DragAnyWindow 4.2.1 Helium 3.1 Pretty Scroll 1.0.2Review

DragAnyWindow 4.2.1
Author: Alessandro Levi Montalcini
Shareware: $10.00
http://persoweb.francenet.fr/~alm

DragAnyWindow is a wonderful utility that greatly enhances the look and behavior of window dragging in the Mac OS. It will enable ‘solid drags’ of windows and live updating of windows while you are dragging. It also lets you set key combinations to make windows “jump” or to drag ‘fixed’ windows that you normally couldn’t move, like the warning dialog for emptying the trash.

‘Solid dragging’ of windows was relatively smooth on my machines (6400/200 and 6100/60), and the live updating feature worked great. I was loading a large page in Netscape, while dragging a large window and I noticed that the page was still loading. This is a wonderful feature that makes it much easier to work since you can move your windows around while the operation in that window is still occurring. You can also set a delay so that the window will not start updating again until a preset delay time runs out, or another that prevents live updating unless you have ‘solid dragging’ enabled.

You can set up to a four-key combination to make windows jump and to drag fixed windows. People with bigger monitors and higher resolutions might not find this feature very useful, but anyone with a smaller monitor (12″ and below) definitely will.

The Summary
DragAnyWindow is a very useful Control Panel that should be a part of the Mac OS. Its originality and breakthrough performance are unmatched by anything like it. $10.00 is a minimal fee to ask for this great Desktop helper and timesaver.

Download DragAnyWindow 4.2.1

Helium 3.1
Company: Tiger Technologies
Shareware: $12.00
http://www.tigertech.com

If you’ve ever wanted to use Balloon Help, and said to yourself that you’re going to start using it, but never do because it’s so inconvenient, then Helium is for you. Helium lets you set key combinations to momentarily inflate Help Balloons and then have them ‘deflate’ after you’ve released those keys. You can also set a key combination to toggle Balloon Help on and off so you don’t have to make a trip back up to the Help Menu every time you want to enable or disable Balloon Help.

Helium lets you increase the size of text in the Balloons, a great feature for anyone with less-than-perfect eyesight. It also lets you hide the Help Menu, invoking it only for those times when you need it.

The Summary
I haven’t experienced any compatibility problems with Helium. The excellent documentation claims that it’s completely compatible with Mac OS 8, and from my experience, I can tell you it is! Using Balloon Help can make veteran users more productive while becoming an invaluable aid to newcomers to the Mac. I’ve benefited from Balloon Help’s advice, and chances are you will too. Download Helium today and see for yourself.

Download Helium 3.1

Pretty Scroll 1.0.2
Author: Johnny C N Lee
Shareware: $5.00
http://www.hkstar.com/~snowyho/johnny/htmls

Pretty Scroll is a Control Panel that animates window scrolling. Don’t confuse this with live scrolling, however. Animated scrolling means that when you move the scroll tab to a different location in the scroll bar, the page will move up at a certain speed, letting you see what your starting point was.

You can turn Pretty Scroll on/off on the fly – there’s no need to restart your machine. Pretty Scroll also lets you set the “scrolling step”, a feature which lets you control the speed at which a page will scroll.

The Summary
Many people may find Pretty Scroll to be very handy, but honestly, I don’t. When I set the scrolling step to a speed to where I can read the text, I found that it’s going so slow that it takes almost 30 seconds for the page to scroll up to where I positioned the scroll tab.

There are other shareware offerings like Smart Scroll or Double Scroll, both of which enable true live-scrolling, a feature which I feel gives you much more control over your document. And while they don’t make your Mac “pretty” by animating text, they do give you features you can use.