If you've got a mammoth widescreen monitor on your desk and you're a Windows user, you may be wondering what to do with all the extra real estate you've got. Why not use it to visually manage your running applications?Microsoft Scalable Fabric takes your monitor periphery and turns it into a tumbnail gallery of your non-active windows. After installing the app (which requires the .Net 1.1 framework), the middle of your desktop becomes a hot zone. It's totally customizable, so you can stretch the boundary lines as far to the edges as you like to prevent accidental resizing.
Drag a window out of the zone, and it will shrink, getting smaller as you drag it farther away from the boundary line. Drag it back, and it returns to its restore size. It's even smart enough to remember the position you drag your windows to - click a taskbar button to minimize, and it'll shrink back to it's thumbnailed home.
Oh yeah, there's a little more eye candy inside: minimize and maximizing are animated, albeit somewhat poorly. It's a good way for anyone who heavily multitasks to keep their arsenal of applications at the ready.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-17-2008 @ 11:56AM
John said...
Does that mean you need to have .net 1.1 specifically? I have 3.5 but it doesn't want to know.
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7-17-2008 @ 12:29PM
Lee Mathews said...
I have mixed luck with .Net...Try with 3.5 only, if it doesn't work, go grab 1.1!
7-17-2008 @ 1:30PM
Stephen said...
This has been out for years. Nothing seems to have changed.
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7-17-2008 @ 2:11PM
Robert said...
August 2005?? I thought I'd seen this before... Wonder why they just found out about it?
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7-17-2008 @ 2:17PM
Lee Mathews said...
Is it wrong that we want to share an older app? It's still slick, and there are a lot of people that don't know about it. Just because an app is older, doesn't mean it's bad. Vista vs. XP, anyone?
7-17-2008 @ 6:48PM
chris joseph said...
If more people start using it, they might have some incentive to develop it further, too. It looked like it might be nice to have, so downloaded it to my work PC this afternoon