My shocking day job revelation: I write enterprise Java software using Windows. There, my secret shame is finally out.
Now that’s off my chest I have something to confess about Windows 7: Microsoft must be doing something right because I hate it considerably less than any other version of Windows. For example, it might have taken it eight years to bring the draggable reorder feature from OS X 10.0’s Dock into the Windows Taskbar, but they got there in the end and I’m a happier user for it.
One of the things I quite like is Aero Peek. Suppose you are juggling three PowerPoint presentations because you are a SRS BSNS enterprise user so obviously you’re not doing anything fun. You move your cursor down to the PowerPoint icon in the taskbar and three medium sized thumbnail icons pop up, each showing the current window contents of the three PowerPoint windows you have open. This visual cue makes task switching more efficient. It sounds small but it’s quite a neat little time saver.
Sadly OS X doesn’t have anything like this. We’ve previously covered using Exposé in the Application Switcher, but it’s clunky. Wouldn’t thumbnails in the Dock be a nice addition to OS X? I certainly think so, and it seems Christian Baumgart agrees with me because he’s written free-in-beta utility HyperDock to do just that. You can see how it works in the screenshot above: in this case, I moved my mouse over to the Firefox icon, and it presented me with previews of the three browser windows I had open.
But that’s not all it does — check out some more of HyperDock’s features on the next page.
TUAWHyperDock puts some Win7 in your OS X Dock originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 26 Sep 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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