Rapid Environment Editor
With many Presagis applications offering configuration options via environment variables, a tool like Rapid Environment Editor is much easier to use than the built-in Windows tool. If you have been challenged while editing your system path to find a variable, you will immediately appreciate the way that Rapid EE expands the elements of your path or other multi-part variables into a tree view. It also offers file/directory name completion as you edit variables, highlights invalid paths in red and can be resized to take up the entire screen to really have full control over your variables.
Input Director
Many people use a hardware KVM as a means of sharing a mouse and keyboard between multiple systems, even in cases when each computer has its own screen. While it is a valid solution, you always need to think for a few seconds about which system to select and then the target system usually takes a few seconds to acknowledge the switch. A more elegant solution to share these peripherals between multiple systems that each have their own screen is to use Input Director, a Windows-based software KVM that communicates through your network. After starting the application on two or more systems, designating a master and its associated slaves and specifying the position of each screen relative to its peers, the mouse cursor will seamlessly glide from one monitor to the next. Another interesting feature is that Input Director can let you copy/paste data between computers! Input Director is always our first choice when we stand up an application with distributed simulation elements to be able to easily control all systems.
7-Zip
Why use a tool that supports a single file format like Winzip when 7-Zip supports all of these:
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Packing / unpacking: 7z, XZ, BZIP2, GZIP, TAR, ZIP and WIM
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Unpacking only: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DEB, DMG, FAT, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, RAR, RPM, SquashFS, UDF, VHD, WIM, XAR and Z
7-Zip is always one of the first tools I install on any system that I setup.
Greenshot
If you ever wished that there was an easier way to take screenshots than using the Windows Print Screen button along with some key combinations and pasting the results in Paint or another graphics tool, than Greenshot is what you need. Through some simple keystrokes or menu selections, Greenshot can capture an arbitrary region of the screen (which you get to draw out to your needs), a window (or even a sub-part of an application window) or the entire screen. The window and window sub-section are my two favorite when creating documentation that needs detailed pictures.
I hope that you will find these tools useful in your work. If you have some other gem in your own toolbox, feel free to drop me a note. If I get enough suggestions, I will post a follow-up article with reader entries.
