See Through Windows
Version 1.0.5 (August 3, 2011)
Recently, I discovered a neat feature in Visual Studio .NET
2008: when an Intellisense popup is visible, it usually obscures
some part of your code. To see what's hidden underneath the popup
window, press the Control key. This will make the
popup transparent until you release the Control key - simply
brilliant, and brilliantly simple.
Why can't I have that in Windows as well? And how hard can it be
to write a little task bar application to make that work? The
answer is: not very - primarily thanks to the .NET Framework. It
took me all of two hours to get a basic functioning task bar app
that makes the foreground window transparent when you press a
hotkey, and turns it back to opaque when you press the hotkey
again. Of course, making the transparency level and the hotkey
configurable, creating an icon for the application, and adding an
installer took me the rest of the day, but here it is: See
Through Windows. (Source is on CodePlex!)
When you run See Through Windows, all you get is an icon in the
System Tray that looks like blueish sunglasses:
The See Through Windows Icon
Double-clicking on that brings up the Options window:
The See Through Windows options window
Here's where you configure the hotkey and the level of
transparency to use. Check the Preview check box to see
the effect of the transparency setting.
Good ideas from Windows 7
Better well stolen than badly invented, they always say. Well:
as of version 1.0.2, See Through Windows implements an idea I stole
from the Windows 7 beta. Windows+Up and
Windows+Down (i.e. the Windows key in combination with the
up and down arrow keys) maximize and minimize the current window.
(Update: To avoid conflicts with Windows 7 itself,
See Through Windows 1.0.3 now uses
Control+Windows+Up/Down/Left/Right) Try it and you'll
love it. Also, if you use multiple monitors, you'll wonder how you
ever got along without Windows+Left and
Windows+Right, which move the current window over to the
next (or previous) monitor.
If you experience problems with the use of these keys (for
instance, if they conflict with another application, you can
disable them by unchecking the appropriate check boxes in the
Options window.
Proof
Pressing the hotkey (Shift+Control+Z by default, which
is really easy to press) will turn the foreground window
transparent. Here's the proof - an Explorer window on top of
Outlook:
Before...
Now press the hotkey:
And after!
Press the hotkey again to go back to the way things were.
Incidentally: you don't have to do that: you can
'transparenticize' as many windows as you like, and turn them
opaque again in any order you like - or not. When exiting, See
Through Windows will change all windows back the way they
were.
While this is somewhat of a useless example, you could use
See Through Windows to keep an eye on some running task,
whose status is obscured by the window in front of it, or have a
quick look at the web page you're writing about, etc. I find myself
using it all the time, anyway.
Notes
The installer will put a shortcut to See Through Windows in your
startup folder, making it run every time you log on. However, it
won't run See Through Windows right after you install it, so you
have to start it manually the first time. You can do that using the
shortcut in the Programs menu.
I owe thanks to Max
Bolingbroke, who
published a class on his weblog to support global hotkeys in
.NET. I used his code unchanged and that saved me a lot of
time.
See Through Windows works under Windows XP, Vista, and 7, even
using the Aero interface!
Updates
To update, just install the latest version, but make sure See
Through Windows is not running when you do. Right-click on the tray
icon, and select Exit before updating. You can then re-start See
Through Windows using the Programs menu.
Version 1.0.0 prevented Windows from logging users off nicely
[dumb, dumb]. Also, in 1.0.1, starting a second instance of See
Through Windows displays a message box and prevents the second
instance from settling into the system tray.
Version 1.0.2 adds support for Windows+Up/Down/Left/Right.
Version 1.0.3 adds the Control key to the Windows hotkeys of
1.0.2.
Version 1.0.5 adds the option to make windows 'Click-Through'
and/or keep them on top of all other windows.
Download SeeThroughWindows
Download SeeThroughWindows 1.0.5 (August 3, 2011) from CodePlex
Now available as both 32-bit and 64-bit installers.
Comments? Bugs? Suggestions? Feature requests? Let us know!