• Winplosion: I tried this one and it works, although the animation is a bit clumsy (and this is a fast Windows XP machine.) You can set it to use F9 just like the Mac, but you have to press ESC rather than F9 again to exit. Worse, while it was running in the background I experienced some nasty delays—my computer suddenly couldn’t keep up with my typing. Needless to say, I uninstalled it quickly.
• Entbloess: I read a brief review here that mentions that it (1) crashed, and (2) messed up the order for Alt-Tab switching. That’s enough to convince me to avoid it entirely.
• Exposer for Windows: I tried to configure this one to use F9 as the hotkey, but it requires a Ctrl, Alt, Shift, or Windows key modifier, which misses the point of making it work just like a Mac. It makes no attempt to do graceful Apple-style animation when you hit the hotkey, and is slow—I actually laughed the first time I hit Alt-F9 and watched the windows disappear one at a time over a few seconds. It did speed up on subsequent uses, though, and at least it doesn’t crash or slow down the machine.
• TopDesk: The article missed this one, but I found it in a Google search. It defaults to the Mac standard F9 key, and the animation is the best I’ve seen outside a Mac—but there’s still a disconcerting 2-second delay between the keypress and the animation. The tiled windows look great, changing color as you hover the mouse over them, and the window-opening animation is perfect. Alt-Tab seems to work normally. It’s even smart enough to know that Konfabulator isn’t a normal application that it should tile. If not for that delay and the hefty system requirements, it would be a great choice.

Conclusion: If I were desperate for this feature, I’d go with TopDesk. But that’s just the point—nobody is desperate for this feature. It’s a convenient luxury, but it’s not worth spending money or destabilizing your system, and if it’s the slightest bit slow, you may as well use the taskbar instead. So the snarky comment under the O’Reilly article that says “Just get a Mac” is, essentially, correct.

But that’s the future. For the present, Microsoft’s first action as LookOut’s new owner was to take it offline. The LookOut site has been stripped down and conspicuously lacks a Download link. LookOut will still work, and will even update itself to version 1.2, if you already had it installed.

I’ve received a few emails asking me how to get a copy of the LookOut installer. I personally had good luck emailing LookOut as mentioned in this forum thread. If you have trouble finding a copy, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

After a bit of investigation, it turns out this message is from The Weather Channel’s Desktop Weather tool, which spends most of its time at the more productive task of displaying your local temperature in the Windows taskbar tray. It means it was unable to connect to a server, probably a network connection problem.

I guess these sorts of problems are bound to crop up when you’re using a combination of software on your desktop, a Web server, and a distributed network of worldwide monitoring stations all connected via a public Internet to act as a cheap thermometer…

Bonsai is a bit limited compared to OneNote–your outline can contain only text, and no formatting like boldface or fancy fonts–but it does what I need it to do. More importantly, Bonsai includes nearly-identical versions for Windows and PalmOS that synchronize perfectly. I’ve moved most of my project planning to Bonsai and it’s really nice to be able to glance at my outlines right on my phone, or add to them.

I’m always a bit reluctant to use software from a small company–it might not be supported in the future. But the desktop version of Bonsai can export outlines in text, CSV, HTML, and even XML formats, so if I ever need to change outline programs, it will be a simple transition.

These highly suspect statistics come from Earthlink’s Spy Audit service, which has a generous (and wrong) definition of spyware that includes "Adware Cookies"–any advertising-related cookies. A scan of my spyware-free PC revealed 80 such items, including legitimate cookies from several advertisers I use myself, not to mention one from Clickz.com. Despite what you might think about cookies and privacy, cookies are data–not spyware by any stretch of the imagination–and they make up a full 80% of the "total instances of spyware" in this survey.

Assuming the Spy Audit numbers are correct, they found an average of 0.35 items of actual spyware per computer scanned. One item of spyware per three computers. That’s a scary statistic, but there’s no need to blow it ridiculously out of proportion. Unless you have a Spyware Blocker feature to promote, of course.

While I’m pretty good at organizing messages, I found something better: Lookout is a plug-in for Outlook that adds a search toolbar and a powerful search engine. It’s far faster than Outlook’s built-in search–to the point of being nearly instantaneous. It has a handy search toolbar and a background indexing system.

Lookout has a nice Google-style search syntax. You can type a keyword or two and get quick results, listed by rank, or you can use modifiers like +word and -word and specify dates, subjects, and other fields. I haven’t spent much time figuring out the syntax, since it usually finds what I’m looking for with keywords alone.

Lookout is free while it’s in beta, but I’ll gladly pay for it. I rarely used Outlook’s search feature, since I could usually find things faster by browsing through my semi-organized folders. By contrast, I’ve found myself using Lookout’s search several times a day, and it hasn’t failed yet. [Found via Marc's Outlook]

Unfortunately, NetLoad is off the market. Its site has been replaced by this notice that NetLoad is no longer available, and that the source code and customer list is for sale for the absurd sum of $25,000.

So… I’m looking for a new tool to deploy files to my servers. In the meantime, Google found the NetLoad download page, now unlinked, so I can at least get it working on my new PC.

I was actually pleasantly surprised by this tool. It didn’t find anything shocking about my machine – a few red icons, but these are things I leave unsecure because my firewall takes care of the problems. More importantly, among the other things listed I found some very good Outlook security suggestions the likes of which I’ve never seen from Microsoft.

This is really a crutch for Microsoft’s lagging security reputation – the real solution is to fix the security issues in future releases rather than make software to detect them – but in the interim, before everyone upgrades to the fabled Secure Microsoft OS, this tool will at least help spread the word about security issues.

The biggest problem is that PSA only works for NT 4 Workstation and Windows 2000 Professional, when the server-oriented OSs are at the greatest risk. The PSA page also categorically denies any knowledge of web server issues – and IIS has quite a few of those.

Nonetheless PSA seems a step in the right direction for Microsoft, and I hope it’s followed by many more.

Now I just have to overcome my fear of taking security advice from Microsoft…