As a former high school teacher I have had my share of T-shirt designing responsibilities. Usually you choose some premade graphics, insert your specific text and colors and have the shirts made. Or, you make your own really cool design and pay a lot extra for it to be created.

Design Studio from Sonic Shack makes things a bit more interesting. It's a bit like CafePress but on your desktop and more fun in my opinion. You can upload your own photos or designs (JPG, PNG and GIF files), and add text and clip art from the stock library. There is even an entire category for skulls in the symbols section of the library.

There are also a lot of font choices and options to rotate and flip images to make things more interesting. To use the free version and save your design you have to enter your email address and a password and name the design.

It's nice to have this in a desktop application. It speeds the upload times if you are taking things directly from your own drives and you can use it without worrying about it the web is going to be slow that day. I found it relatively intuitive to use so there was no learning curve.

You can print shirts for as little as $18.50 each, which, for a totally customized, one of a kind shirt is not too bad. You can also add the Sonic Plug-in to your website and sell custom shirts and make a profit as well.

If you spend any amount of time moving files around using Windows Explorer, the repetitive clicking can get tiresome. Folder Guide is a context menu enhancement that speeds your navigation: add a folder to your Guide, and accessing it is a two-click operation from any explorer window or file dialog box.

Adding a folder to Folder Guide can be done two ways. Launch the main program, click the add button, set up an alias, and browse for your path. Oddly, the developers chose to use the explore view which means there's no access to the right-click shortcuts you've already created to make navigating easier.

The easier - and more logical way - is to simply browse for your folder and right-click it. Choose add to folder guide, and you're done. You won't be prompted for an alias, so to edit the default name you'll need to use the application itself.

Snce Folder Guide works with file dialogs it's available just about everywhere you want to make directory browsing faster: attaching files in GMail, selecting a save location for a screen capture, you name it.

Folder Guide is freeware, and Windows only, of course. No mention is made on the site of Vista or 64-bit compatibility.