Thursday, February 15, 2007

Taskbar Shuffle

The Windows Taskbar has always annoyed me. I always thought Windows 3.1 had it right. (Don't get me started on helping Grandma find the documents she saved to the desktop rather than My Documents)

My biggest issues with the Taskbar are:
  • I like to have my "tasks" in a particular order. I have, in fact, closed all my other programs and re-opened them just to return them to the proper order on the Taskbar.
  • I like related tasks to be grouped together. Especially multiple windows from the same application.
  • If I accidentally close a program I don't want it to re-open at the end of the task list. I want it to be where it was. Outlook always goes first, if it's suddenly last it takes me ages to find it.
So, Microsoft finally made some improvements in Windows XP with their Task Grouping settings but it still doesn't really cut it.

You can only imagine how happy I was when I found Taskbar Shuffle. It does one wonderful thing. It lets me click and drag the tasks allowing me to re-order them any way I want! So what if it did a funny inverted colors thing.

The 2.0 version was recently released and things are only better. It looks a lot better for one thing. And it has a new grouping features that group new windows from the same application (I mean you Internet Explorer) together. This isn't the "collapse into a single task" grouping. It's just keeping the tasks next to one another.

So, I highly highly recommend this great little utility!

(no, I'm not advertising or have any monetary interest in Taskbar Shuffle. A great app just deserves high praise!)
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3 comments:

  1. Unknown11:26 PM

    hi, i'm quite a newbie at programming and found your blog to be very helpful! i was wondering, do you post your example code under any particular license, if i want to incorporate it into my work?

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  2. Jake10:56 AM

    Just to be clear, since this thread is off-topic; I did not create Taskbar Shuffle.

    On to licenses:

    I'm not real familiar software licenses. However, unless otherwise noted, or if another license is already in place, all my work is licensed as follows:

    Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

    Unless someone can convince me that a different license would be better.

    So, all the SWFUpload code is covered by the same license as the original SWFUpload (which, I believe, is the MIT license).

    Thanks for helping to clarify the issue.

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  3. Unknown11:11 AM

    Thanks for the quick response!
    The CC-by license says that I must credit you in the manner you specify. In terms of source code, then, do you have a author header that I need to stick somewhere? Or how else should I attribute the work?

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