MoonDriver for Windows

We're suckers for cool little utilities that more or less do one useful thing very well. MoonDriver is one of those programs. It places an image of the moon in its current phase on your desktop. That's it, pretty much, but it's much more useful to have than you might think at first. The moon influences many aspects of nature and our daily lives, everything from ocean tides to biorhythms, but understanding the lunar phases is worthwhile in and of itself.

MoonDriver places an icon in the System Tray; right-clicking it calls up the program's properties, which allow you to resize the moon, select always on top, and make other common adjustments. We liked the Upcoming Phases feature, which displays the next four phases and their dates. Down Under users can select Southern Hemisphere, and Daylight Moon displays Luna as she appears in the day sky. You can add a red, blue, or yellow tint, but cheese lovers will be disappointed to learn that there is no green.

Human survival once depended on an intimate knowledge of lunar phases, but, love songs excepted, modern life has moved us away from the moon. Such lunacy is easily remedied, though, by downloading MoonDriver. Going outside and looking up at the moon helps, but MoonDriver informs you even when it's cloudy, and using it will help you understand what you see when you do go out under the moon. It's free to try but, at $8, it doesn't cost the moon, either.