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There are a few commercial apps that give you the always ontop for windows, also the nvidia drivers offer an app too which gives you said functionality.

For a good free (and small) application see Powermenu.

also try powermenu - allows you to minimize any app to the system tray, set it always-on-top, set its priority, and set its transparency. I found it a very useful little app :)

You have a point; any "always open" app like email/calendar should not take up space on the task bar. Personally I have lots of apps like this (that I want to leave open all day w/o them taking up taskbar space). Is that seriously a show-stopper for people, though?

My current solution is PowerMenu; it's tiny, freeware, and gives you a "minimize to tray" option for all windows. I also use it to reorganize things on my taskbar (e.g., comparing old output with new, I can have the older document on the left... it just works better in my mind).

Tips: use the commandline options to disable menu extras you don't want. Here are my options:
-hideself on -disable priority -disable transparency -disable alwaysontop

Installed on my computer right now are:

Avast! Antivirus
OpenOffice
Ad-Aware
Audacity
Azureus
CDex
ExplorerXP
FeedReader
Gaim
Mozilla
Spybot S&D
Tweak UI
TightVNC
OpenSSL
MP3Gain
PowerMenu

All of those programs are truly free with no spyware or nag screens.


When I'm looking for new programs, I go to:
TinyApps.org
Pricelessware
SourceForge
In that order.

http://www.veridicus.com/tummy/programming/powerme nu/ PowerMenu is better than needing individual apps to support tray-minimizing. Try it, tastes great.

Powermenu is another app that enables minimizing any window to the tray, as well as Always On Top, Process Priority and Window Transparency settings for all windows.

I use PowerMenu. It adds a few items to every window's title bar menu - minimize to tray, set transparency, set task priority and 'always on top'. I find it incredibly useful. hth ning

That said, I don't think that XAML itself is a good idea. Apart from XAML vs XUL/SVG/etc. issues, .NET itself is fundamentally broken. I'm not sure that it will be fixed and serious design issues will not make its way to Longhorn.

For always on top in windows, check out PowerMenu

My use of a desktop, and esp. the 3D Desktop is very personal, and I use a lot of tools to achieve what I want. It would take a long time to convey what I do, but let me try to start by answering your specific questions ...

Most people's desktops just seem to be a rather disorganised collection of shortcuts and temporary documents

This is true as M$ could never really communicate what they were trying to do with the Desktop Metaphor. And their tendency to define "special folders" and then hide them in the Windows subfolder was not very helpful ... And I think in their Win XP version they have tried to retrace their steps - emphasizing a clean desktop, automatically removing unused icons etc ... Personally I believe, M$ screwed by taking this approach and have wasted the whole paradigm of Desktop ..

It would help if Windows didn't forget where your desktop icons were when you do things like change res, but even so it just seems like a dumping ground.

I use a program called Iconlock which gives me the option os saving in the Right-Click Context Menu of the Desktop. Looks now it is hard to get a free copy but I have an older and free version of it. Let me know and I can upload it somewhere for you. Otherwise you might find better substitutes that achieve the same goal. Iconlock lets you save the various arrangements of the icons ... The saving mechanism is quite extensive, and more you use it the more powerful it becomes esp when you redefine the Desktop folders.

You could use TweakUI to redefine your Desktop. Use the program to define ANY folder (not just c:\win\desktop) to become your desktop. It does make you Log On/Off but it is a minor irritant. That way you can get whatever icons you want on your Desktop using TweakUI, and then resort to the saved Icon arrangement using Iconlock.

The apps I use everyday go on the quick launch bar.

QuickLaunch is my place of choice for Icons. Notwithstanding the fact that people say too many icons there make it load slow- I have about 130 icons, and I am doing just Fine. It is nice because no matter where you are, you can always hit the Windows button on the Keyboard, and all your shortcuts are immediately there ...

As it stands I find an incontinuity between the spatial desktop and the list based files/folders in a file manager.

This is the crux of the problem, and there is no complete solution to it. In fact you have to balance the flow of information from 1D listing, to 2D X-Y plane, (and extending it with Virtual Desktop Manager like JS Pager using the Natural Skin) to the 3D using 3Dtop. Actually the 3Dtop window is just a window and you can make it just one of the virtual windows on the JS Pager ..... In each of the 1D, 2D, and 3D, there are nestings and recursions of information, and also there are pseudo layers, i.e.1.5 D, 2.5D, and you also have to look at the temporal aspect. So, it does take a little while to be able to make a packet of information move from one type of dispaly to another, and as you can't preserve all the information tradeoff's have to be made. It is these tradeoff's that make it hard to describe my system.

Then I use programs like Peepshowlite to be able to cut thru layers, and the Peepshow Full program lets you make multiple incisions ...

To control which windows stay on the top, and to control their transparency I use the program PowerMenu ...

Anyway, I know you must be thoroughly confused by now, but all of these and many more utilities come

I use PCAnywhere a lot for managing machines over a VPN, and I would kill myself if I had to use a system like this to do what this person is talking about. Unless you're running the PCAnywhere (or VNC) server on a really fast machine, and your network connection is at least 10base-T, you're going to hate working through this because of the lag-time in the UI.

Try TightVNC, which is TridiaVNC plus JPEG compression and "Tight" compression, minus the support and fee structure of the commerical TridaVNC (TridiaVNC does have a free, non supported version). Claims are of > 25% improvement over VNC's Zlib encoding.

I've found that it works reasonably well over broadband with highest compression, though the JPEG compression takes a toll on CPU and image quality at the highest levels. 10base-T is just about like being there, and dial-up is usable for short periods of time. Anything more, and you'll want to just jump in the car though.

To be honest, for managing Windows 2000 servers, I usually use the MS Terminal Services Advanced Client. It's accessible through a web browser and is pretty responsive over dial-up or broadband. When I need access to the actual desktop session (Term Services satrts a new session on the server) to see error messages or such, I use VNC-X, which is an ActiveX VNC client. I simply add it to the same page that I launch TSAC from and have 1-click access to any server through either VNC or TSAC. (Hey, maybe I should patent that!)

While I haven't looked at this program yet, I know that they're certainly not the first to do this in Win2k or XP. In fact, alpha blending was one of the first GUI hack to come out with Win2k.

Hell, if you program in Delphi 6 you can set the transparancy level in the Form Designer!

Personally, I use PowerMenu to handle my window transparency. It does a few other exceptionally useful things too, and it's only ~50k to download.

Example: PowerPoint only creates presentations that will work correctly with IE4.x or higher; KPresenter creates (albeit static) presentations you can even view with G!zilla and/or KFM, Konqueror, mozilla, IEx.x, NSx.x... any web browser that supports images, basically. I like that.

Well that's the cost of using DHTML and other cool things, webbrowsers not bothering to support newer standards. I wouldn't be suprise if Microsoft started making more use of VML, which again, is a standard that other browsers refuse to support (hell, none even support XML like IE).

Also, when was the last time that you saw Explorer embed a Word document?
Uh, today? It's been done FOR YEARS. IE has been an OLE container since IE3, and OLE and VBX etc has been around since the very early nineties. COM/OLE is one of the key technologies that makes up modern Windows. BTW, can you embedd KDE's media player into a website? You can with media player :).

In a frame?
Uh, ofcourse, why would that make a difference? It's just an object in the HTML DOM.
Here's a few links to images to demonstrate the power of COM and IE. Tis quite shocking how many people still think Windows is in the win2.0 days :|

Example 1
Word document inside IE. Notice how IE's menus are integrated with Word's menus. MS Word is acting as an ActiveX Document in this example.

Example 2
Excel document inside IE.

Example 3
PDF document inside IE

I don't have an example for postscript cause I don't use it, or know of a viewer for windows. But you get the idea...it's not that difficult to add support.
Note that the opposite is generally true, eg. you can host IE inside Word & Excel to display HTML/XML etc. I don't think ADOBE's pdf viewer is an OLE container, but they could make it one.

Microsoft is going to have to worry about people wanting these cool features- I already show them to my friends and they drool, because they want a desktop that can do what mine can. No they don't, cause they came up with this kind of stuff and implemented it before Linux did, and have made it basically upbitquous(no sleep, bad spelling) in the windows world. This kind of thing is an extension to java applets - but it's been done by Microsoft in client side apps (well before the WWW become popular). Now you know, care to show your friends this? :P

Example: PowerPoint only creates presentations that will work correctly with IE4.x or higher; KPresenter creates (albeit static) presentations you can even view with G!zilla and/or KFM, Konqueror, mozilla, IEx.x, NSx.x... any web browser that supports images, basically. I like that.

Well that's the cost of using DHTML and other cool things, webbrowsers not bothering to support newer standards. I wouldn't be suprise if Microsoft started making more use of VML, which again, is a standard that other browsers refuse to support (hell, none even support XML like IE).

Also, when was the last time that you saw Explorer embed a Word document?
Uh, today? It's been done FOR YEARS. IE has been an OLE container since IE3, and OLE and VBX etc has been around since the very early nineties. COM/OLE is one of the key technologies that makes up modern Windows. BTW, can you embedd KDE's media player into a website? You can with media player :).

In a frame?
Uh, ofcourse, why would that make a difference? It's just an object in the HTML DOM.
Here's a few links to images to demonstrate the power of COM and IE. Tis quite shocking how many people still think Windows is in the win2.0 days :|

Example 1
Word document inside IE. Notice how IE's menus are integrated with Word's menus. MS Word is acting as an ActiveX Document in this example.

Example 2
Excel document inside IE.

Example 3
PDF document inside IE

I don't have an example for postscript cause I don't use it, or know of a viewer for windows. But you get the idea...it's not that difficult to add support.
Note that the opposite is generally true, eg. you can host IE inside Word & Excel to display HTML/XML etc. I don't think ADOBE's pdf viewer is an OLE container, but they could make it one.

Microsoft is going to have to worry about people wanting these cool features- I already show them to my friends and they drool, because they want a desktop that can do what mine can. No they don't, cause they came up with this kind of stuff and implemented it before Linux did, and have made it basically upbitquous(no sleep, bad spelling) in the windows world. This kind of thing is an extension to java applets - but it's been done by Microsoft in client side apps (well before the WWW become popular). Now you know, care to show your friends this? :P

Example: PowerPoint only creates presentations that will work correctly with IE4.x or higher; KPresenter creates (albeit static) presentations you can even view with G!zilla and/or KFM, Konqueror, mozilla, IEx.x, NSx.x... any web browser that supports images, basically. I like that.

Well that's the cost of using DHTML and other cool things, webbrowsers not bothering to support newer standards. I wouldn't be suprise if Microsoft started making more use of VML, which again, is a standard that other browsers refuse to support (hell, none even support XML like IE).

Also, when was the last time that you saw Explorer embed a Word document?
Uh, today? It's been done FOR YEARS. IE has been an OLE container since IE3, and OLE and VBX etc has been around since the very early nineties. COM/OLE is one of the key technologies that makes up modern Windows. BTW, can you embedd KDE's media player into a website? You can with media player :).

In a frame?
Uh, ofcourse, why would that make a difference? It's just an object in the HTML DOM.
Here's a few links to images to demonstrate the power of COM and IE. Tis quite shocking how many people still think Windows is in the win2.0 days :|

Example 1
Word document inside IE. Notice how IE's menus are integrated with Word's menus. MS Word is acting as an ActiveX Document in this example.

Example 2
Excel document inside IE.

Example 3
PDF document inside IE

I don't have an example for postscript cause I don't use it, or know of a viewer for windows. But you get the idea...it's not that difficult to add support.
Note that the opposite is generally true, eg. you can host IE inside Word & Excel to display HTML/XML etc. I don't think ADOBE's pdf viewer is an OLE container, but they could make it one.

Microsoft is going to have to worry about people wanting these cool features- I already show them to my friends and they drool, because they want a desktop that can do what mine can. No they don't, cause they came up with this kind of stuff and implemented it before Linux did, and have made it basically upbitquous(no sleep, bad spelling) in the windows world. This kind of thing is an extension to java applets - but it's been done by Microsoft in client side apps (well before the WWW become popular). Now you know, care to show your friends this? :P