Windows 7 has a simple Picture Viewer application inbuilt which supports basic image formats like JPG & PNG. Nearly four years ago, Windows Vista introduced a modern and extensible imaging framework called Windows Imaging Component (WIC). WIC made it possible for 3rd parties to add support for additional image formats to the operating system, complete with thumbnail views in Explorer, previews and slideshow in Windows Photo Gallery / Photo Viewer and on Window 7 Home Premium and Ultimate, also in Windows Media Centre.

Since I moved from ACDSee to Windows Live Photo Gallery for all my image management needs I was missing the ability to preview Photoshop PSD files. With ACDSee, such codec was already available, but there is no such codec available for Windows from Adobe due to which we cannot preview PSD files in Windows without having Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Bridge.

Preview helps, as most of the time I don’t want to edit the images, I just want to see which PSD is for what. I want a small preview, that’s all. If you have Photoshop installed then by default the PSD files will open in it which takes time to open such a big application & opening it just for a 10 second preview is again, useless. Thankfully, there is a way.

I found that Microsoft Expression Design 3 has the ability to import Photoshop PSD files in it, which means it has a compatible decoder codec. By using a simple trick you can enable preview of PSD files in Windows Explorer & Windows Photo Gallery.

1. Expression Design 3 comes with a compatible PSD Decoder codec called PSDCodec.dll which can be found in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Expression\Common\Imaging\3.0.269.0
2. If you do not have expression blend then just download the trial from here. Then Using 7-Zip, open ‘Blend_Trial_en.exe’ and in the ‘Setup’ subfolder, open ‘BlImp.cab’ then extract ‘PSDCodec.dll’. You can also download the codec from my skydrive.
3. Keep the codec file somewhere safe in your PC. I recommend keeping in C:\program files\Codecs\
4. Now register this dll by going to command prompt with Admin rights & run command “regsvr32 C:\Program Files\Microsoft Expression\Common\Imaging\3.0.269.0\PSDCodec.dll”. The file path can depend on your installation of Expression Design.
5. Right click on any PSD file & click on “Open with –> Windows Live Photo Gallery” & check the box below the application selection which says “Always use the selected program to open file of this type”.
6. Now, when you will double click on the PSD file, it will open with Photo Gallery app & you will also be able to see each layer of the PSD file individually.

If you want even more codec support, consider buying FastPictureViewer Codec Pack 2.1R2

Now, that was just one trick. These days, people use many social networking services like Facebook & Twitter. How about uploading images to Facebook directly using Live Photo Gallery application? You can do that by using Live upload to Facebook. Once you install this plug-in, you will be able to upload to Facebook, by clicking on Publish in the toolbar & then “Live Upload to Facebook”. You will need to authenticate your account though which is a requirement of using Facebook.

When I had my old Sony Ericsson K750i  it had a feature using which I could control Windows Media Player or any other compatible media player using my phone over Bluetooth. It was quite a useful feature as I didn’t need to buy a Windows Media Centre remote to control the media players. Besides, its just one less device to deal with as K750i used to do it all.

After buying my Nokia N79, I was missing this feature a lot & was looking desperately for some application which could give me this or similar feature. I tried various application for my N79 but either some of them refused to connect or just didn’t work. Few days ago I tried Vectir & to my surprise, it worked flawlessly with my N79 & Windows  7.

Vectir works by installing the application on your system  & installing a small Java based app on your mobile phone. All you have to do is to start the application on your PC and then start the application on your phone. Once the Phone app has started, it will search for your computer, after which you can connect either automatically or if Bluetooth serial port service is not installed in the computer then by setting a COM Port manually.

It also supports connecting via WiFi but this I wasn’t able to test as I don’t have a WiFi card in my desktop.

Once configured, you can also change the keypad shortcuts to your liking. This I liked as now I have almost same keypad shortcuts for both Windows Media Player & Media Centre.

What I like about Vectir is that it doesn’t come in your way when using. You just start the application on your computer & it can continue to work in the background. I would have appreciated if it could run as a service, as once configured, we don’t need to see the configuration part again.

Since Vectir is still quite new & considering Windows 7 was jut released, I hope the developers do decide to include some features like jumplist support in future as the entire right click menu of Vectir tray icon can come in a jumplist.

A more native UI to Windows 7 would also be appreciated though its not as important currently because once running, users will hardly see it again as it runs completely transparent in your system. The entire UI of Vectir is made in WPF & being a .net application, not only it is fast but also secure & efficient on RAM.

Currently Vectir runs with any mobile phone supporting Java based apps whether it is normal keypad based or Touch Screen. It is one app which you should sure try before buying a Media Centre remote for your PC.

You can download a trial and check how good it works for you.

Twitter & Facebook are all the rage these days. Almost everyone I know is on it even if they are not active there. A friend of mine recently joined Facebook who is a long time Orkut user & her first question was “How do I talk to someone on Facebook? Where is the scrapbook?”. I have to say, Facebook is sometimes confusing, no wonder they released Facebook Lite recently.

When I am using Twitter or Facebook, I prefer not to go to there website to do the thing. I am a person, who prefers to navigate through the web using conventional desktop application, which is why despite of having GB of space in GMail & Windows Live Mail, I still use Outlook. Likewise, here are two applications I use for Twitter & Facebook which I liked at first try only.. & have good potential on the Windows 7 platform both made using SilverLight

Twitter = Sobees Lite

Sobees is a WPF & SilverLight based client for Twitter, Facebook & MySpace. Although only the twitter component is what I use as the Facebook part of Sobees isn’t up to the mark for me.

What I like about Sobees is that it supports integration with Windows 7 Superbar & Jumplists, lets me change the layout as I want & update my status on multiple services at once only. I can have a single column layout which is what I prefer with Tabs on top or Side or a Multi Column layout… anyway I need. This is something only DestroyTwitter gives (As far as I know).

Sobees also shows a notification in the bottom right hand side when there is a new update. I can also update my status using the jumplist too.

Being WPF based, it uses hardware acceleration to which makes scrolling through large lists easy. Most important thing due to which I like Sobees compared to any Adobe AIR based Twitter client is the ability to change the font size according to what I like. Text make up as a large part of the Twitter experience so more configuration in text is a always a better feature compared to Adobe AIR where text fonts are at a predefined size only & do not scale with change in Monitor DPI.

Sobees is currently in Alpha phase & yet provides amazing Twitter experience, final version should be available soon with support for DirectWrite & Direct2D.

Facebook = Fishbowl 

I found about FishBowl through a tweet of fellow MVP Manan Kakkar. Its a desktop client for Facebook released by UXlabs@Microsoft. Another awesome app made with SilverLight & features optimised to Windows 7. I always wanted to use a desktop client for everything & Fishbowl does that for me & Facebook.

From what it seems, Fishbowl is using DirectWrite for the text.

Scrolling through the lists in Fishbowl is better then Sobees, so I guess Direct2D isn’t enabled in Sobees yet. But since Fishbowl is able to scroll through long lists easily, I am sure other apps can do it too.

Do check out these apps, they are worth using specially if you are on Windows 7

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Presenting, what I call “Help Manual”. This application is made in simply Winforms but an also be made in WPF. It is simply a CHM & HLP Viewer, nothing else with basic functions that one would want from one such application like zooming the page & still fitting it in the application Window, printing everything using the IE 7’s print view etc. The following mock up was made in Microsoft Blend & edited by Photoshop.