Friday, May 31, 2013

7+ Taskbar Tweaker is AWESOME

The skinny :

7+ Taskbar Tweaker makes Windows 7 even better.

The two things I can now do that I couldn't previously :
  • Re-arrange the order of items in a stacked taskbar group.
  • See seconds on clock in the system tray!
It does much more besides, but these are the key things for me.

The fat :

I love Windows 7.

7+ Taskbar Tweaker makes it even better.

I'm one of those common-enough-but-not-so-common guys who tends to have ZILLIONS of things open at the same time.

Especially web browsers.

Dragging & dropping tabs around within browser windows is very useful.

And the ability to drag & drop Windows 7 taskbar entries around is very useful.

But I HAVE to use "grouping" or "stacking" on the taskbar, or else I end up with three or four rows of icons.

Some might argue I should use Windows differently than I do.  I say it works very well for me.

But what didn't work so well was that the spatial aspects of the Windows desktop were compromised by the order of items in the stacked / grouped windows.

e.g. open Notepad, enter "Text 1", open another Notepad, enter "Text 2", open another Notepad, and enter "Text 3".  Now suppose you want to refer frequently to "Text 3".  It's third up from the bottom.  Easy enough.

But suppose you're a programmer, and Windows 7 is still not the most reliable beast in the world, and maybe once or twice a month you have Windows Explorer crash on you and restart.  The crash & restart isn't very painful - at least they've smoothed over that process - but now the order of items within the stacked / grouped lists has changed!  Whatever Notepad you happened to have used most recently prior to the Windows Explorer crash & restart, is now at the top of the list.  The order of items in the list is changed to match the somewhat arbitrary z-order of windows at the time the Windows Explorer crash occurred!  Not so useful.

And if like me you have lots of browser windows open (not just lots of tabs within windows - which I also do), then you spend more time than you care to hunting through the list of open windows in any group, trying to find GMail or that project management tool or whatever it is you like.

7+ Taskbar Tweaker resolves this problem, and does more besides.  It downloads quickly, and installs easily, and gives you a very impressive range of customisation options for the Taskbar.

But most importantly for me, it works with Windows 7 64-bit and allows me to relatively-easily change the order of items in any grouped / stacked set of windows, to whatever I want.

Since my taskbar is at the bottom of my screen, I figure it's most efficient to have my most-frequently-accessed browser windows at the bottom of the stack.  Can do.  GMail first, then other very-frequently-accessed management tools.

Voila!  Much less time hunting for things, much more time getting things done.  Swapping between tools or quickly referring to a document is now easier.

And of course this works with my in-house Autosave Notepad, and with PDFs open in Adobe Acrobat, and with Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, and with any other Windows app where you might from time to time end up with a bunch of open documents for reference as you work.

I love it!  Great work whoever you are who wrote 7+ Taskbar Tweaker!