#5 Windows 7 TaskBar Keyboard Shortcuts

“Aero” is the name of the glitter and glitz and gives Windows 7 a lot of the eye candy you see in the Scott Cate Windows 7 video tutorials. Some users do not have Areo installed on their Windows 7. It’s possible that their video card (or other hardware) isn’t strong enough, or maybe they’re running a virtual instance of Windows 7. Whatever the reason, if you don’t have Aero enabled, you don’t have Aero Peek. This is the feature that gives you a popup preview of the applications that are running, as you hover over the launch icons in the task bar.

The following Key Board shortcuts will help you navigate your open (and to be opened) applications faster.

  • [WINDOWS LOGO]+[NUMBER] – Open the item in that position (if the application is already open, this action will toggle minimize/restore.
  • [WINDOWS LOGO]+[NUMBER] – Open an additional instance of the numbered application. In the video, another instance of Internet Explorer.
  • [WINDOWS LOGO]+[CTRL]+[NUMBER] – Cycle through the like applications that are open. In the video we have several instances of Internet Explorer running, along with many other applications. Where regular [ALT]+[TAB] or [WINDOWS LOGO]+[TAB] will cycle through all open applications, [WINDOWS LOGO]+[CTRL]+[NUMBER] will just cycle though our running instances of Internet Explorer.
  • [WINDOWS LOGO]+[ALT]+[NUMBER] – Open the context menu of the numbered item. With Internet Explorer, this shows your most recently used pages/tabs, as well as any pinned items that you may have.

And if a picture is worth a 1000 words, you should be happy I did the video, which saves me a lot of typing to show and explain all these keyboard shortcuts in action. Enjoy the video tutorial.

#4 Windows 7 Magnifier Presenter KB Shortcuts

If you ever have an audience that is looking at your screen, you have a couple of options to change your screen resolution. You can go all out, and actually change your resolution, but that sometimes has a drastic effect that manipulates all your applications, toolbars, etc. Remember that there is a difference in what you should do, based on your audience. If there are 3 or 4 of you hovered around your monitor for a few minutes, then changing your resolution is probably not a nice choice. On the other hand, if you have hundreds or thousands of people in your Microsoft TechEd audience, then you absolutely change your resolution to 1024X768.

In both situations, if you are projecting your screen, it’s helpful to know about the Windows 7 Magnifier.

The video will show how all this works, but for keyboard junkies, here are the keyboard shortcuts …

  • [WINDOWS-LOGO-KEY][+] – Activate the Magnifier, centering the magnification on your current cursor position, magnified at the last zoom percentage.
    • If the magnifier is already active
    • [WINDOWS-LOGO-KEY][+] will increase the magnification percentage by 100
  • [WINDOWS-LOGO-KEY][-] – Lower the Magnification percentage in increments of 100 [500%,400%,300%,200%,100%]
  • [WINDOWS-LOGO-KEY][ESC] – Close the Magnifier, and show the full screen

#3 Windows 7 “New Folder” Keyboard Shortcut

Organization is the name of the game, when keeping track of files/folders on your computer. Any computer, Any operating system, it doesn’t matter, if you have tens of thousands of files, they need to be organized. Typically these are organized is some sort of nested fashion. If you don’t use folders, then you end up with hundreds or possible thousands of files in the same place, and things just get harder to find.

Think about your Downloads directory. Everything you download get’s stuffed into the same directory. Think about the ease of having a Utils directory, or maybe a PDFs directory.

Now I’m getting side tracked, but the bottom line is … you’ll need to create folders, and here is a little keyboard shortcut that makes life a tiny little bit easier.

If you’re a KB junkie, save your time on the video, the trick is [CTRL]+[SHIFT]+[N] in any Explorer window/dialog (including File | Save, Save As).

Screencast video hosting services compared

Running the Visual Studio Tips and Tricks video blog, I have a lot of screen casts to share. In order to do this, I need to host the videos somewhere. When you think video, first you think of YouTube, at least I do. But there are other options, that are also free, or close to free, and I’m trying them all (or as many as I can).

Because the Video Tips/Tricks are pretty bandwidth heavy, I’m looking for low cost video hosting options. Maybe there are others, but I’ve narrowed my hosting choices down to …

  • Silverlight Streaming
  • Amazon Cloud Front
  • YouTube
  • Vimeo.com
  • Screencast.com

You know, I say they’re bandwidth heavy, but let’s put that into perspective. The screen casts range in size from 5mb to 100mb. Today, in most parts of the world, that is no longer bandwidth heavy. An hour long HD movie can easily turn into Gigs and Gigs of space, so maybe I’m putting too much weight on my bandwidth constraints.

Currently all of my video blog video sources are hosted on both Silverlight Streaming, and Amazon Cloud Front. I’ve posted a few on YouTube, but until recently I couldn’t figure out the magic of HD on YouTube, so YouTube wasn’t originally an option. Now I’m kind of stuck, because the original content wasn’t recorded to the YouTube spec, and they just look crappy.

So Below, I’ll divide this post into two parts. First, a pro/con list of each of the services I’m considering, followed by an embedded player from the service, if there is one.

Silverlight Streaming …

If I could have my way, I would change nothing. As I mentioned the video’s are currently being served from Silverlight Streaming. And while there is no termination date, Microsoft has announced that the Silverlight Streaming services are not going to be around forever, and they’re recommending moving away from the service. Surprisingly (and confusing to me …) is that as of today (Nov, 2009) you can still sign up for a free account, with 10gig of storage space. I would think that if the service is going away, they would not be accepting new accounts. But, that’s another story …

Amazon Cloud Front …

This really shouldn’t be in the list, but since it’s part of my current solution I’m throwing it out there. This is just a storage service. Nothing more. Could be SkyDrive, Box.net, or any Hosting company like DiscountASP.net. In several instances the Microsoft Silverlight Streaming services has been out of service, so I was throwing the video content up on the Amazon Cloud. The video player that I’m using is a custom Silverlight player, and the only thing I really need is a URL to the WMV file. So in reality, I don’t even need a video hosting solution, just a hosting solution. The problem with the hosting is that it usually comes along with a pay for usage. I’m not against paying for bandwidth, but if there are better services, I’m up for not paying as well 🙂

Vimeo …

Also, Vimeo is a contender. I’ve paid the $60/annual for their premium account, but Vimeo re-encodes the video content and it just doesn’t have the clarity of the original screen capture. You’ll see in the content comparison below, that the quality is MUCH better than event the YouTube HD, but it’s still not close to the original recoding. If I was not recording screen captures, I think Vimeo would be my winner because of the quality. But because my video content is almost always under 100mb in size, I’m looking for perfect quality, which Video doesn’t give me since it goes through a magical re-encoding process.

YouTube …

My biggest problem with YouTube is the pre-production that needs to be done. I really have to jump through hoops to get the content recorded properly, so that after the video is uploaded, it can be rendered in HD. In order to embed the video on my site, I’ve decided that the perfect content size is 900X480. This video size is not conducive to HD playback. I don’t care about the size, this isn’t going to DVD or ever mean to be played on a television. It’s meant to be played on ScottCate.com. Now, the argument could be made that YouTube has enough traffic that I should bend over backwards to get the content uploaded. The argument goes … maybe it would be worth the extra troubles just to get a YouTube channel. So if I chose YouTube, I’m still stuck with looking for a solution for the original content I have, that isn’t YouTube render friendly. YouTube also has not-so-easy sizing options. If I want to play the video back at a certain size, I can’t, unless it lines up with the players they choose. I’m sure this could be hacked, but I don’t wanna think that much about it, just work for me please!

TechSmith Screencast.com …

I record all the content using Camtasia from TechSmith.com. They offer a nice solution of hosting the video output on ScreenCast.com. The premium service is $99 a year, which is well within my “Cheap enough for blogging” price point. A nice part of ScreenCast.com is that there are output options baked into the Camtasia product to upload the final product. In fairness, the product has uploads built for other services, and FTP, and I even think they can be customized to any service. Also, ScreenCast.com doesn’t re-encode the uploaded content, it just streams it out.

And the winner is …

Screencast.com! After typing all this, and thinking about my real problem, I’ve realized that what I need isn’t a video hosting solution to save on bandwidth costs. What I really need is a hosting service that doesn’t re-encode the content that I upload. With that, all I really need is any old hosting service right? But, once you couple the convenience of the upload being built into Camtasia, the service becomes my winner and is a perfect solution for Screencasts.

Below is the same video uploaded to three services, Screencast.com, Vimeo, and YouTube. You tell me the quality difference. Keep in mind that my goal is to play the content back at full size, 900X480, or as close as the player will let me.

ScreenCast.com …

 

 

YouTube …

 

 

Vimeo …

Microsoft PDC Sessions/Keynotes online for Download

If you’re seen the tech new recently, you’ve heard about the Microsoft PDC (Professional Developers Conference). If you couldn’t make the conference (like me) then you’ll be happy to know that Microsoft has posted video of all the sessions and keynotes.

And they’re available for download. In fact, here is a set of CURL scripts that will download them for you all at once (or overnight depending on your bandwidth).

The script basically says – do I have this file? If no, go get it.

Included with the scripts, is a handy Renamer, that renames the file to the session name, which is much more meaningful than the original session number. But … what if (like my) you download 1/2 of them, and the other 1/2 die (or aren’t available)?

If you use the Renamer, the next time you try to fetch the videos, you’ll be fetching them all over again. So I hacked on the Renamer script a bit, to create an Un-Renamer 🙂 Basically the same script backwards. It just took a few minutes, but I thought it might be helpful to provide for others.

Enjoy: PDC09UnRenamer.zip