In a recent video we talked about my favorite
utilities for the Mac, but here's a question.
What about Windows?
Yep, we're doin' Windows,
and just like we did with the Mac utilities video,
I wanna talk specifically about utilities.
These are little tools that make your experience
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,
we're gonna see where Windows 10 is going.
So you know, let's Skype him in.
Hey Tom, thanks for being on.
- Yeah, no worries, good to be on.
- I know you just wrote an article about
ear trumpets so, what's that all about?
- I don't know about you, but I've got gaming PC.
I like to have 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 EarTrumpet is kinda the third party app
that lets you switch apps between the outputs.
So it basically imitates the system tray icon
where you 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
split screen and full screen
and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But Windows doesn't really need that
because most of that stuff is sort of, built in.
But, there's this new utility called Groupy, right.
Can you tell me about that?
- So say you've used File Explorer, stuff like that.
I have always wanted tabs just to have
different folders open and in the same window
and stuff like that.
So this enables that.
It's pretty simple, you just click plus and it
generates a tab within the whole window
interface, you can group different apps together,
you can group workflows, so say you use Word,
File Explorer, you can group them all in
to that single window and just tab between them.
You can't tab pretty easily,
you can create your own shortcut,
but usually you'd use Control + Tab
to tab through things, you can't do that for example.
But, Microsoft is working on their own version
of Groupy, 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 Windows
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?
- It's very similar, they're doing
it in a way that, they're calling it sets.
The idea is that you'd have a set
of applications that are sort
of grouped into this single interface.
But they have some form of connection to each other.
So say you were working on an email
and you open a link from an email,
it might open within that interface
rather than opening in a separate window.
- 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 Lightshot and
a few others, but you use one
called ShareX, right?
- ShareX is a totally customizable
screenshot tool for Windows.
It's super powerful, you can upload stuff
to Imgur and I can literally
hit print screen on my keyboard,
drag around the desktop for the
region I want, let go and within
a couple of seconds it's uploaded to Imgur.
The link is in my clipboards and
I just paste it into Slack or
wherever I want to share that image.
The reason I like it as well,
is that you can record GIFs on that,
so particularly in our sort of job
where you're trying to grab GIFs
off the screen and stuff like that,
it's pretty great.
- Tom does it also let you annotations?
- Yup, so when you get the region capture,
you can also annotate on it,
crop it, all that sort of stuff.
- Okay so we know that a bunch of
the features that we've been talking
about are basically going to get
built into Windows 10 later on,
but what do you think it means
that Microsoft is being so aggressive
at converting these third party
utilities into things that are
just built into the operating system?
- I'd like to think it's them listening,
but then I have been asking for
ages for Alfred for Windows,
so maybe that will come at some point.
I feel like it's a mixture of them
listening and just realizing what
kind of people use Windows for, maybe.
It's moved on from the general consumer
to more of a subset of people who
are using it for 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,
it's the PC, right.
- Yeah.
- They have to keep making it better
and better to keep people using it.
- I did find some utilities on my own.
I want to get into 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 100
things that I copied, and then just
be able to arrow through them when I paste.
On Windows my favorite one is called Ditto.
It's a free utility, just lives
down in 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 few
things that you copied, hit enter
and it pastes it right there at the cursor .
It's super convenient, doesn't take
up any memory, it's just great.
Whenever I use a computer with
a keyboard, I want to have instant
universal search no matter what I'm doing,
no matter where I am on the computer.
In theory Windows is very good at that.
They have this thing where you just
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 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 Wox,
that's W-O-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
bar comes up and you can just
type a thing.
So I've got G for 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, this isn't a review of Windows,
I just wanted to talk about some
of the tools that make me feel more
productive on this operating system because
like I've said before, and I know
this is really corny, but these
utilities make me feel like I
have super powers, and Windows is
really good at enabling that.
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.
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
missed your favorite Windows utility
now's a perfect time to drop some
knowledge on all of us, down in the comments.
We can have a chat down there.
You can 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.