Yesterday, a friend told me about TopDesk by Otaku Software. I downloaded the trial version, installed it and messed around with it a little. If you haven't seen this yet, it's pretty cool. What is it? According to their
website: "
Find windows, fast. TopDesk is a quick and easy way to switch between applications. With a single key press, you can instantly view thumbnails of all open windows, display thumbnails of windows belonging to the current application, or hide all windows to quickly access the desktop." Basically, it's a replacement for ALT-TAB in Windows.
Immediately, I starting thinking of how to code something like this. At first thought, I believe I'd need:
1. An application running in the background t
- Capture windows and cache them for quick display
- Intercept the ALT-TAB keystroke combination
- Display the open windows (tiled, cascaded, spatial)
- Allow tabbing across windows or use of mouse
2. A SysTray icon to a setup window t
- Makes changing options easy
- Make enabling/disabling the application easy
3. A registry setting to load the application upon Windows start up.
So today, I'm starting to work on recreating this in C#. Stay tuned for periodic updates and email me if you have any suggestions or questions.
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