Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Open Source
Vitrite: Lightweight window transparency for Windows
by Jordan Running Apr 26th 2006 at 10:45AM
There's a
lot of apps out there that will let you control your windows' levels of transparency in, er, Windows. Vitrite's snappy tagline is "useless window
transparency since 2002," and it does two things: Lets you change a window's transparency by holding Ctrl and
pressing the number keys, and toggle the "Always on Top" mode with another keypress. What's it have to
recommend it over other such apps? Well, not a lot, really, but it is lightweight (a 43kb download) and open source,
which are two things we're big fans of here at Download Squad.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
tyler said 12:00PM on 4-26-2006
I like this much better than Froost. More stable and the hotkeys are "key".
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matt said 12:23PM on 4-26-2006
At least they're honest - most useless graphical "feature" everrrrr
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brian said 2:39AM on 4-27-2006
So it says no CMD.EXE transparency... what are you using in the screenshot?
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Lo Schiaccianoci said 8:59AM on 4-28-2006
Brian the window shown in the screenshot is not CMD.EXE it's PUTTY.EXE!!!
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William C Bonner said 1:48PM on 4-30-2006
One of the things I liked about Vitrite is that it is distributed with source code, so I could look at what they were doing, to see how much overhead the pogram might add. I don't want it on my laptop that doens't have enough ram as it is, but knowing the proper API calls to implement transparency is a good thing in windows programming in general, and not obvious in the windows help system.
It turns out that the program uses very little overhead, and simply sends a windows message that converts the windows transparency bit. The overhead all comes in the windows video driver at render time, so it's not really measurable.
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