Saturday, February 21, 2009

SOFTWARE: One Trick, But WizMouse Masters It!

On a daily basis, I check a bunch of recommendation sites. Most don't pan out, but you occasionally find a gold nugget amongst the dross. Such a find is Antibody Software's WizMouse utility.

WizMouse does only one trick, but it is a neat one for anybody who has a big enough screen OR screens and occasionally finds the need for scrolling more than one window, and goes back and forth doing it. Say a listing of files in Explorer and a list of files on a web-page or an Excel spreadsheet. You know the drill. You click on one window, scroll to what you need. Then you click BACK to the other window, taking great care not to click on something randomly to activate the window that might lead to adverse reaction, where you can THEN scroll that window. It can be quite the balancing act.

Enter WizMouse. It simply changes the behaviour of the scrolling function of your mouse (or my trackball) to scroll THE WINDOW IT'S HOVERING OVER! Doesn't requiring clicking to select at all. You can even scroll a window that's partially hidden by another window!!!!!

This is just incredibly neat. And free. And useful.

Let me give you an example. I had my point of sale system running. I was on the page with the catalog of items for sale. I ALSO had an excel analysis of sales open in another window on my second monitor. I was scrolling the item catalog, then going over, clicking on a cell and scrolling the analysis so that it showed approximately the same items. Then I clicked back over to the POS software, scrolled again, went back to excel, clicked there ... well you get the drift. After installing WizMouse, I just hovered over either window and scrolled. NO clicking whatsoever. It seems such a tiny improvement, but you have NO idea just how handy NOT CLICKING is!

Give it a try.

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