Skip to Content

Submit your nominations for the Luxist Awards' Best in Decor
AOL Tech

transparency posts

Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity

Afloat teaches your Mac's windows some new tricks

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.

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Social Software

Digsby responds to claims of shady money-making tactics


Digsby is probably one of the best instant messaging/social networking applications I've ever used. I'll go ahead and put that bias on my sleeve. Not only does the application let you chat with contacts on AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, and Windows Live and Yahoo! Messengers, but it also acts as an email notifier and provides you with updates (and the ability to update your status) on social networks Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn.

But the company behind Digsby has done a few things to annoy users over the past half year or so. The most noticeable change is the installer. It's not unusual to install an application and see an offer to install a browser toolbar or other third party app. But in order to install Digsby for the first time, you have to click through "offers" to install about half a dozen different applications.

I was willing to put up with that, because it's a non-issue once you've installed the software, and hey, Digsby needs to make money, right? But yesterday, Lifehacker shone the light on a much shadier tactic: Hidden away deep in the licensing agreement is a line letting users know that Digsby will use your spare computer cycles to solve distributed computing problems. We first noted this issue back in November, but since it's making the rounds today (CNET's Download.com lowered the ratings score for Digsby as a response), let's take a closer look.

Distributed computing software allows hundreds or thousands of computers to work together to solve problems like finding cures for cancer or search for intelligent life in the universe. In Digsby's case, some of the problems may involve analyzing the stock market, searching the web, and other activities that can help Digsby make money.

Read more →

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

FastAero adds Vista-like transparency to Windows XP

Fast Aero
FastAero is a Windows XP utility that adds a transparency effect to some program windows. The effect is similar to one of the components of the Aero Glass interface on Windows Vista: You can see through borders of some programs and more easily see what's going on behind the program window.

The utility is an executable file, which means you can unzip the program and run it without installing anything to your system. You can also decide whether to add a blur effect that partially obscures what's going on behind your window. If you disable this feature, you get a nice crisp clear, and somewhat blue look at what's behind window number 1.

The default language for FastAero is Polish, but you can change it to English by opening the config.ini file in a text editor and changing "polish" to "english."

I've never found these sorts of transparency effects to be particularly useful. There are other elements of Aero Glass that I'd much rather have on Windows XP, like the ability to see previews of running programs when you scroll your mouse over taskbar icons. For that, there's Visual ToolTip, which provides some, but not all of the functionality of that Aero Glass feature.

[via gHacks]

Filed under: Windows, Freeware

Shell Enhancer's Got Your Hotkeys and a Whole Lot More


One of our beefs with Windows is that there are some pretty obvious customization options missing. Little things, but things we'd use if they were there. Fortunately, NuonSoft's Shell Enhancer packs a bunch of these features into a single 2.5MB installer.

What can it do? For starters, it allows you to "roll-up" windows (display only the title bar), make any window transparent, minimize applications to the system tray, lock them in position, and even force them remain on top.

It doesn't stop there, however. Also included is a wicked hotkey manager; we particularly like the prepacked "Google selected words." Highlight some text in any window, press ctrl + alt +g, and Internet Explorer will open with your results (you can easily rework it to use Firefox, of course). There's also a thumbnail-enhanced task switcher and a taskbar button mover (it's not click and drag, but it works).

Who doesn't want a little more functionality with a dash of eye candy for their Windows shell?

Filed under: Web services, web 2.0

Twitter Developers answer our burning questions

Twitter on Get SatisfactionSome of our questions about Twitter's recent and well documented downtime have been answered by the Twitter Dev team.

This is a nice move from Twitter, and we've watched a slow progression into open communication and transparency happen over the past few weeks in Twitter-land. They've been using services like Get Satisfaction to open up the conversation with those who are passionate enough to care.

And there are a lot of us who care.

Enough to start 2,146 different topics on Twitter alone.

Some of the Twitter faithful asked obvious questions like "Why Ruby?", while some of the better questions highlighted were "Why wasn't Twitter built as a messaging system from the start?". The answer was quite honest, and it was basically that Twitter was a one day project and it's success was not projected.

Very humbling for a company with funding to come out and talk behind the scenes nit and grit. Check out the full post.

We hope to see more of this from Twitter and from other companies as well.

Twitter has also opened up a Tumblr blog to keep us up to date on all of the important status information.

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Office, Productivity, Freeware

PowerMenu - added options for running programs

Power MenuPowerMenu is a small utility that adds a few options to the system menu on any application. This is the menu you get when you click on the icon on the top left of the application's window, or if you right-click on the system's entry in the taskbar. What options do you get? Well, for me the most interesting one is the ability to set the priority of the running program without having to go through the task manager. Other options include setting window transparencies, setting a window to be Always on Top, and the ability to minimize programs to the system tray.

All of these functions have been done in other apps, but this is a nice small little utility that has them all together. If you're looking for a way to do all or some of these things, PowerMenu just might be the way to go. Note that it doesn't appear to have been actively developed since 2002, so any problems you discover with it likely won't be getting fixed any time soon. So far I've had no troubles with it, but you never know, right?

Note that many of the download sites listed don't work, but I was able to use the Veridicus site (which is the domain that the page is hosted under) with no problems.

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Open Source

Vitrite: Lightweight window transparency for Windows

VitriteThere'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.

Featured Time Waster

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

View more Time Wasters

Featured Galleries

Defective by Design, London: Protest Pictures
Microsoft Security Essentials
Chromium Pre-Alpha on CrunchBang Linux
Safari 4 Beta
10 Firefox themes that don't suck
IE8 RC1
Download Squad at the Crunchies After-Party
Download Squad at the Crunchies
WordPress 2.7
Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals
Windows 7 Hands On
Comodo Internet Security
Android First-look: Amazon.com MP3 Store
Android First-look: Twitroid
Google Reader Android
Android Hands-On
Twine 1.0
Photoshop Express Beta
Mozilla Birthday Cake
Palm stuff
Adobe Lightroom 1.1

 


Follow us on Twitter!

Flickr Pool

www.flickr.com

More Tech Coverage

AOL Radio