Update of the update: Digsby’s Erick Davidson e-mailed me today to let me know you can turn ads off pretty simply: Tools > Preferences > Conversations > Ad Options. Right on, we have a winner.Update: OK, so here’s the catch: Digsby has ads. You get a stream of them at the bottom of your IM message window. While, yeah, I totally get it, I still hate it and find it distracting. So, I’m probably going to stick with Pidgin. (And if I switch back and find out the Pidgin has ads too, well, I just clowned myself.Reflexively, I want the first Toolbox inclusion to be Malwarebytes. It's the one thing, maybe the biggest thing I've acquired free and use all the time and is massively helpful. This was covered, however, in a Hack This column back in the fall. If you're rolling around in the massive manure pile of downloaded anything, it's worth reading.First up: Digsby. Here's the problem: you work on a computer all day and have, perhaps, acquired the unfortunate syndrome of obsessive checking, that stupid compulsive cycling between Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, work Gmail, web mail, and an IM client like Pidgin. Maybe even something else. Flickr? And maybe you even keep them all open at once, dragging down your bot's performance for the sake of whatever you want to call this sub-OCD condition.You could get a Ritalin prescription, sure. Hey, you might already have one. Or hopefully Digsby can help at the very least from a productivity angle in centralizing all of those multiple updates into one little pane.OK, so I installed this on my Windows 7 machine and it went smoothly enough. It'll tell you to invite all your e-mail contacts but, whatever—I said “no” easy enough. You set up an account—username, e-mail, nothing else—and the thing whips you through adding all your various IM and social networking accounts (it’ll ask you for each one again if you want to invite people). I added Gmail, Yahoo, Aol, Facebook, and Twitter. I have no idea what ICQ is and LinkedIn is still online networking's punchline, but you can add both of those too. Neat.What you get is a normal IM window with your other non-chat stuff stacked collapsed underneath. You hover over one and you get a new panel, like this:You move your arrow away and it disappears. That's not irritating at all. What is though is that it has popup notifications, which is the opposite of what I want from something like this. Under ‘preferences’ and, then, ‘notifications’ is the check-box to turn them off.Versus Pidgin? Well, it looks exactly the same really, but with a boatload more functionality—including video chat. That said, I've been rolling with Digsby for all of
a half-hour, so I'm not uninstalling Pidgin yet. But so far so good.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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Hey sailor, welcome to Toolbox. This is the place where Motherboard'll be telling you every week about this or that bit of software that you really need to have on your computer or phone-computer now. Requirements for something to be in our toolbox: 1) It is actually useful, like in the sense that you might turn to it on a regular basis and for hopefully more than one task, 2) It is free, or really, really exceptionally cheap (or cheap relative to function, like a smuggled tethering app), and 3) it is useful to most people, relatively speaking. Please send you suggestions to michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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a half-hour, so I'm not uninstalling Pidgin yet. But so far so good.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.