Dave Joneston – The unique identifier is only used in the case where two windows are the same size. At all other times we use the area of the window, so that we get the “best-fit” of all the windows on the screen. We can’t use the window title, because windows can have the same title, but we could use the window handle (the number that Windows XP uses to identify the window). We’re going to try this out in the near future once 1.3.x is stable for most people. Re-computing the sort order takes very little time, so we do it every time we tile to save memory. TopDesk already uses up 10-15MB+ to store the window images, so we’ve tried to save memory everywhere else in the application.

Regarding a unique identifier of windows: this may be overly simplistic, but couldn’t you simply use the title of the window? You’re already gathering that data to overlay the text on each window. I’m not sure that sorting based on alphabetic order is the best idea, but you could simply use the attribute to track which window was sorted where.

Another idea: why re-compute the sort order every time topdesk is called? Why not save the sort order then in the interim if no windows have been added or subtracted revert to that previous order? This might have the added bonus of furhter speeding up activity when repeatedly invoking topdesk.

Thanks, great piece of software… tried a bunch of alternatives and TopDesk wins hands down…

I have the same problem as Peter – ie multimonitor support is broken – when you select a window on any monitor other than the primary, the selected window isn’t brought to the front.

Is there anywhere that i can download version 1.3.0?

Thanks

neFAST, we don’t refresh the previews when Exposé is activated because it would take 1+ seconds to do so if there were more that a couple of windows open. Minimized windows won’t update with the live preview option because we can’t grab their image when they’re minimized. The implementation we have at the momement is the best we can come up with at the current time, but now that all the main functionality has been implemented, we’ll start to investigate ways to get around the problem. We’re hampered by the window image grabbing being so slow, but we may be able to come up with some tricks to keep the windows more up to date.

Now I’ve got a few suggestions :

The first time I launched Topdesk I thaught that the windows previews were buggy : for example IE was showing the wring webpage.
Then I noticed the “enable live windows update” option, but the problem is that you have to hover something like 2 seconds on the faulting windows to get the update and sometimes it doesn’t update at all …
Why don’t you refresh the previews when exposé is activated ?(i mean when just before tiling the windows).

What about adding an exclude list for programs we don’t want to see exposed ?

And for the eye-candy part :
- make all previews transparent, not only minimised windows (maybe vary the transp %age)
- let the user choose the hover-color
- add a “hover-zoom” like in entbloess (quite useless )
- get a snaphot of the desktop including background and icon, not just the background !

PS:The handling of the tiled windows is perfect for me

So I suppose my suggestion would now apply for both Topdesk as well as expose. I’d prefer to have the option of forcing all windows to the same order as long as no additional windows are opened or closed. Any changing of order disrupts my workflow while I hunt for the window in question. It’s a nitpick I guess, but think of it this way – if one were using a 30″ monitor but the windows periodically changed locations would the jumbo monitor be as useful?

I wouldn’t say that this should be as big a priority as insuring that all of the bugs are worked out of the existing scheme. But an option to maintain order would be nice – maybe this could be the behavior of the ‘grid’ layout? (although a fixed ‘spatial’ layout would be the best IMHO.)

This is on a XP with three screens.