Desktop has been the core to Windows, therefore Microsoft has never stopped working on adding more features to it to improve the user experience on desktop. Features like Window Snapping, Peaking, 3D Window Flipping, and Taskbar are absolutely not only useful but beautiful as well. But, it still feels like that there are much more Windows can learn and steal from other operating systems or even some of amazing 3rd party add-on programs, such as Fences, or like the one I am going to present.
BetterDesktopTool is a nice neat 3rd party desktop enhancement program that brings a Mac like Expose and Spaces feature to Windows with bonus features like Virtual Desktops,multi-monitor support, and very customizable hotkey and mouse button assignments. It works on recent versions of Windows from Vista SP2 and above with support of both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. It also requires .Net Framework 4.0 and Aero Glass feature turned on. The best part, it’s free, though only for personal use. You will have to buy the licenses if you are intent to use in a business environment.
The first thing you will do after you have it installed on your computer is to configure the keyboard shortcuts. I won’t suggest assigning the mouse buttons to it since most of us only have 3 buttons on our mouse to work with. I will also not recommend setting up hot corners for this program on a Windows 8 machine, since these corners has been quite busy there.
You have 5 things to set the keyboard shortcuts for:
- show all windows
- show foreground app windows, aka the active window
- show desktop, same as Win+D, the peak bar at the rightmost on your taskbar.
- show non-minimized windows
- show minimized windows
Obviously, the Show All Windows, Show Non-Minimized Windows, and Show Minimized Windows are the ones you will definitely love to use.
Want to see more how it works exactly? Let’s take look this video demo:
Verdict
When I first saw this tool, I was so impressed, to be honest. It’s that video demo that caught my attention and attracted me to download and install this tool, which successfully lured me to write this post. So, it could happen the same to you. Just look through the video and see if it’s interesting enough.