Few of my favorite IE7Pro features

Tal Shachar, which is a sort of a mentor for me, and one of the people I appreciate the most,  introduced me to IE7Pro, which he writes about on his blog.

I've been using it for quite a while now, and found a few features I really like.

Sessions' management

This is, for me, a great (if not the greatest) feature. I'm spending quite some time researching the Internet, for me, or for my clients. When I'm preparing for a lecture, or when I'm writing a post, or just trying to study something new.

Usually, I'm opening tab-after-tab of links, from search engine, or from inside an article, and so on. Resulting in an IE window with 10-20 tabs.

When I'm done searching, I just save the entire session (all the links, to all the opened tabs) with a unique name. Later, if I need, or want, to return to them, I can easily restore the entire session.

Catching a snap shot of a page

Another great feature. I'm consulting a lot about user interface, and related issues. Therefor, many of my documents and reports include screen capture of web pages. This feature makes it so much easier: instead of having a screen capture utility running, I have a screen capture inside the browser, only two clicks away.

View Selected Source

When ever I want to check a rendered HTML, I use the "view source" as a starting point. Most sites and pages, will display a long and messy HTML code; especially those who are based on some kind of content management application (i.e. MOSS 2007).

What IE7Pro offers, as a nice addition, is the option to select a part of the page and just view the "selected source". A very cool and handy feature.

IE7Pro offers another nice feature, related to that, which is to change the application being used to view the source. But that is something you can easily do with a small registry hack.

Online services

As with most IT consultants, I have a few computers I'm using. The online services on IE7Pro, makes it very easy to synchronize the bookmarks (favorites) between all of them. That alone isn't something that great, since there are many add-ons and utilities that do just that.

The nice thing about that feature, is the ability to synchronize preferences. If I'm switching computer, or just formatting, I just need to install IE7Pro, and two click later, I have my IE the way I like it.

Features I want

Since nothing is perfect, there're few items I would be happy to see...

A single click to bookmark a page. Firefox has it. It is very comfortable: you came across a page you want to remember, just click the little star on the address bar, and that's it (this is how it goes in Firefox).

Easy macro recording and playing, for repetitive tasks... All of the Office applications has it, why not IE?

If anyone knows about a utility that dose that (or how to do it in IE7Pro) I'll be happy to hear about it...

Expanding VHD files with VHD Utility

I'm working quite a lot with Virtual PC and Virtual Server. And who isn't?

When ever I need to test something for my self or for a client; If I want to create a POC, or a demo. Virtual machine is a perfect solution.

When I was working on the Accessibility Open House, I created a VPC to demonstrate some of the topics I was talking about. However, while working, I run out of space in my VPC drive. That was a very frustrating situation. Here I was, with almost everything installed, and I can't install the last piece of software I need.

I've searched the net to find a solution, and found a nice little utility called "VHD Utility" by Xtralogic.

This little application, once installed, adds an item to the context menu of a VHD file. Right clicking the file, when the VPC is off, gives you a new item "Expand VHD".

Choosing this menu item, will start a wizard, which ultimately allows you to expand that VHD (it doesn't matter it the VHD is a dynamic or fixed size):

Besides the wizard, the utility also supports command line operation:

I've added it to my "Path" environment settings, and I'm working with it from the command prompt very comfortably.

The free version (the trial, actually) can only expand your VHD 1GB (And no, this isn't 1GB at the time, but 1GB and that's it). For me it was perfect at the time, because that was exactly what I was missing.

I choose to buy the full version (only 25$,Less then a 100NIS), which allows me some more freedom.

Dealing with time and pressure

I haven't wrote anything for over a month.

What happened is that I had to take over a couple of projects, on top of those who were already on my list. Given the new tasks, and some bump on the road, left very little time to anything else.

I'm not a person who gets pressured very easily, but yet I've found this last period to be a bit stressed.

This post is not about complaining of tough time, but to describe some insights I had during this past month.

I participated in a "time management course" conducted in my company by Skiliks (details about the course can be found here, to who ever is interested).

In the course, I realized that I do mange time, in a reasonable manner, but yet I have many things to improve.

As an example, dealing with e-mails:
We all use Outlook or some other organizer. When I work, I'm using my laptop for documents' writing, development, etc. When e-mails gets in, Outlook pops out this announcement, saying I have a new e-mail, the title and some other details. Like this one here:

 
The thing is, that when you see that, your eyes are going to that corner automatically. Furthermore, you tend to read the title. Every now and then, the title is intriguing enough, so you stop what you were doing, and read the entire mail. Once you there, you might also answer, or read other mails, and your original task is forgotten.

To solve that, I just switched this feature off ("Tools" -> "Options" -> "E-Mail Options" -> "Advanced E-Mail Options" and un-check "Display a new mail desktop alert").

Another thing about e-mails is to set a time for answering them, or just dealing with them. It is much easier to have an hour (more or less) to just deal with everything. I alos informed my cotacts that e-mails will be answered in the morning or afternoon, but not immidiatly. So far it works...

I found this article on "Microsoft @ Work" site, 4 ways to take control of your e-mail Inbox, it is worth reading.

Anther tip I figured is about coffee breaks.

First of all, those are very important. It gives you some time to breath, to relax, and so on.

However, if you'd bring yourself a bottle of water, you will find out that you save a lot of time, otherwise wasted, bringing 10 cups of water...

The course gave me many other tips, so I recommend you take it, if you can.
I can't cover everything here, there isn't enough space here