What an ingenious idea for finding information - an extension to firefox in which you press ALT` (right above ALTTAB), and are presented with an overview of your tabs as thumbnails.
Big whoop you say - Every man and his dog is doing this, and Internet Explorer 7 does it better than f0xpose, etc.
The *kick ass* feature which makes this actually usable is the find-in-page search across multiple tabs. For instance, I have 10 tabs open for work, 6 for gmail, blogging, what have you, and 20 billion that I just haven't read. I hit ALT`, and type "Valex", and before you know it... wham! I've got only the tabs which contain "Valex" somewhere presented to me - I can then simply click the one I want.
If TopDesk could do this for all windows that are open, I would pay for it (currently, the only thing stopping me from shelling out dollars to an Aussie company is that they shift the thumbnails about when you close / open windows - so where MSN was a moment ago is now notepad. ICK. Don't fuck with my short term spatial / visual memory)
3 comments:
Hi,
I'm from Otaku Software, the developers of TopDesk. I don't understand what you mean by "shift the thumbnails about". As long as windows stay at the same size and position TopDesk will always tile them at the same place.
If you change size or position then yes, the tiled placement will change (Expose on OS X is exactly the same), but that's the whole point. If it didn't change, you'd eventually end up with an unusable mess of tiled windows. For example, small windows that were originally tiled to a certain spot would have to be squeezed into that same spot as they got larger, eventually becoming unrecognisable. The opposite would happen for large windows that became smaller - there'd end up being a lot of wasted space around them (e.g. they'll move to a different spot).
On the subject of IE7, there's no difference between TopDesks' grid layout mode (most people prefer the spatial layout) and what IE7 does (apart from the search). What *is* different is that the order of the tabs in IE7 rarely changes. Switch the order of the tabs around and you'll get exactly the same behaviour.
Finally, what version of TopDesk did you try? We're currently at 1.4, with v1.4.1 coming out early next week. If you've used 1.4 or a previous version, it'll definitely be worth checking out the suprise new feature in v1.4.1.
Didn't know about the grid layout mode - it wasn't obvious to find; perhaps include that too in the installer options :)
It's in both the online and offline documentation (which, of course, no-one reads), and smack bang in the middle of the options dialog. Maybe not obvious 5 seconds into using the app, but it'll reveal itself upon closer inspection :).
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