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Winsplit Revolution (tested v8.07)
Window tiling utility
Developer: Winsplit Revolution team
OS: Windows
Price: Free
www.winsplit-revolution.com/

So you've bought yourself a new computer monitor the size of Montana. Congratulations! While much of the world soldiers on with 19-inch and 22-inch monitors, you've got a device that can display 1080p movies and offer a near-cinematic computer gaming experience. But with large monitors offering resolutions in excess of 1920x1200, there's a lot of screen real estate to play with. Most applications and websites take advantage of only a fraction of that space, floating aimlessly in a vast, empty ocean.

Though Windows Vista offers some rudimentary window-shuffling features, there aren't enough options available to satisfy those looking for more structure. Enter Winsplit Revolution, a utility that allows you to create and apply window layouts quickly and easily. Want to stick a window in the top-left corner? Press Control-Alt-7 (7 sits at the top-left corner of the numeric keypad) and the active window pops to the corner and resizes itself automatically to set portions, like a quarter of the screen. In this way, you can quickly create a neatly ordered grid of windows without fuss.

There are several preset layouts for all corners and sides of the screen, and you can make up your own layouts as well. Other features, like an auto-tile feature that takes all open windows and creates a mosaic, are fun additions that you may not use often, but are nevertheless nifty to have. For those with large monitors, Winsplit's core functionality is a must-have.

UltraVNC (tested v1.0.5)
Remote desktop client/server
Developer: UltraVNC
OS: Windows/Mac/Linux
Price: Free
http://www.uvnc.com/

Maybe your father's called you about yet another bizarre computer problem, or perhaps you've realized the documents you were going to e-mail to yourself are still sitting on your computer at home. There are plenty of reasons why you might think to yourself, "gee, if only I could take control of the other computer remotely." And though there are several options for remote desktop control, the king of the hill is VNC and its many derivatives and offshoots.

UltraVNC is one of the more robust branches of the original VNC, which was created almost a decade ago. That program was designed simply to mirror the screen and inputs of a computer remotely, over a network or the Internet, in order to control it as if you were sitting right in front of it. The latest version of UltraVNC adds quite a few features on top of the original premise, such as file transfers and text chat. It also offers more options for connections, including encryption and automatic quality throttling for slow connections.

One of the main issues with UltraVNC and most other VNC descendants is the relative lack of user-friendliness; it's clearly a product designed with the high-level computer geek in mind. This can be especially problematic for those who don't know how to poke holes in a firewall, or those who don't even know what a firewall is. But UltraVNC has ways around even this long-standing problem. Its many features, especially its connection encryption, makes UltraVNC one of the best remote desktop solutions available.

Tree Style Tab (tested v0.7.2008101801)
Firefox tab manager
Developer: Shimoda Hiroshi
OS: Windows/Mac/Linux (via Firefox)
Price: Free
http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en

Sometimes, clutter doesn't disappear — it just gets swept under the carpet. Before browsers like Firefox popularized the tabbed interface concept, applications with multiple windows would stack up in the Windows taskbar until even the labels disappeared. Finding the right window eventually became a memory game: which taskbar button had the document I was looking for again? Tabbed browsing did away with the taskbar clutter, only to move it into the tab bar of individual applications. Now it's not the Windows taskbar that you can't read, but the browser's tab bar.

Tree Style Tab is a handy Firefox add-on that attempts to mitigate this problem in two ways. First, it moves the tab bar to the sides of the browser by default, which swallows up more horizontal space but allows for far more tabs than is possible with a horizontal bar. Second, and more importantly, it creates a tree structure for tabs, allowing users to create a hierarchy of tabs on the fly or manually via drag-and-drop. Have several tabs related to a single project? Drag them under a single parent tab, and they'll form a branch that you can expand when you need to access those tabs, and collapse when you don't.

For many Internet users, Tree Style Tab is overkill — it's not of much use if you only ever have a few tabs open at a time. But if you use tabs a little more enthusiastically than most, Tree Style Tab may just save you from drowning in tabs.