Tag: gestures

  • Freeware Quick Cliq Is An Innovative Launcher And More

    Freeware Quick Cliq Is An Innovative Launcher And More

    Quick Cliq, packed into a single executable, is an interesting launcher and productivity tool. It incorporates launching files, folders, URLs and emails with an enhanced clipboard utility and the ability to keep text snippets as memos. It also supports a number of Windows manipulation features.

    The program interface is launched by choosing the Add/Change item via its tray icon or via – the configurable – Win+Z keys. The options for configuring hot keys and mouse gestures are found under the settings menu. Other settings include enabling features such memos and setting colors and such things as adding the program to the Windows context menu.

    The program is divided into four main sections or features each launched in it own configurable way. They are described below.

    Accessing the Main menu: hold right mouse button and move mouse down or the aforementioned Win+Z if using the keyboard. Here you can create quick launches by adding folders, files, URLs, and email addresses in a sort of a list that will then be available for using the same mouse gesture or key combination.

    Windows menu: hold right mouse button and move mouse right or Win+C keys. The Windows menus allows you to hide or show windows and a few others settings like choosing to keep a window on top. When windows are hidden any one of them can be previewed by hovering over their name in the windows list while pressing the Ctrl key.

    Memos menu: hold right mouse button and move mouse left or Win+A keys. Add as many memos as you need and then send them to clipboard or automatically add them to the current open window.

    Clips menu: hold right mouse button and move mouse up or Win+X keys. This is where the program is on the innovative side of things. In addition to holding up to nine clipboard items it is possible to append or add data to any one of the existing clips. As the tutorial video on the developer site shows suppose a user needs to copy only certain paragraphs from a long page or text into a new clip. Using Quick Cliq instead of repeatedly selecting the text and then pressing Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V while going back and forth between the long text and the new clip or document the user can press Ctrl+1 (the 1 represents the numbered clip item so it could be any of 1 to 9) to copy and then press Alt+1 to paste, all without leaving the original long page or text. Then to append or add to the clip (clip 1 in this example) other text can be selected and added to that clip or document simply and only by pressing Ctrl+Win+1.

    Quick Cliq is in active development and in addition to the video tutorials it is also a good idea to follow the developer blog. It requires Windows XP as a minimum.

  • RealWorld Paint.COM The Complete Image Editor

    RealWorld Paint.COM The Complete Image Editor

    A relative unknown amongst the image editing freeware choices RealWorld Paint.COM is a surprisingly powerful and useful application. It is described by its author simply as

    Web-graphic-master’s tool of choice

    RealWorld Paint.COM makes it easy, barring the advanced functions used by
    RealWorld Paint.COM
    true graphics professionals, to scale the heights of the standard Photoshop. RealWorld Paint.COM is more than sufficient for most purposes. On launch the options are to create a new raster image, open an existing image, capture the desktop or open the clipboard stored image.
    Going through the program one finds the usual requirements in crop, cut, zoom, rotate, mirror but also grid of various sizes that can be superimposed on images to make working on regions easier. Other necessities like border, transparency, color and brightness adjustment and not to mention bevel, drop shadow, fill, border, blur are all present and so is a good text editor with features like gradient text effects. The ability to import, export and use masks can be useful for organizing image editing tasks. Of course it is also possible to create layers with various filters and effect and import or export them. Of some importance is the multiple undo and redo available. Perhaps more notably it is also possible to work with photoshop compatible 8bf plugins (see images) and the ability to define, using an included editor (see images), plugins via the use of javascript. One can also use one of the few available or the one already included that takes screenshots. Perhaps a more unique feature to RealWorld is that 
    RealWorld Paint.COM
    by right clicking an image the user can define mouse gestures (up, down, cross, circle, arrow, hourglass and many more) to automate everything from saving a file to shifting its hue.

    More details can be read, discovered and seen by using this less than 7MB download and checking the software author’s wiki. Resulting images can be saved in the usual formats like JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG and others called ‘Layered image files’ and ‘RealWorld image files’ for images to be worked on later while preserving layers and effects much like other porfessional editors allow. RealWorld Paint.COM is compatible with Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or 7 and is also available in a very convenient portable download. It is not to be confused with the better known PAINT.Net application however. On the DonationCoder forums RealWorld’s author explains the choice of the name in the following way

    Yes, the Paint.COM name is controversial, a bit of a joke and something to counterweight the flood of .net apps. I am old school C++.