people came out of the initial effects of the shock, a lot of them decided to stick with Windows 7 for now, some decided to try and adapt to the new system, and the more tech-savvy lot with the knowledge of coding started writing programs to bring the old Windows 7 interface back in Windows 8. As a result, different tools surfaced, promising to bring back the Windows 7 UI to Windows 8 either by installing the missing features, or by disabling the new Windows 8-specific ones. If you are among those looking to transform your Windows 8 to Windows 7 in terms of the interface, here is a list of some of the best tools out there that can help you achieve that.

Start Screen Modifiers

Since the release of the Consumer Preview of Windows 8, a lot of developers have created their own version of the Windows 7 Start Menu for filling the void created by the Windows 8 Start Screen. Each of these tools performs the basic function of bringing back the Start Menu, while providing users with different sets of advanced features, ranging from the ability to completely block Windows 8 features such as the Charms Bar, Switch List, and Start Screen, to allowing the use of both Start Screen and Start Menu at the same time, letting you make the most of every new and old feature. From the huge number of Start Menu replacements available on the internet, Waqas managed to compile a list and compare the best ones, so make sure to check it out and don’t forget to leave your comments about the one you like to use and why.

Skip Metro Suite

If you are not too bothered by the Windows 8 UI – or even like it for that matter – but find the Hot Corners annoying, Skip Metro Suite is your solution. The problem with Hot Corners is that they are active across the entire OS, be it the Start Screen, the Desktop, or any x86 or Windows Store application. So, whenever you take your mouse to the corners, out comes the Switch List from the left side or the Charms bar from the right, taking away your attention from the task at hand. To avoid it, you have to be careful every time you go anywhere near any of the corners of your screen, and that can be pretty annoying. Skip Metro Suite allows you to individually disable each of the four Hot Corners on your screen as well as the Drag-to-Close feature (grabbing a Modern UI app from the top-middle side and dragging it down to close it), and Skip the Start Screen on system start, taking you directly to the Desktop.

Aero Glass for Win8

Another feature greatly missed in Windows 8 is the famous Aero Glass effect of Windows Vista and Windows 7. The Aero Glass theme makes window borders, taskbar and the Start Menu transparent, giving you a glance through them at what’s behind the active window. Moreover, the blurred effect combined with the intricate shading gives a very beautiful perception of the window being under real light. The reason for ditching this famous feature for a much blander solid-border theme has been speculated and stated as the greater memory and processing power requirement of Aero Glass, especially with a large number of windows open. However, for those who just don’t want to let it go, Aero Glass for Windows 8 aims to bring it back to Windows 8. After testing out a lot of failed and semi-successful tools and methods developed for the purpose, we found Aero Glass for Win 8 to be closest to the real deal. Here is a detailed post on how to get the Aero Glass effect in Windows 8 using Aero Glass for Win8.

Ex7forW8

The purpose of this tool is not to merely add a Start Orb to your taskbar or skip the Start Screen, nor does it just disable the Charms Bar or the Switch List. In fact, it does all these things and then some. Ex7forW8 is a complete explorer shell replacement utility for Windows 8 that allows you to run the Windows 7 explorer shell itself in Windows 8. As a result, it disables all the Windows 8 Modern UI elements and brings back nearly all the features of the Windows 7 UI including the Start Menu and Desktop in their own original form. Every Modern UI element such as the Charms Bar, Switch List, and even the Modern UI apps will be disabled by default, though there is also the option to use the shell without disabling the Modern UI features. Sadly, the tool does not bring back Aero Glass border transparency on its own, but with a little help from another tool known as AGTweaker, even that can be achieved.

Classic Start Menu For Windows RT

If you have come this far, you might have noticed that all the aforementioned tools and method are x86-based and thus, only applicable to Windows 8. Windows RT does not allow execution of third-party EXE files due to the different architecture of its ARM processor and restrictions by Microsoft to prevent users from running third-party apps that haven’t been installed through the Windows Store. However, this does not mean that the users of Windows RT are stuck with the Start Screen forever. After an exploit was discovered that allows you to jailbreak your Windows RT tablet, several x86-based tools were ported to run on jailbroken RT tablets, one of them being Classic Start Menu that allows you to bring back the Start Menu and disable the Start Screen on Windows RT.

That should do it – using these tools, anyone can easily change the user interface of Windows 8 to make it look and feel as close to Windows 7 as possible.

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AccountKiller Helps You Easily Delete Accounts On Web Services

Fawad Mir — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 13:55:57 +0000

Almost all online services out there require you to register an account with them before you can start using them.These accounts often hold a lot of information on you, including your name, email address, gender, phone number, address etc., with some services such as Steam also containing your financial information such as a credit card details. If you decide to stop using a service, you no longer need an account on it. While some websites provide you an easy method for deleting your account all your personal data stored on the service, there are some that take you through a long journey of finding the appropriate links, visiting multiple pages, filling forms and what not before you are able to delete your account. There are also some services such as Skype and eBuddy that do not let you delete the account at all. Since each service has its own set of rules and instructions for deleting an account, it is impossible to follow a general process for the purpose. AccountKiller is a web service that contains instructions on deleting accounts from a large number of web services. Other than these instructions, it also lists direct links for deleting accounts, wherever available.

The homepage of AccountKiller groups web services into three categories according to the amount of effort required by the users to delete their account from them. The White category contains the services that offer a very easy way for their users to delete their accounts, requiring just one or two clicks. Some of the famous services in the White list are Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter and Google. The second category is Grey, containing services that allow users to delete their account, but require following a cumbersome procedure for the purpose like emailing the developer or going through some advanced method to get their account deleted. Black is the last category and comprises of services that do not allow you to delete your account at all, such as Skype and eBuddy.

You can select any of the sites from the list to view complete set of instructions on deleting your account from them. Whenever available, a direct link will also be provided for deleting the account.

If you don’t see the name of the required service on the main page, you can search for it using the search bar. Just start typing its name, and all matching services with account deletion instructions will start appearing.

Under each individual service, users can post comments about whether it should belong to a particular category or not, and also point out any mistakes in the provided instructions.

AccountKiller is a brilliant idea, and it takes a lot of hassle away from the process of finding the exact way of deleting deleting all your redundant accounts on web services.

Visit AccountKiller

[via Ghacks]

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Tibi’s Mathematics Suite Combines Scientific, Graphical, Matrix & Factorization Calculators

Fawad Mir — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 12:11:03 +0000

Some love it, most hate it and many have tried their level best to avoid it at school, but Mathematics is everywhere all around us, and there’s no escape from it in any field. Every element of the world is either based on or in some way related to numbers and mathematical calculations. Behind every piece of technology including your computer and smartphone, there are millions of calculations going on every second. While these complex, automatic calculations are handled by computers, there are many that are still needed to be done by humans, in order to create those machines. A calculator is one particular device that has helped almost everyone at some point in their lives, allowing them to perform complex calculations in a few seconds. Windows has its own calculator with basic arithmetic and scientific calculations, but it doesn’t quite cut it for more complicated ones. Tibi’s Mathematics Suite is a portable open-source application featuring a Scientific calculator, Graphical calculator, Matrix calculator and Factorizator, each with its own feature set to let you to perform complex calculations with ease.Just download and run the application once, and its icon will be added to the system tray, giving you quick access to each of its component of the application, as well as the Help and Settings section.

The Help menu lists all the features of the package and contains instructions on the usage, syntax and other elements of each type of calculator included.

The Settings window allows you to specify a different hotkey to quickly access each of the 4 calculators, and the help menu. To specify the hotkeys, select the calculator type from the list, click the Shortcut field, press the preferred hotkey combination and click Set.

Let’s take a look at the included calculators now, starting with the Scientific Calculator. The Scientific Calculator boasts a well-designed UI with the color-coded buttons organized in a way to keep related ones together. It features all the operations you would expect from any scientific calculator, including basic arithmetic operations, trigonometric and logarithmic operations, exponents and factorials, to name a few. The output is presented in a beautiful display designed to emulate the color LED display found in some expensive scientific calculators.

The Graphing Calculator lets you plot graphs for several basic as well as complex mathematical expressions. You can combine multiple graphs, specify custom range for the X and Y axis, pan to any region of the graph, and zoom in &out.

As the name suggests, the Matrix Calculator allows you to perform operations on matrices. You can create two matrices with variable rows and columns, and perform several basic and advanced operations on them from the listed options. The output is generated instantly upon selecting the operation.

Lastly, the Factorizator allows lets you factorize any number with the click of a button. It shows you both the remainders and the divisors in separate columns, organized in the same way you used to do factorization by hand in school.

Tibi’s Mathematical Suite works on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.

Download Tibi’s Mathematical Suite

[via How-To Geek]

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Customize Aero Glass Effect Opacity & Blur In Windows 8 With AGTweaker

Fawad Mir — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 16:00:39 +0000

Immediately after the release of Windows 8, transparency-obsessed users and developers have been demanding and developing different methods for bringing window and taskbar transparency back to Windows 8. The choice between transparent and solid window borders depends on your preference between a visually pleasing UI or better performance. A lack of transparency does not mean that the Windows 8 interface isn’t as aesthetically pleasing; it is just that for some people, a shift from the rather stylish look of Windows 7 to a simpler, minimalistic one seems like a step back. Over time, a lot of tools have been developed for the purpose, Aero Glass for Win8 being the best of the lot. It is the closest you can get to the original Aero Glass effect with blurred transparency. However, the application does not have a GUI or any settings to control the transparency or blur effect. Today, we bring to you a tool called AGTweaker that works as a supporting utility for Aero Glass for Win8, allowing you to control the level of opacity and blur to apply to window borders. Moreover, it lets you set the Aero Glass effect to be applied at Windows startup to avoid the trouble of loading it every time you reboot your system.

Keep in mind that AGTweaker is not a standalone application and you will need Aero Glass for Win8 in order to make it work. Follow our post on Aero Glass for Win8 to learn how to properly install it on your system.

Unlike Aero Glass for Win8, AGTweaker does not need to be placed in any special folder and can be run from any location within the OS. It is a portable application, so does not require installation. When you run the tool for the first time, the values for Opacity and Blur will be set to default, as set by Aero Glass for Win8. You can move the sliders right and left to increase and decrease the intensity of the effects. You can increase the Blur effect to its maximum value while still decreasing Opacity to zero to give window borders a glazed look.

You can also choose to make the window borders completely transparent by setting the blur effect to zero too. The Additional Settings section below the sliders allows you to enable or disable debugging mode, BoundingRectangleRedraw and HideCMD Workaround for Ex7forW8 users.

AGTweaker works on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 8.

Download AGTweaker

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Light Alloy Is A Portable Video Player With Borderless Viewing & Advanced Scheduler

Fawad Mir — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 14:50:57 +0000

Audio and video players come in all shapes and sizes. While some people like to stick with the native Windows Media Player, many choose to go for third-party alternatives that offer a lot more features and options. I personally like to use KMPlayer as my default application for watching videos, as it plays back any format you can throw at it, provides easy navigation and volume controls, and offers a plethora of options related to every aspect of audio and video playback including subtitle and audio syncing, and a lot more. Other video players boast their own specific features, such as QuickPlay that has support for playing videos of up to 4K resolution, and the world-famous open-source VLC Player that packs with a large number of widely known as well as little-known features. Light Alloy is yet another media player for Windows that comes with simple playback controls, borderless viewing, switchable skins and multi-language support for English, German, Japanese, Romanian, Chinese and more. The navigation bar displays a timeline so you can see exactly how much playing time has passed, and the player supports Blu-Ray playback as well. More on Light Alloy after the jump.

When you launch Light Alloy for the first time, you are asked to choose some basic options for the application such as its default skin and language, the location to save the settings, and whether to use system codecs or the player’s own internal codecs for playback.

The main interface looks pretty simple, with playback controls at the bottom of the video frame. On the left side, there are controls to play/pause the video, skip forward/backward, increase/decrease the volume, adjust the picture, sound and subtitles, take screenshots and view file info.

The buttons for adjusting the picture, sound and subtitles bring up extended options for the selected feature. For instance, the Picture options window lets you adjust brightness, contrast & saturation, and change the aspect ratio.

The bottom-right region of the player offers a further set of controls including a Scheduler that allows you to automatically power off your computer at the end of a movie or playlist, or set an alarm that can start playing back a video file at a specific time.

The Settings menu is provides you with detailed customization for the app’s Interface, Mouse controls, Playlist, Events, Video, Sound, File Associations, OSD (on-screen display), Hotkeys etc.

At the extreme right, you’ll see playlist options that allow you to add multiple videos to the playlist. Just open the playlist and drag/drop the video file in the playlist area to queue it up. When you add a file, a context menu pops up, enabling you to select the position of the new file.

To switch to borderless mode, just right-click anywhere inside the video frame. It hides all the UI elements from the player, leaving only the actual video.

Light Alloy is available in both portable and installable versions for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.

Download Light Alloy

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View Folder Sizes In Windows Native File Explorer

Fawad Mir — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 13:45:51 +0000

Applications that analyze the disk space usage allow you to identify the programs and folders hogging your hard drive. If you have a big hard drive, you might not care about duplicate files stored in your computer, but if you have limited disk space, storage memory management is of high importance. We have covered a lot of applications that allow you to keep an eye on the memory consumption by different folders. These include OverDisk - an application that provides details about file and folder sizes in a graphical representation – and DiskFerret, a Java-based disk analyzing utility. While these programs are very useful, you are required to launch them manually every time you want to view folder sizes. By default, the Size column in Windows Explorer only lists the size of files present inside a selected folder, and does not display the size of subfolders. Folder Size is an application that provides you with an easy, automated way to view the sizes of folders while using Windows’ native file manager.

The application is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows. Download and install the setup compatible with your operating system. After it has been installed, Folder Size begins running in the system tray, allowing you to disable or enable it at any time, and choose to launch it at Windows startup.

When the application is activated, you don’t need to do anything to have it display folder sizes. Just open a volume drive or folder containing subfolders and a window will automatically pop up on the right side of the current Windows Explorer / File Explorer window, listing the sizes of all the files and folders present within it. If you are using Windows XP, however, the folder column will be integrated into the Explorer window itself.

The pop-up window automatically resizes according to the number of files and folders present inside the selected folder, so it doesn’t take more screen space than necessary.

As stated on the application’s website, you may experience a few bugs in the way Folder Size adjusts itself beside the active Explorer window. It seemed to run without any problems whatsoever during our brief test run.

Folder Size works on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.

Download Folder Size

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View 500 Image Formats, Convert Between 130 & Apply 50+ Effects With ImageCool

Fawad Mir — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 16:30:22 +0000

These days, one can find a large number of free and paid image editing tools. Some of them provide you with color correction controls like changing the hue, brightness, contrast and saturation, while others let you quickly apply different preset filters to your images. Most images captured with high resolution cameras are in resolutions much higher than our display devices. Having a 2560p image to view on a 720p or 1080p screen does not offer any benefit when it comes to the picture quality, and having a lot of such images on your disk can consume significantly high amounts of storage space. Image resizing is also very important if you need to frequently upload images online, because larger images take more time to upload and consume more space on the server. However, most image resizing applications can only handle the common image formats such as JPEG, PNG, BMP and GIF. Today, we bring to you ImageCool – an image converter for Windows that can handle up to 500 image formats. You can view images in any of these formats, convert between 130 formats, apply 50 different effects and filters, and perform other functions such as cropping and applying watermarks.

The main interface of the application provides you with the main functions of the application consolidated under three tabs: Folders, Settings and Effects. The Folder tab lets you browse for the image files. The left pane contains the folder tree, while the right side is populated with all the images available in the selected folder.

The Settings tab allows you to specify input and output settings for image conversion. Under Output Settings, you can select the Output Format, Quality, Resizing options, and Destination Folder, while the Input Settings section allows you to choose the formats to show in the right side.

The Effects tab provides you with controls to perform image correction such as changing the Color Balance, Brightness, Contrast, Hue, Saturation, Luminance etc. You can also rotate the image from here. A great option here is the ability to save all your settings using the ‘Save as Project’, and apply them to other images at any time later on.

While the application is running, a drop zone is created on the desktop, allowing you to quickly covert images by dragging and dropping them on it. When you drop the images on the drop zone, you can choose if you want to use the current settings for effects, correction & conversion, or apply settings from a previously saved project.

ImageCool also offers other image-related tools that allow you to crop images, split them, combine multiple images, build an executable file out of a bunch of images to create an instant slideshow, and apply watermarks on images.

ImageCool works on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.

Download ImageCool

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Memorylage For Windows 8 Creates Collages From Images & Webcam Photos

Fawad Mir — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 15:37:08 +0000

Collage is an art technique that involves creating an image by using a number of other images, but it is not limited to that; you can use newspaper cuttings, images, text, photographs, parts of other artwork – almost anything that you can find, provided that your creativity and the available tools allow you to work with the raw materials. Previously, we have covered some great collage-making applications, such as CollageIt that allows you to make a collage in just 3 steps, and Shape Collage, a cross-platform tool to create collages in any shape. While there are a lot of desktop apps available to create photo collages, Memorylage is a new Modern UI option for Windows 8 and RT users. It allows you to create simple image collages using images stored on your computer. Moreover, it lets you capture images through your webcam and create an instant collage, which can be perfect if you are having a party and want to capture its great moments straight to a collage.

By default, the app launches with the Pictures folder as the default location. All the folders present inside it are listed on the left side, while the images are available on the right side.

You can access any of the folders and create collages from the available images by right-clicking them. You can right-click multiple images to mark them for collage creation. Moreover, the application also allows you to pin the current folder to the Start Screen, giving you quick access to it. Once all your favorite images are selected, tap the Custom Collage button at the top-right corner to create the collage.

From the app bar, you can choose the Photo Booth option to capture live images in succession using your webcam. You can specify the number of images you want to capture, and the time delay between successive shots. Once the specified number of images are captured, the app bar will automatically open, allowing you to create a ‘Custom Collage’ with the captured images.

If you don’t like the default arrangement of images, tap the Shuffle button in the lower-right corner to change it automatically. You can also swap the position of two images just by selecting them together. When everything is set according to your preferences, hit Save and the collage will be saved to your disk.

Folders pinned using the app sport live tiles, and are directly accessible from the Start Screen.

Memorylage works on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 8 and Windows RT.

Get Windowslage from Windows Store

Read Memorylage For Windows 8 Creates Collages From Images & Webcam Photos by Fawad Mir on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

Chrome App Launcher From Chromebook Comes To Windows On Dev Channel

Fawad Mir — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:50:44 +0000

Chromebooks have been gaining significant popularity lately. These Chrome OS-toting computers basically use Google Chrome itself as a computing and app platform, and require continuous internet connectivity to run all these web-apps. Chromebooks rely solely on the Chrome apps but since the browser itself is always running as a part of the OS itself, you do not need to launch it every time you want to run an app. Instead, you get an app launcher similar to the Start Menu for accessing all these apps. Today, Google has released a developer preview of its app launcher for Windows that allows you to launch your installed Chrome apps directly from Windows desktop. As of this writing, the app launcher is only available for Windows on the Chrome Dev Channel, but Google plans to push it to Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux soon.

In order to get the app launcher, you will need to switch to the Dev channel of Google Chrome. After switching to the Dev build, you will need to download any of the available Chrome packaged app such as TextDrive to enable the app launcher. Do note that none of the Chrome-packaged apps are currently searchable on the Chrome Web Store, and you’ll need a direct link to one of them (like that of TextDrive we just provided) in order to install them. Many of Google’s own Chrome apps might not work to initially get the Chrome App Launcher, so it’s best to go with TextDrive, even if you don’t need it. Also, if you have installed the Chrome-packaged app before switching to the Dev channel, you’ll need to uninstall and reinstall it in order to get the Chrome App Launcher. You will also be asked to sign in to a Google account before you can get the launcher.

As soon as the app is installed, you will notice a new icon in the Windows Taskbar. Click the icon to open the app launcher with the list of all your installed Chrome apps. Any offline apps will launch directly on the Windows Desktop, while the ones that require an internet connection will be launched in the default internet browser.

If you are a regular user of Chrome apps, this is quite a useful addition to the system and simplifies the process of launching your favorite apps. Hopefully, it will be soon make its way to the Beta and then the Stable channel for Windows as well as Mac OS X and Linux, allowing every Chrome user to take advantage from this useful feature.

Read Chrome App Launcher From Chromebook Comes To Windows On Dev Channel by Fawad Mir on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter