Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity
Afloat teaches your Mac's windows some new tricks
by Jay Hathaway Nov 1st 2009 at 12:00PM
Afloat is a handy little plugin for your Mac that gives you more control over all the windows you've got open. Once installed, Afloat adds some new options to the Window menu in most applications, allowing you to do some neat tricks. Here's a rundown of the options, which almost all have keyboard shortcuts:The keep afloat command assigns a window to stay on top of all others. Alternatively, you can pin windows to the bottom of the stack, at desktop level. Window transparency is adjustable using either a slider or keyboard shortcuts. Afloat allows moving and resizing from any part of a window if you hold down cmd+ctrl - just grab an edge to resize, or drag from anywhere to move.
If you use Spaces, you can use Afloat to make a window appear across all Spaces, so you won't lose it when you switch. There's also a neat overlay feature that makes your window transparent and unclickable, so you can use it as a guide while you work with whatever's underneath - I can think of some fun design applications for that one. Afloat also has a hotkey to locate the file associated with the current window, which is something the OS X Finder could probably use as a standard feature.
It's not that Afloat adds essential functionality to the OS. In fact, it's probably overkill for most people, but just about every Mac user should be able to find one feature to like in this handy little plugin.
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)
blogward said 6:45PM on 11-01-2009
But does it allow you to roll windows up? Removing that function in Leopard was surely a Microsoft moment.
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Information Central said 4:24AM on 11-02-2009
"Afloat allows moving and resizing from any part of a window if you hold down cmd+ctrl - just grab an edge to resize"
It deserves credit for trying to address the most idiotic defect in the Mac UI, but TWO modifier keys? Lame.
Apple, just fix this shit. Two decades later, and your window management still sucks ass.
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