Toolfish Utility Suite 2.05

Overview

Toolfish Utility Suite is a utility that runs from the system tray offering numerous little features that can help the user save time when using their computer each day.

A site monitor can check the uptime on a web site, email server or communications port and alert the user by email, audio notice, opening a program and raising a pop-up when one of these services goes down.

The web compare feature can check web pages for meaningful updates to their page and when discovered, the user can be notified with the percent that the page has changed. The fuzzy logic used can help to identify pages that have only been slightly modified versus ones that have genuine new content to view.

The email announcer can check local and POP3 email accounts for new email and alert the user when a new email arrives.

The talking reminder features is interesting as it can remind the user about an event by speaking about it.

Other applications can be controlled by sending keystrokes over to a given application, close the app down, and more.

Multi-threaded performance is included on supporting processors in order to speed up performance. Unicode is fully supported for special characters and foreign language support.

Installation

The installation completed without any issues.

There was no malicious software included with the setup program.

Toolfish Utility Suite requires Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP.

Interface

The interface has large toolbar icons that keep with the fish theme. There are toolbar icons for Event Manager, Event Wizard, Keyboard Spy, Suggest a feature, Smart Mute, and Options.

The main readout can have a long list of informational statements and alerts in a red color when needing to get the attention of the user. However, it could potentially take a while to read all the messages as they fly by which makes the user less efficient than they might otherwise be.

Pros

• Useful multi-purpose utility based in the system tray
• Attractive interface with large toolbars and informative readout of messages to the user
• Site monitor to check web site, email server and communications ports.
• Web compare to check if a web page has been significantly updated recently
• Email announcer for local and PO3 email
• Talking reminder for major events
• Send keystroke and actions to other programs
• Multi-threaded performance enhancements
• Unicode support
• 14 day trial period

Cons

• Readout that updates with many new messages which could actually be a distraction rather than a net benefit.
• Would normally expect to see this as a free app, not with a 14 day trial.

Conclusion

Toolfish Utility Suite is a nice little utility that sits in the system tray. It has some useful features like a web site uptime checker, talking reminder, web site update check, and more. The readout with notices can get cluttered quickly though.