 In a recent video, we talked about my favorite utilities for the Mac, but here's a question. What about Windows? Yep, we're doing Windows. And just like we did with the Mac utilities video, I wanna talk specifically about utilities. These are little tools that make your experience of using Windows better, not just apps. And I have to be honest with you, I can't pretend that I know Windows quite as well as I know the Mac. This is my surface and I do use it all the time, but I really wanted to call in an expert. And lucky for me, I've got one I can call. His name is Tom Warren. He's a senior editor for The Verge. And so we're gonna have a chat. He's gonna talk about his favorite utilities. I'm gonna talk about mine and we're gonna see where Windows 10 is going. So, you know, let's Skype him in. Hey Tom, thanks for being on. Yeah, no worries. Good to be on. And I know you just wrote an article about Ear Trumpet. So what's that all about? I don't know about you, but I've got a gaming PC. I like to have like Spotify coming out of my speakers and YouTube coming out of my headphones and stuff. That's not really super easy to do in Windows at the moment. So Ear Trumpet is like kind of a third party app that lets you switch apps between the outputs. So it basically imitates the system tray icon where you have the volume icon right now. It lets you sort of drag and drop essentially apps between different outputs within that interface. So on the Mac, there's a bunch of different window utility options that let you set up like split screen and full screen and blah, blah, blah, blah, but Windows doesn't really need that because most of that stuff is sort of built in. But there's this new utility called Groupie, right? Can you tell me about that? So say you've used File Explorer or stuff like that. I've always wanted tabs just to have different folders open in the same window and stuff like that. So this enables that. It's pretty simple. You just click plus and it generates like a tab within the whole window interface. You can group different apps together. You can like group workflows. So say you use, I don't know, like Word, File Explorer. You can group them all into that single window and just tap between them. You can't like tab pretty easily. There's like, you can create your own shortcut, but like usually you'd use control and tab to tab through things. You can't do that, for example. But Microsoft is working on their own sort of version of Groupie, so, you know. One of the themes that I'm picking up on here is that a bunch of the stuff that we're talking about is basically gonna be built right into Windows at some point in the near future. And I guess a lot of those updates are gonna come in this Redstone update. So Tom, how is Microsoft gonna be doing its version of a tabbed interface? Yeah, so they're doing, it's very similar. They're doing it in a way that it's like, they're calling it sets. The idea is that you'd have a set of applications that are grouped into this single interface, but they have like some form of connection to each other. So say you were working on an email and you open a link from an email, it might open within that interface rather than opening a separate window. Okay, let's talk screenshots. Everyone needs a good screenshot utility, right? But the one that's built into Windows is honestly, it's not that great. And there's a bunch of replacements out there. There's like Lightshot and a few others, but you use one called ShareX, right? So yeah, ShareX is a totally customizable screenshot tool for Windows. So it's super powerful. You can upload stuff to Imgur. So I can literally hit like a print screen on my keyboard, drag around the desktop for the region I want, let go. And within a couple of seconds, it's uploaded to Imgur. The link is in my clipboard and I just paste it into Slack or wherever I wanna share that image. The reason I like it as well is that you can record GIFs on it. So particularly in our sort of job where you're trying to grab GIFs off the screen and stuff like that, it's pretty great. So does it also let you do annotations? Yep, so when you get the region capture, you can also annotate on it, crop it, all that sort of stuff. Okay, so we know that a bunch of the features we've been talking about are basically gonna get built into Windows 10 later on, but what do you think it means that Microsoft is being so aggressive at converting these like third-party utilities into things that are just built into the operating system? I'd like to think it's them listening, but then I have been asking for ages for Alfred for Windows, so maybe that'll come at some point. But yeah, I feel like it's a mixture of them listening and just realizing what kind of people use Windows for maybe. It's moved on from like the general consumer to more of a subset of people who are using it for like real work, so to speak. So I feel like they're picking up on that trend. It's the one thing that Microsoft has that they have to keep pushing, is the PC, right? Yeah. They have to keep making it better and better to keep people using it. I did find some utilities on my own. I wanna give you the stuff that I found. I really can't use a good, proper desktop operating system without a clipboard history. My memory sucks, and I love that it can just remember the last hundred things that I copied and then just be able to arrow through them when I paste. And so on Windows, my favorite one is called Ditto. It's a free utility, just lives down in the system tray, and you set a hotkey to it. I've set mine to Shift Command V, and when you hit it, it pops up this little window and then you can just arrow through the last few things that you copied, hit Enter, and it pastes it right there at the cursor. It's super convenient, it doesn't take up any memory, it's just great. Whenever I use a computer with a keyboard, I wanna have instant, universal search, no matter what I'm doing, no matter where I am on the computer, and in theory, Windows is very good at that. They have this thing where you can just hit the Windows key, start typing the thing that you wanna search for, hit Enter, and bam, it opens up. But here's the problem. That Windows search, it uses Cortana, and Cortana wants to use Bing, and I don't find it that easy to customize, and it doesn't really match the way that I wanna work. So I've installed an app called Wox, that's W-O-X, and if you're familiar at all with Alfred on the Mac, this is basically the same thing. You hit a button and a blank search box comes up and you can just type a thing, so I've got G for Google, type Verge, and then it searches the Verge, and there's a bunch of other stuff you can do to customize it. You can put it in custom searches, you can have it do calculations, you can do all kinds of stuff. It's a little bit complicated to set up, but for me, it's totally worth it. Anyway, look, this isn't a review of Windows. I just wanted to talk about some of the tools that make me feel more productive on this operating system, because like I've said before, and I know this is really corny, but these utilities make me feel like I have superpowers, and Windows is really good at enabling that. And the thing I'm worried about is I don't know if Microsoft is really into that anymore. They're pushing Edge super hard, they're pushing Bing so hard, oh my God, stop it with the Bing. They're even pushing Cortana a little bit too much, and I hope that they change their mind about that, because I don't think Windows should be about locking us into Microsoft services. I think Windows should be about making us feel powerful. Hey, thanks for watching, and if I missed your favorite Windows utility, now's a perfect time to drop some knowledge on all of us down in the comments. We can have a chat down there, you can click subscribe, and the other thing you can do is go check out Verge Science. They're doing some amazing work. I love the video they made about ferrofluids not too long ago.