Gadgetory

in a recent video we talked about my favorite utilities for the Mac but here's a question what about Windows yep we're doing Windows and just like we did with the Mac utilities video I want to talk specifically about utilities these are little tools that make your experience of using Windows better not just apps and I have to be honest with you I can't pretend that I know Windows quite as well as I know the Mac this is my surface and I do use it all the time but I really wanted to call in an expert and lucky for me I've got one I can call his name is Tom Warren he's a senior editor for The Verge and so we're gonna have a chat he's gonna talk about his favorite utilities I'm gonna talk about mine and we're gonna see where Windows 10 is going so you know let's Skype him in hey Tom thanks for being on yeah all right it's good to be home and I know you just wrote an article but ear trumpet so what's that all about I don't know about you but I've got gaming PC I like to have like Spotify coming out my speakers and YouTube coming out my headphones and stuff that's not really super easy to do in Windows at the moment so it trumpet is like kind of a third party app that lets you switch apps between the outputs so it basically imitates the system tray icon we have the volume icon right now it lets you sort of drag and drop essentially apps between different outputs within that interface so on the Mac there's a bunch of different window utility options that let you set up like split screen and fullscreen and blah blah blah blah but Windows doesn't really need that because most of that stuff has sort of built in but there's this new utility called group II right can you tell me about that so say you've used file explorer stuff for that I've always wanted tabs just to have different you know different folders open and in the same window and stuff like that so this enables that it's pretty simple you just click you know classic it generates like a tab within within it's the whole window interface you can group different apps together you can let group workflows to say you use I know like word file explorer you can group them all into that single window and just tap between them you can't like tab pretty easily there's like you can create your own shortcut but like usually you use ctrl + tab to tab through things you can't do that for example but Microsoft is working on their own sort of version of groupies so you know one of the themes that I'm picking up on here is that a bunch of the stuff that we're talking about is basically going to be built right into wind at some point in the near future and I guess a lot of those updates gonna come in this redstone update so Tom how is Microsoft gonna be doing its version of a tabbed interface yes they're doing it's very similar they're doing it in a way that it's like they're calling it sets that the idea is that you'd have a set of applications that are grouped into there's no single interface but they have like some form of like connection to each other so say you were working on an email and you open it linked from an email it might open within that you know that interface rather than opening a separate window okay let's talk screenshots everyone needs a good screenshot utility right but the one that's built into Windows is honestly it's not that great and there's a bunch of replacements out there there's like light shot and a few others but you use one called share X right CS sherek sees a totally customizable screenshot tool for Windows and so it's super powerful you can upload stuff to imager so I can literally hit like a print screen on my keyboard drag around the desktop for the region I want let go and within a couple of seconds is uploaded to imager it link is in my clipboard and I'll just paste it into slap pool wherever I want to share that image the reason I like it as well is you can record gifts on it so particularly you know sort of job when you're trying to grab gifts off the screen so it's pretty great does it also let you do annotations yet so when you get the region capture you can also annotate on it crop it well that's all stuff okay so we know that a bunch of the features we've been talking about are basically gonna get built into Windows 10 later on but what do you think it means that Microsoft is being so aggressive at converting these like third-party utilities into things are just built into the operating system lots of thing it's them listening but they don't have been asking for a lease for Alfred for Windows so maybe that will come at some point but yeah I feel like it's a mixture of them listening and just realizing what kind of people who use Windows for maybe it's moved on from what the general consumer to more of a subset of people who are using it for like real work so to speak so I feel like they're picking up on that trend it's the one thing that Microsoft has that they have to keep pushing is the PC right there yeah they have to keep making it better and better to keep people using I did find some utilities on my want to give me the stuff that I found I really can't use a good proper desktop operating system without a clipboard history my memory sucks and I love that it can just remember the last hundred things that I copied and then just build an arrow through than what I paste and so on Windows my favorite one is called ditto it's a free utility just lives down the system tray and you set a hotkey to it I've set mine to shift command V and when you hit it it pops up this little window and then you can just arrow through the last you know a few things that you copied hit enter and it pastes it right there at the cursor it's super convenient it doesn't take up any memory it's just great whenever I use a computer with the keyboard I want to have instant Universal search no matter what I'm doing no matter where I am in the computer and in theory Windows is very good at that they have this thing where you hit the Windows key start typing the thing that you want to search for hit enter and bam it opens up but here's the problem that windows search it uses cortana and cortana wants to use bing and I don't find it that easy to customize and it doesn't really match the way that I want to work so I've installed an app called walks that's wo X and if you're familiar at all with Alfred on the Mac this is basically the same thing you hit a button and a blank search box comes up and you could just type a things so I've got g4 Google type verge and then it searches the verge and there's a bunch of other stuff you can do to customize it you can put in custom searches you can have it do calculations you can do all kinds of stuff it's a little bit complicated to set up but for me it's totally worth it anyway look this isn't a review of Windows I just wanted to talk about some of the tools that make me feel more productive on the soccer team system because like I said before and I know this is really corny but these utilities make me feel like I have superpowers and Windows is really good at enabling that and the thing I'm worried about is I don't know if Microsoft is really into that anymore they're pushing edge super hard they're pushing Bing so hard oh my god stop it with the Bing they're even pushing Cortana a little bit too much and I hope that they change their mind about that because I don't think Windows should be about locking us into Microsoft services I think Windows should be about making us feel powerful hey thanks for watching and if I miss your favorite Windows utility now is a perfect time to drop some knowledge on all of us down in the comments we can have a chat down there you could click Subscribe and the other thing you can do is go check out verge science they're doing some amazing work I love the video they made about ferrofluids not too long ago