That’s what the free portable software PointerStick does. It adds a presentation stick to the mouse cursor. While you still see the default mouse cursor on the screen, a stick is added to it that points to its location.

The stick itself is huge in comparison making mouse movements and cursor positions easily identifiable even from afar on on smaller screens.

PointerStick comes with a set of options. Non-German speaking users should click on the LNG link first to switch to English as the interface language.

Both the site of the pointing stick and the transparency can be configured with sliders in the interface. The default size is set to 512 pixels which can be changed to a value between 64 and 1024 pixels. It is furthermore possible to change the transparency of the mouse pointer with a slider.

The program ships with several pointer stick textures, including gold, silver or red. This can make sense depending on the screen background.

Several shortcuts to hide or display the stick are enabled by default. A triple click with the left mouse button hides or shows it, as do the keyboard combinations Ctrl-Alt-Y and Ctrl-Alt-Z and a right-click on the program’s system tray icon.

Windows users can download the portable software PointerStick from the developer website. The program is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

When you are doing presentations, what are your tools of the trade?

That’s where Pointofix comes into play. The portable software program provides access to onscreen tools that can aid during presentations. It will display a small always on top window with a start button. A click on that button will display the controls of the presentation software that can be used to paint various forms, symbols and colors on the screen.

The program should work with every software program as long as it is not been started in full screen (games for example are not working but a maximized Internet Explorer window is). Available onscreen presentation tools include drawing arrows, lines, rectangles and other objects on the screen. It is furthermore possible to add checkmarks and text, change the color of the onscreen items and magnify or zoom to highlight key areas further.

Pointofix is a German software. International users need to download the language pack that is offered on the website of the developers. This language pack will change the interface language from German to other languages such as English, French, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Polish, Dutch, Hungarian or Swedish. All that needs to be done is to rename the desired language file to pointofix_translation.ini and move it into the directory of the presentation software.

Pointofix is compatible with most Windows operating system. The software is also provided with an installer for users who prefer to install their software programs.

The program will automatically display all available and supported audio and video devices during first run. To start a video conference users need to be selected from the address book. The first step after installation of the software is therefor to add users to the address book. The username that was registered at the iVisit website needs to be added to add the user to the software program.

It is then possible to call or send messages to users that have been added to the address book. The sharing tools can be used to share documents with another user. It is for instance possible to share documents, presentations, applications, web browsers and even the whole desktop.

Presentation Sharing

Web Browser Sharing

The software is available for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh computers. A mobile version is also available for Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional. Interested users can download the video conferencing and collaboration software at the iVisit website.

Impressive is a presentation software that provides the same presentation techniques that are known from PowerPoint with the difference that it can apply those to pdf documents and images. It offers links, overviews, page transition effects, highlights, spotlights and a sheet by sheet mode that can be controlled manually with the mouse buttons or automatically.

The portable software will extract a number of different files to the local computer system. Presentations can be started by dragging and dropping files onto the impressive.exe file in the program folder or by launching the tool from the command line. The basic command would be impressive file.pdf. More than a dozen command line parameters are available that can be used to control most aspects of the presentation software. Parameters exist to start the presentation in a custom resolution, a specific display ratio, to automatically flip pages after x seconds or to display a progress bar.

The primary application for this software is presentations. It can however be useful as a pdf reader as well especially for users who prefer to read page by page without scrolling.

There has not been any progress in development for the last six months which could mean that the project was temporarily or permanently halted. It does however work fine in its current stage but could use some usability additions like a graphical user interface to make things easier for the user.

The presenter console displays the current slide, a smaller preview of the upcoming slide and a tool bar with navigational buttons and the current and elapsed time. There are additional options to display the notes of the current slide and view a slide overview which is also excellent for quick navigation.

The presenter console will automatically detect if more than one screen is available. Sun’s presenter console is able to detect the screen that is used for the presentation and will automatically display itself on the other display.

The computer whiteboard software is unfortunately only available in German which should not be a huge problem as it is completely icon driven. The toolbar looks similar to image editor toolbars and should not pose a problem for none German speaking users.

The software will display a small window with a Start button after launch. Pressing the start button will activate the whiteboard mode on the computer. The computer screen is a full whiteboard from that moment on until the user presses the Fertig (Done) button.

The computer whiteboard software works flawlessly without lags or visual problems. It is compatible with Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Eric Wong who already contributed quite a few applications mentioned his software program Windows Extractor which can be used to easily extract controls, elements and windows from the parent application and provide access to them in their own window which can either be displayed in fullscreen right away or the default size which allows for resizing and moving the extracted window contents.

Windows Extractor offers some interesting applications. It is for instance possible to extract videos out of websites and play them in their own window. Even more interesting is the option to move windows and controls out of applications.

Imagine extracting a window out of an image editor like Adobe Photoshop or software development application like Visual Studio and moving that window to a second monitor screen.

Working with Windows Extractor has been designed to be as simple as possible. The application uses two hotkeys to extract windows at mouse position and restore the extracted window back into its original interface. The F10 key extracts the window at mouse position while F11 restores its position. The hotkeys can be changed in the program interface.

Two sizing modes are available: Full Screen and Windowed. Full Screen mode will show the extracted window in fullscreen while the windowed mode allows for resizing and moving. It can happen that the program crashes if a Window cannot cope with the extraction.

Windows Extractor requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 or higher and compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows XP and windows Vista. The Source Code is provided on the homepage of the software program as well.