Media collection organizer

Libra is a free collection organizer software does tracks your books, audio CDs, movies, and games (for now apparently). It is only free for non-commercial use of course.

It hooks up to the Amazon database for its searches, although there's nothing stopping you from adding you own stuff.

The features highlighted on its website are:

• Turn your webcam into a barcode scanner (sounds impressive! no webcam to try...)
  
• Lightning speed database (not exactly lightning, but fast nonetheless)
  
• Track who borrowed your stuff (nice! provided I remember who borrowed what prior to this...)
  
• Print beautiful catalogs (interesting, those I prefer to save on ink ;)
  
• Share your collection online (I'll have to get some friends to try this)
  
• Attention to detail (yes, it looks prefer good, supports custom skins too)
  
• Import existing collection (from a couple of applications, most notably MS Excel)
  
• Extensible & Flexible (claims it is designed to support any collection)

Other stuff not mentioned include a built-in browser for their forums and the ability to edit item details (and reset, based on Amazon) as well as adding your own notes. A feature I found to be very very useful is being able to specify custom actions to items, such as creating a command that automatically fires up a playlist or opens up the PDF of a book. Another thing I like is that I actually like the cheeky tone they used for their website. Nice touch, hehe.

All-in-all, I'm quite impressed. I'm gonna keep it around and catalogue my collection of stuffs using it. I'll probably merge all my other mechanisms for keeping track of stuff into this!

RK Launcher

I found a really neat tool the other day when checking out the desktop modding guide over at Lowyat.net's forum. It's called RK Launcher.

What does it do? Well it shows a very nice looking docking bar at the side of your screen that can be used to hold shortcuts. The good thing about it is that it's fully customisable. It's still in beta and it's already impressive. You can change it's location, the opacity, the size of the bar, the animation smoothness, and the icons. Just drag-and-drop the shortcuts. I'm in the midst of cleaning up my desktop and relocating everything on the bar (and hiding the standing Windows taskbar while I'm at it).

It gets better. You don't need to install it at all. Just drop it anywhere and maybe add a shortcut to the start menu so it starts up automatically. And even better, you can have multiple copies of the program and have two different docks containing different shortcuts!

While searching for more icon sets (very few by default), I found this post, which already manages to explain things I wanted to talk about, and with screenshots to boot, plus providing some links to icons.

Also, RK Launcher can be used to contain docklets as well, as mentioned in the above link. Do a google on Y'z Toolbar and ObjectDock. The docklets (mini-programs) for these applications can be attached to RK Launcher without much problems.