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Loading Zone November 2006 • Vol.6 Issue 11 Page(s) 77 in print issue |
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ActualTools Actual Window Manager 4.1 |
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Actual Window Manager 4.0 $39.95 ActualTools www.actualtools.com CPU Rating: 3  Actual Window Manager isn’t imperative to own. In fact, you’ll carry on just fine never having used it. Still, download and pop it open and you’ll find yourself immersed in all it offers, which essentially is tools for managing, manipulating, and automating how your windows function. Other apps do a lot of what AWM does, but arguably not to the same extent. As AWM’s thorough Help guide explains, you can apply rules universally to windows, to specific ones, and exclude others entirely. Once installed, buttons that appear next to a window’s standard Maximize, Minimize, and Close buttons let you resize and roll up windows. This last space-saving option coolly leaves only a window’s title bar behind until you unroll the window again. Other buttons turn a window transparent, force it to align to a precise location, and keep it on top of others. AWM’s real draw is how much you can tweak these actions. For example, I set Outlook to roll up when inactive but also set a delay before it did so. I also set Firefox’s window to turn transparent at a certain transparency level, prevented Firefox from closing accidentally, adjusted pixel by pixel the position for it to open on the Desktop at startup, Ghosted it so I could view it but pass the mouse cursor through it to click a background window, forced it to minimize to the System Tray rather than Taskbar, and more. There are more than 40 of these tweaks. Applying them to windows won’t make you dramatically more productive, but it does eliminate many annoyances associated with working with multiple windows at once. New to this version is multiple-monitor support, which, for example, lets you open a window automatically on the second monitor in a precise location rather than dragging it there. You can also configure the window’s size to match the resolution of the monitor you’re sending it to. AWM is a tiny 3.36MB download, and it has a free, 60-day trial. Use the trial first to decide if you’re the type of multitasking user whom AWM will benefit before paying the somewhat-steep $39.95 price.  by Blaine Flamig
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