Author: Browser Engine

TrayBlank is a very simple program that offers a quick way to manage your screensaver. Some people like to lock their computer when they are stepping away from it; it’s a good habit for your privacy and security especially if you are in a public place or place where others may get near the device.

Locking the computer will obviously make Windows switch to the lockscreen which, depending on the version, may display a wallpaper.

Personally, I prefer to see a nice screensaver when my computer is idling and it’s usually set to use my wallpapers folder. Now, as you may know, the screensaver depends on two things: screensaver settings and power settings. The latter is the more important one because it may put your computer to sleep before the former can be triggered.

If you want to start the screensaver immediately, TrayBlank is a nice tool. And it has a couple of extra features that you may find useful. The program’s name should give you a hint, as it runs from the system tray. Right-click on its icon and you will see a pop-out menu. The first option lets you Start the screensaver instantly; this also works when you double-click on the icon. On the other hand, if you want to save power, the ‘Turn off monitor” will likely be your favorite option. This does not put the computer into sleep mode though as it turns off the monitor only.

The Choose Screensaver menu is quite nice, it takes you to Windows’ select screensaver screen. Select the “Configure Screensaver” option from the tray icon to open the screensaver settings. Do note that this is only available for the Photos and Text screensavers (default ones in Windows).

Don’t want your screensaver starting quickly? Hit the screen timeout menu and choose from 1 minute and up to 120 minutes. While Windows does offer a longer time period, this can be useful if you’re temporarily switching to a different duration.

There are three hotkeys that you can use when TrayBlank is up and running:

• Ctrl  + Alt + S  starts the screensaver.
• Ctrl + Alt + Z turns off the monitor
• Ctrl + Alt + C brings up the screensaver settings.

You can customize the shortcuts from the setup menu.

The Screensaver Start menu has 3 settings: Delayed, Directly, and Directly after timeout. When “delayed” is chosen and you double-click the icon, you will notice a slight delay after which the screensaver starts.  The 2nd and third options make the program start the screensaver as its own process.

When you use either of those options, the tray icon changes to an arrow icon with a bar below it to indicate the progress of the timeout. If you need more information about the current settings, simply mouse over the icon and you’ll view a tooltip that tells you what screensaver is set, when it will timeout, when the monitor will go off, and the selected delay mode.

Closing words

TrayBlank is not meant for advanced users, it is strictly for screensaver aficionados. I find it to be better than Windows 10’s approach to screensavers. Navigating to Settings > Personalization > Lock Screen > Screensaver in Windows 10 is annoying. It’s not the best place for the settings, is it? It almost feels like Microsoft wanted to do away with the legacy feature. I’m pretty sure some people may not even know that the operating system has the option.

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Earth Alerts is a free program for Microsoft Windows devices that monitors severe weather alerts worldwide to inform its users about these in realtime.

The application is compatible with all supported client operating systems (Windows 7 to Windows 10) and requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.8.

Earth Alerts displays important information on first run. The program supports global weather alerts and may add specific information about locations in the United States and worldwide to the application; the latter requires a Google Cloud Platform API key and provides you with direct information about thise locations.

It is perfectly fine to use the program without locations support. It may not be as convenient on the other hand as you need to select the alerts under global or United States overview to go through them one by one.

Tip: check out our overview of weather programs for Microsoft Windows systems.

The application displays information about weather alerts in the sidebar. These are sorted into groups and subgroups. The first two groups, Global and United States overview, are always accessible. The group that follows only if you have added an API key.

Groups highlight important events in red and use numbers to indicate the number of alerts. A click on a subcategory, e.g. Volcano, Fire, Tropical Cyclone or Earthquake, provides details.

If multiple alerts are found in a category, data is divided into tabs at the top. The data is color coded to indicate the level of severity, e.g. orange which means it is under watch or yellow which means that it is an advisory.

Information is different depending on the selected alert category. Most categories displays a list of links at the top that you may use to switch between different pages that provide you with information.

The tropical cyclone page may display a satellite map, provide released advisories and forecasts, or tracking information.

For earthquakes, options to switch between “most recent”, “past 24 hours” and “past week” are provided as well as maps and other information. The program links to weather and government sites on the Internet.

The application’s settings provide useful information. You may change the auto-update interval or disable auto-updating altogether. The default interval is set to 10 minutes. Other options include switching between metric and and English US measurement systems, or changing notifications.

You may enable or disable certain alert types; if you are not interested in tropical weather alerts, you may disable those for instance. Additionally, you may disable weather alerts for certain regions only and change the minimum magnitude and maximum distance for earthquake alerts.

These options are available for global and United States alerts, as well as global and United States locations (if enabled).

Closing Words

Earth Alerts is a useful software program for Windows, especially so if you face severe weather occasionally or regularly. The program is a bit fiddly when it comes to navigation and the Google Cloud Platform API key requirement for its location feature is not optimal either. If you can look beyond these, however, you are left with a useful weather alerts program for Windows.

Now you: do you use weather apps or programs?

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FreeVimager is a free image viewer and editor for Windows. It is user-friendly, fast and offers quite a few interesting features.

Tip: check out previously reviewed image viewing alternatives such as ImageGlass, IrfanView, or FastStone Image Viewer.

The application’s interface is a bit outdated, but we can ignore that because functionality-wise, it’s quite good. The menu bar houses most of the options that you’ll be working with, but some of these tools are also available on the toolbar at the bottom.

The “open file” window displays a preview of the selected picture along with its resolution,DPI, BPP and modified date. You can also load a directory containing your photos and browse through the images.

Image formats that are supported by FreeVimager include BMP, EMF, GIF, JPG, PCX, PNG, and TIF.  The application opens each image in its own sub-window which some may like, others may dislike.

Loading two or more images does the same, but when you hit the maximize button on one of the pictures, the program switches to a tab bar allowing you to jump between the images quickly.

Opening more pictures when the tab bar is already visible does not add them as tabs. You can fix this easily by using the Window menu’s Cascade or Tile (horizontally or vertically) options. Do that, and then click on the maximize button on a picture. This will rearrange all the images in tabs. Speaking of which, the Windows menu can also be used to navigate through the opened files.

While working with several images, you will be able to use the Play menu to view the contents as a slideshow. If you have a scanner plugged in, FreeVimager can be used to scan a document/picture and save it in TIFF or PDF formats.

Editing options

FreeVimager’s editor isn’t a full fledged one, in that it doesn’t have a proper set of tools like text, eraser, pencil, brush and so on. But if all you want to do is modify some aspects of the image, it can  do that.

Use the edit menu to rotate and resize pictures, and you can also crop images or add borders. There are some advanced options for adjusting the properties such as the Grayscale, Brightness, Contrast, Red Eye removal, Sharpen, or Soften. The convert to option can be used to save the image in a different color profile (16-bit/32-bit, True Color, etc).

The JPEG Advanced menu allows you to losslessly crop an image, which saves it without compressing the picture. The program retains the EXIF, XMP, JFIF, IPTC, COM, ICC data when you edit images, but you can optionally delete them if you want to.

The screenshot option available from the Edit menu, can be used to snap a copy of the picture you’re working with. This also works with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + F11.

Batch Processing

FreeVimager supports batch processing which allows you to rename or convert multiple pictures at the same time, adjust the quality settings, etc. You can access the option from the File menu. The portable version of the program runs directly from the executable, and the settings are saved in an INI file directly. The application’s source code is available at the official website.

If you can look past the dated interface, FreeVimager is a good image viewer and the editing options are a nice bonus.

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You may have heard about or even used the excellent XnView Image Viewer (check out some of our other favorites such as Faststone Image Viewer, QuickViewer, or HoneyView) . But did you know that the developer also makey an image tool that you can access from Explorer’s context menu?

XnShell is the Shell extension we’ll be looking at here. And no, you don’t need XnView for this tool to work.

Download and install XnShell and open Windows Explorer. Select an image and right-click on it, and you’ll see the XnShell context-menu item. This won’t appear when the selected file is not an image.

The first thing that you will notice in this menu is that it displays a thumbnail preview of the picture. That’s unusual and may be helpful, unless you use tiles or other view modes where the picture is already visible. It also displays the resolution, the bpp (bits per pixel) and the size of the image.

Edit images from the context menu

The application lets you edit the image with a couple of clicks and you don’t need any image editors to process the changes. The first option is to convert the image, and you can save it in GIF, BMP, JPG, PCX, PNG, TIF and TGA formats. How does this work? Select an image, right-click > XnShell > Convert into, and pick a format. That’s it.

The other “Convert..” option isn’t instant like the one above, but lets you select the output folder, format, and also resize the image. There are a lot more output formats available when you use this option including CIN, DCX, DDS, DIS, DPX, GBR, ICO, IFF, IMG, JIX, JXR, KRO, MBM, MIF, MTV, PAT, PBM, PDB, PDF, PGM, PIC, PIX, PNM, PPM, PRC, PS, PSD, QRT, RAW, RGB, RLA, SCT, TGA, VST, WBMP, WRL, XBM, XPM, YUV.

You can define the compression settings manually from the “Convert…” menu.

Resize and Rotate images

The Resize menu has options to modify the picture’s size to one of the following 320 x 200 pixels, 640 x 480, 800 x 600, 1024 (x pixels based on the aspect ratio). You can use the 50% and 25% resize options to reduce the original image. The result is instant, and the new image is saved in the same folder with a new name. Similarly, the Rotate option offers ways to change the photo’s orientation instantly by 90°, 180°, Flip Vertical or Horizontal, or Rotate based on the EXIF tag.

Other options

XnShell can edit the ITPC metadata of pictures. There is an option to retain the original attributes and another to use templates to quickly add information to your images. You can upload images to the cloud directly by using the Send to ImageShack menu item. And the final menu option is to set the selected image as wallpaper.

The Options sub-menu allows you to modify XnShell’s settings. You can use this to disable/enable any of the menu items. The default thumbnail preview size is 128 x 96 which is small, but you can increase the size manually. Or you can disable the previews. There are a few other options for tweaking the thumbnail settings.

XnShell’s convert options is incredible if you edit images on a daily basis, and share them online.

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