Mac OS X Task switching on Windows

Hasn't every Windows user, once, or maybe even twice, with a little envy watched a Mac user wanting to switch to the right one out of his many open applications, just click a button, and get all of his open applications minimized, spread out and scattered on his screen at once, whereas he just clicks the one he wants, and it maximizes?

Us PC users usually have to alt+tab us all the way "around" until the little square stops around the right little fuzzy icon. A lot of times it is also hard to tell which little fuzzy icon is the right one, because if you have many files open in the same program, they might all show up as identical icons.

This is at least how I have felt, and I figured there had to be someone else out there who felt the way I did, and would have created a way for PC users to get that neat task switching feature onto Windows. So I went googling away to find this way, hopefully created by someone. I succeeded.

The solution is called TopDesk, and you can find it at http://www.otakusoftware.com/topdesk/. It is as of writing this article $19.95 (but there is a free trial version), but I would say it is well worth it, because it saves so much time, and gives me visual satisfaction when I use it. It is also highly customizable. You can change the fonts, the speeds at which the windows minimize or maximize.

And if you use Windows XP and want the task switching feature of Windows Vista (the one where all the windows are stacked on top of eachother and you can scroll through them), you have the choice of using that instead of the scattered view aswell. There is even a third option, that is identical to the scattered windows one, except for that it doesn't scatter the windows randomly, it puts them out evenly, like a grid.

So with TopDesk, you as a PC user all of a sudden have even more, and better ways to switch applications than that Mac using buddy of yours that you used to look at with jealousy. Sweet huh?