Pin minimized windows to desktop thumbnails with miniMIZE

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Freeware

Pin minimized windows to desktop thumbnails with miniMIZE

by Lee Mathews Nov 17th 2008

I'm always on the lookout for a good application to utilize the extra space on my widescreen monitor, and this morning I happened upon miniMIZE.

It's a free app for Windows that monitors the applications you launch. When you minimize a window, miniMIZE removes the button from your taskbar and creates a thumbnail. It's easy on system resources, only consuming about 7mb of memory.

Thumbnails can be dragged anywhere on your desktop, or you can let miniMIZE automatically line them up along any edge of your desktop. You can also choose to pin icons to the desktop or have them float on top of active windows.

Further tweaks include thumbnail size, opacity, customizable hotkeys, and application icon overlays. Any applications you don't want handled by miniMIZE can be added to an exclusions list - just drag the crosshairs onto the appropriate program.

It's similar to ThumbWin, which Brad wrote about last year, but the site and application are both English.

Note that miniMIZE will only catch things after it's running - so you'll have to close and re-open your other apps after installing it for things to take effect.

Tags: desktop, enhancement, minimize, thumbnails

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Jake said 11:03AM on 11-17-2008

Abandonware; has not been updated from 1.0.37 beta for 2.5 years. This is a comment not so much on the specific app as the category of apps far beyond maintenance.

Lee Mathews said 11:05AM on 11-17-2008

Regardless of when development stopped, it works just fine. Check it out!

Generic said 11:53AM on 11-17-2008

Sounds fun but I have to try it to know what it is like (downloading).

Killer said 9:23PM on 12-08-2008

I'm using Vista Rainbar. Here's the link:
http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=17627

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