It turned out to be easier than I thought it was going to be.

If you would like to do the same, begin by creating a new shortcut to the folder.

Right Click on your new shortcut and choose properties

What we need to do now is change this from a plain old folder link into a shortcut that invokes an application. Specifically, Windows Explorer.

In the “Target” section

Add “%windir%\explorer.exe ” to the very beginning, without the quotes and with the single space at the end. Then remove the quotes around the target folder, so it looks like this:

For non techy types, the %windir% is what is called a path. It was set up automatically when you installed Windows 7 and just directs to where Windows is installed, which is generally C:\Windows, but not always.

In the “Start in” section, add the “%windir%” (no quotes) path again. Your final product should look something like this:

If you would like to make the icon for the shortcut be something different, click on change icon and change it to whatever you want.

Click on ok, then right click on the folder again and choose “Pin to Task Bar.”

You should now have a nice, new shortcut to the folder that is not stacked inside the existing Explorer shortcut.

Now if only I could figure out how to make the contents appear like a Stack on OS X.

So, for my tweep @KellyCDB, who has tried Quicksilver twice but found it lacking, I am going to hopefully convince her otherwise with some really slick things you can do.

For starters, Quicksilver is an application launcher. It is a nice way to keep your dock uncluttered (I am still guilty of this, but such is life). Simply press Ctrl+Space to open it and start typing in the name of the application you want to launch:

A nice little drop down will appear where you can can use your arrow keys to scroll down and select the application you want to launch if it doesn’t show up in the main Quicksilver window. Just press enter when you find it. Of course, if you want to do something other than open, you can press Tab to move to the second pane of the Quicksilver window and choose other options:

If this were all Quicksilver could do for you, you might wonder what the point is when you can do a lot of the same stuff with Spotlight. Where Quicksilver really starts to shine in in the plugins:

Let’s say you want to send an email to one of your contacts. Install the Apple Address Book plugin, open up Quicksilver, and start typing in the name of your contact. Once you select it in the first pane, tab to the second pane and select compose email. Apple Mail will open and a new email will start for that contact:

Pretty basic and something fairly simple, but wait, there’s more. This one is one of my favorites. I use Screen Capture all the time to get image captures when I am at work. A lot of the time, it is easier to show someone a picture than to try to describe the problem to them. Quicksilver has some pretty slick things you can do with Screen Capture. Make sure you have the Screen Capture plugin installed first, then open Quicksilver and start typing in Capture:

We are going to do this with Capture Region, select it, press enter, and you will get your cursor for selecting the region. Click to capture and you will immediately be taken right by to Quicksilver with more options for what you can do with you screen cap you just took:

These are just a few of the items I like to use best, but here are some links to other ways you can use Quicksilver:
Quicksilver: From A Better OS X To Even More – Dan Dickinson: The Primary Vivid Weblog

Quicksilver – A Better OS X In Just 10 Minutes – Dan Dickinson: The Primary Vivid Weblog

Another Quicksilver Tutorial: Gold Trigger – Dan Dickinson: The Primary Vivid Weblog

Hack Attack: The Quicksilver video extravaganza – Application Launcher – Lifehacker

Screenshot Tour: A look under the hood of Quicksilver – Feature – Lifehacker

Hack Attack: Advanced Quicksilver guide – slashes, appends, and proxies, oh my! – Application Launcher – Lifehacker

How to install Linux applications in OS X – a complete walkthrough – Simple Help – The bottom of this article tells you how you can launch those applications with Quicksilver.

There are many more tutorials and articles floating around for advanced ways to use Quicksilver. It is just one of those things I don’t know how I could live without.

And just as an addendum, I used Quicksilver to resize all 4 of the full screen captures I took at the exact same time. Yay for Quicksilver.

A while ago, I purchased a Mac. I love my Mac. It beats the crap out of any Windows computer I have ever owned. I do have one problem, though, and it deals with Entourage and VPN, which may actually be something I could just blame on Microsoft.

At work, we are still using the dinosaur Exchange 2000 for our email. We have a “new” server sitting around, and when I say new I mean hardly even used because we have had it for almost a year and a half, bur out network administrator has yet to get it totally up and running. Part of the problem is his decision to move from the old 32 bit architecture to the 64 bit and the ensuing problems with upgrading from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2007. Some day I am sure he will finally get it up and running (and he damn well better before Snow Leopard comes out in September with integrated Exchange 2007 support in Apple Mail!) but, much like what was said at the end of Conan the Barbarian, that is a story for another day. Because of this, my options are currently very limited with regards to email clients.

I could use Apple Mail or Thunderbird, but neither one of them has MAPI support, so I would be without my calendar and contacts being updated on my Blackberry. This leaves me with Entourage.

Overall, I do like Entourage. It reminds me a good deal of Outlook, only without some of the bloated crap in that particular PIM (does anyone actually use the journal?). My main gripe deals with trying to connect to our Exchange server when I am away from the office.

Entourage has built in support for OWA. One would think that, since we have OWA access, I should be able to easily connect to the server and be done without. Unfortunately, this is not the case. I get the feeling that forms login is all that is supported, and we, unfortunately, are still using pop up login. Maybe, in the near future, this could be fixed with our upgrade, but like I said, when that happens I am switching to Apple Mail.

The only other option available is to connect to the network at work via VPN and access the Exchange server that way. While this sounds good in theory, I have found that it does not work very well in practice. For some reason, when I start the VPN tunnel, Entourage refuses to connect. Every other email account works without any issues what so ever, but for some reason it refuses to find our Exchange server.

I have tried using the IP address, using the server name, using the fully qualified server name with the domain, and I get nothing. It feels almost like I picked the box on Wheel of Fish and Kuni just yelled, “Nothing! Absolutely Nothing!! STUPID!!! YOU SO STUUPPIIIDDD!!!!”

Hopefully, someone who actually knows what my problem is will stumble across this soon and perhaps, if I am truly lucky, give me some ideas about what may be causing Entourage to not like my VPN tunnel. Perhaps I have set something up that won’t allow it to connect? Maybe Entourage just hates VPN tunnels? I definitely have run out of ideas.