Scargill

Archive for the ‘Rocketdock’ Category

Don’t you just love technology – especially when it goes wrong.

Some time ago now, having discovered that Google Alerts doesn’t really work that well any more – probably due to Google getting rid of the Google Reader…. I switched to another program – and cancelled Alerts I had in my name (they kept getting it wrong anyway and giving me alerts for another Peter Scargill – a racing reporter)…

So this morning – despite scrapping the lot, this alert came in… I thought for a moment that I may have forgotten to cancel this one – so looking in the email, there’s a link that says “Manage your alerts”. I clicked on the link and sure enough….

As if that wasn’t a bad enough start, I noted that my sister Mary had taken a photo of my wife Maureen and put it on Facebook – Maureen is over in the states at the moment on holiday..  I went to the photo, clicked on Maureen’s face and tagged it with her name. What do I get in the email?

Erm, sorry, WHAT? No she didn’t !! And the thing is there’s not much you can do when this stuff goes wrong.

While I’m on – you may have seen me getting excited about Pokki – which at last appears to be a way to get a Windows START button onto Windows 8 and get rid of the pesky swipe actions which make using the trackpad almost impossible on a no-touch-screen tablet (i.e. the majority of them). Well, I checked and they do a Windows 7 version – with another piece of free software called Start Killer, you can delete the Windows ORB…. and now it’s not necessary to run Rocketdock to get the shortcuts. This is so intuitive it makes you wonder why Microsoft didn’t do this…

Ok it’s not as pretty as the ORB but it’s a hell of a sight more useful and adjustable.

As you can see on the left, when you click on the new icon – you get your usual tools on the left (you select which ones you want) – and favourites you want on the right – you don’t have to go looking for them – under all programs you get to see everything you’ve installed – and there’s a “favourites” star to click if you want the item shown here.

Marvellous.