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HyperDock puts some Win7 in your OS X Dock
My shocking day job revelation: I write enterprise Java software using Windows. There, my secret shame is finally out. Now that that's off my chest, I have something to confess about Windows 7: Microsoft must be doing something right because I hate it considerably less than any other version of Windows. For example, it might have taken it eight years to bring the draggable reorder feature from OS X 10.0's Dock into the Windows taskbar, but they got there in the end, and I'm a happier user for it. One of the things I quite like is Aero Peek. Suppose you are juggling three PowerPoint presentations because you are a SRS BSNS enterprise user, so obviously, you're not doing anything fun. You move your cursor down to the PowerPoint icon in the taskbar, and three medium sized thumbnail icons pop up, each showing the current window contents of the three PowerPoint windows that you have open. This visual cue makes task switching more efficient. It sounds small, but it's quite a neat little time saver. Sadly, OS X doesn't have anything like this. We've previously covered using Exposé in the Application Switcher, but it's clunky. Wouldn't thumbnails in the Dock be a nice addition to OS X? I certainly think so, and it seems that Christian Baumgart agrees with me because he's written the free-in-beta utility HyperDock to do just that. You can see how it works in the screenshot above; in this case, I moved my mouse over to the Firefox icon, and it presented me with previews of the three browser windows that I had open. But that's not all it does -- check out some more of HyperDock's features on the next page.
Windows 7 review
Oh, Windows. You inform and entertain us. You are inescapable, and your Start menu is full of items relevant to our productivity. You move us. Sort of. To be honest, we're not sure what sort of state this fair planet of ours would be in without the ruggedly functional operating systems the folks at Redmond have handed to us over the years, and while Windows Vista might have proved that Microsoft wasn't invincible, it did nothing to demonstrate that Windows as an idea -- and for most, a necessity -- was at all in jeopardy. Windows 7 arrives on the scene three short years after Vista, shoring up its predecessor's inadequacies and perhaps offering a little bit more to chew on. We've been playing with the OS ever since the beta, along through the release candidate, and now at last have the final, "release to manufacturing" (RTM) edition in our grubby paws. Does it live up to its understandable hype and the implicit expectations of a major Microsoft release? Let's proceed on a magical journey to discover the truth for ourselves.
