Sick of the bloat which is acrobat reader on windows? Give Sumatra a try. If all you need to do is occasionally read a pdf file and you’re tired of the sluggish bloat that is Adobe’s Acrobat Reader, it’s great.

In the past I pointed at colibri as the best windows file launcher, but I’ve recently switched over to Launchy after it was mentioned in a sourceforge contest. There’s still nothing on the windows side that’s as elegant as Quicksilver on OSX, but Launchy is getting close. If you’re unfamiliar with this kind of tool, they function thusly – hit a command key sequence to invoke a text entry area, then begin typing the name of the program you want to launch. The tool will begin offering guesses as to which you want to launch, and you can use your arrow keys to pick the appropriate response, then hit enter and off you go. Instead of hitting enter you can hit tab then choose an operation, like, say, ‘reveal location’ or ‘move to.’

It sounds cumbersome but these tools have changed the way I use computers in a significant way. It’s funny – what’s old is new again, since this category of tool is sort of an effort to stick a gui on top of the command line interface we all knew and loved in DOS or in unix.

Anyway check out launchy if you’re on Windows, it’s great.

So we’re about to go live with the next phase of our project at work, and as part of that we’ve been testing our materials. Part of that is checking for broken links, and this led me to check if there was anything better out there than Xenu, which I’ve been using on Windows for years. Turns out there isn’t, despite Xenu being incredibly long in the tooth and weak on the user interface side of things. If you need a link checker on windows, Xenu is your tool, trust me. Just remember to turn it down a couple of notches – on a fast windows machine, it’s an effective webserver denial of service attacker because it can bounce requests so fast.

So thanks to my friend Tony, I have a Pownce account and have some spare invites to share. If you’re not familiar with it, Pownce is the latest project from Kevin Rose, the former techtv host who started Digg. To be honest aside from sharing the occasional file I don’t really see the use of Pownce yet, but I also failed to see that Digg would take off, thinking at the time it was slashdot only with dumber people commenting, so who knows, maybe I’m missing something with Pownce and it will be the next big thing.

It’s basically like twitter or your instant messenger client, with some web-publishing capabilities and an Adobe Air client. If you want an invite, leave me a note in the comments with the email address you want it sent to and I’ll hook you up. If I don’t hear from anyone I’m going to register for inviteshare and see how well that works – it’s a great idea, no idea if the implementation is good though.

Check out the jingproject, a new application from techsmith, the folks who make Camtasia Studio, a product I use regularly to produce things like this. Jing is not nearly as feature rich as Camtasia is, and it takes a bit to get used to its interface, but it’s free (at least for now), runs cross platform, and outputs to a single swf file, which makes it easy to embed anywhere you want. I’ve been experimenting with it at work because while I like Camtasia, it has two issues which bug me – it can’t output to a single swf file in a usable manner, and it crashes a lot. So far Jing has been stable and is producing decent screencasts for me.