For me, one of the most annoying things when working on a computer is trying to find the right folder. Even though the network at my office and my computer at home are pretty well organized, it can take quite a lot of mouse-clicks to find what you’re looking for, just because of the sheer number of folders. Sure, you can create shortcuts to your most used folders on the desktop. This is a method I used for a while until I found ac’tivAid and Dirkey. Now I can’t really think of an easier and faster way to find the folder I’m looking for, than with these two tools:
ac’tivAid
This collection of tools is being developed by my favourite German computer magazine c´t. It contains more than 30 different tools ranging from an application launcher, recent directory pop-up to other various tool that make your work in Windows much easier. Although, most of the tools are really useful, it´s the QuickChangeDir tool which stands out.
My job as a Graphic Designer/Account Manager quite often requires me to find folders and files really quickly on our servers. It´s not that we haven´t organized our folders, it´s more that there are so many and even if you click your way through the folder structure it always takes a few moments until you find the file you want. So for years now I´ve been looking for a tool which I can activate in every file requester or explorer window, type in part of the name of the project folder I´m after and then you just hit return and you´re there. This is exactly what QuickChangeDir does. And it does this job very fast and very quick by indexing all the folders on your (network) drives on a regular basis. Just to be clear, this is not a file search programme like Google Desktop. It only works with folders but since I keep my files pretty organised anyway, this is all I need.
I´ll give you another example so you can see what makes this tool quite unique, at least as far as I know. Let´s say you´ve just created a Photoshop file which will be used in the Christmas flyer you´re working on. You hit Ctrl-S in Photoshop and the save file dialog pops up. If this is a new project, chances are pretty small, that you´re already in the right folder where you want to save this file. But with QuickChangeDir all you need to do is hit Windows Key + – and type “Christmas” or whatever part of the project folder name you remember. Next, you´ll get a list with all the folders containing “Christmas”. Just choose the one you need and hit enter. Even though this might have saved you only a few seconds, if you, like me, work on many different projects during the day it can save you a lot of time.
The only problem with ac’tivAid is that the website is only in German, so is the read-me file. But at least the whole interface is available in English. And since most features are self-explanationary this is actually all you need. On http://www.heise.de/ct/activaid/ just download”activaid_v111.exe”, which has all the installation files in one package. If you encounter any German bits you don´t understand, you can ask me anytime.
http://www.heise.de/ct/activaid/
Dirkey
Just like QuickChangeDir above, Dirkey is a real time saver if you need to get around your folders as fast as possible. You could describe the programme as a folder bookmarking tool. There are quite a few tools like this out there, but it is the integration with Windows, which makes Dirkey special. No matter if you´re in explorer or any Windows file-requester, just right-click on the red close icon in the current window and Dirkey appears. Now you can add the current folder to your favourites or select a previously boomarked folder from the list. I always bookmark all the folder of my current projects, so that I can access them from anywhere in Windows with just two mouse clicks. Unfortunately, the author of Dirkey doesn´t develop the software any further and has sold the source code to another company. But the good thing is that´s been working without any problems on my Windows XP machine at home and several PCs at work for the last few years.
http://www.protonfx.com/dirkey/
Apart from ac’tivAid and Dirkey there are a few more tools which I use every day to make my computer work easier, but those two are definitely the biggest time savers. If you know of any other must have tools like these, please let me know. Of course, any other comments or questions are also welcome.
When I´m on the road (and I mean that literally) I simply record a voice note in Evernote on my iPhone and then tag it with @todo. I try to get into the habit of checking this tag for notes every morning when I open Evernote and then take actions, like turning it into a to do in Remember the Milk or write down the note. Evernote already has an excellent OCR feature. Now I wish it would have the same for voice or music and sound in general. Imagine Evernote would recognise not just words but also music, like the Shazam app on the iPhone.