Another cure for Mac envy - Entbloess

Posted Nov 14th 2004 10:24AM by Marc Orchant

Apple does some very cool things. The Expose feature they introduced in Mac OS X Panther is a perfect example. Rather than relying on the old Alt-Tab style task switching, Apple created a feature that provides miniature live windows of all open applications you can switch between with a click of the mouse. It's a guaranteed "wow" whenever I demo the Mac to friends or co-workers.

A small company in New Zealand, Nipaco, has produced a similar capability for us Windows users with the odd name of Entbloess (there is no explanation on the site for the derivation of the name). This small utility is cheap ($7.99), has an incredibly small memory footprint (unlike other tools in this category I've tried which can slow my system to a crawl), and can be tried out free for 100 uses.

entbloessI don't often rush right out to pay a shareware fee. I usually am able to control myself long enough to find out whether the application is something I'm going to stick with. Entbloess is so cool, so well written, and so handy that I broke my own rule and bought a license within hours of installing it. It's that good.

In addition to performing this core function so well for users like me who often have half a dozen or more applications running at any given time,  Entbloess also lets you perform window commands while a window is highlighted. This feature allows you to close the highlighted window by pressing 'Q' or 'F4', or minimize it by pressing 'M'. You can also cycle though windows using PgUp and PgDn after invoking the Entbloess screen (default is F9 or moving the mouse to the lower left corner of the screen which rocks when using the Tablet PC stylus!).

If you suffer Mac envy or just need a way to switch tasks with a lot visual information, this is a great tool and well worth a test drive on your system.

Reader Comments

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1. If others have problems like I did with the download.com link from their site, you can also download from: http://www.entbloess.com/downloads/ .

On 2k entbloess doesn't capture any previews for my firefox or thunderbird windows...

Posted at 6:18AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Joshwa

2. Entbloess means "bare" in German.

Posted at 6:18AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Scott

3. Joshwa: I always recommend reporting these issues directly to the developer. The only way they can cure problems like this is if users report them.

Scott: Thanks for the definition.

Posted at 6:18AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Marc Orchant

4. Entbloess, in German (derived from "entbloessen", to expose), means the same as "Expos?in English - written without the accent aigu (expose!), i.e. the imperative form. More smart than elegant, this is cute anyway.

Posted at 6:18AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Sebastian

5. Sebastiian: excellent. Thanks for the explanation. It makes perfect sense now.

Posted at 6:18AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Marc Orchant

6. Marc, of course I reported this to the developers.. they have been quite helpful and are working on a fix. But I also thought your readers would be interested as well.

FWIW, even without the previews I find entbloess pretty darn useful, and the best of the pack w/r/t performance.

Posted at 6:18AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Joshwa

7. Joshwa: Good for you! You'd be surprised how often users *don't* report these issues. I agree completely about the value of this tool. It is very well-behaved and has been drawing "wow" reactions from folks in my office all day.

Posted at 6:18AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Marc Orchant

8. I've been running Entbloess on Windows 2000 all day. I noticed that about every 3 to 5 seconds, my mouse seemed to freeze or hesitate for just a split second. At first, it just seemed strange, but after a while it got to be annoying. I checked Processes in Task Manager and saw that about the same time this occurred, Entbloess suddenly went from 0 CPU to about 15-20. On a hunch, I unloaded Entbloess and the "problem" went away. I reloaded Entbloess and it started up again.

Has anyone else experienced this behavior?

I've emailed Nipaco about it. I'll let you know what I find out.

Posted at 6:18AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Scott

9. Thanks for finding this neat app, Marc. Very nice. Purchase decision for me was also a no brainer.

Joshwa, thanks for the alt download link. The main one on Downloads.com is still delivering incomplete and corrupted files. I've also told the developer.

Posted at 6:18AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Neville Hobson

10. As a followup to my earlier post above (#8), I heard back from Nipaco. The bottom line is that my problem stems from using Windows 2000. The "update at regular intervals" process is what is sucking up my CPU cycles -- and the way it was explained, this process is necessary due to the limitations of Windows 2000 vs. XP. So, every time this "update" happens -- about every 5 seconds -- everything else on my PC "hesitates" for a split second. The best way to describe it is that it's like a brief hiccup every 5 seconds, or so. If, for example, my mouse pointer is tracking across the screen, it appears to "freeze" momentarily when Entbloess "updates" (not unlike what you see when your mouse ball is dirty). It's not a show-stopper, but like I said earlier, it is just noticeable enough to be mildly annoying. Supposedly, this does not occur with XP.

So, if you have XP, Entbloess may be a no-brainer. If you have Win 2000, you may want to play with it long enough to make sure this particular "feature" won't drive you nuts.

I guess one of these days I'm going to have to shell out some bucks and upgrade to XP. More and more, all of these neat apps are optimized for XP -- or won't run on anything else but XP.

Posted at 6:18AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Scott

11. I like task switch xp...i find it useful enough for my needs

Posted at 6:18AM on Dec 19th 2005 by justin

12. Arghhh! Still more problems. I updated Entbloess from version 2.5 (the version I downloaded from Download.com 2 days ago) to 2.7 (the latest version on Nipaco's site) yesterday. Since then, it has done nothing but crash -- on both my desktop and my laptop (both running Windows 2000). I'm not sure what gives, but I think I'm ready to run up the white flag. Based on my experiences so far (admittedly, only 2 days), I'd say think carefully if you intend to run Entbloess on Windows 2000.

Posted at 6:18AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Scott

13. Does anyone have some tips on how you would use Entbloess on a Tablet PC?

I'm setting up and trying my new Tablet on my spare time and I think I'll create some Sensaura shortcuts. Pointing to the edges of the screen is definitely not working well on my Toshiba m200 nor is it efficient.

Posted at 6:18AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Daniel Jomphe

14. I've tried entbloess on xp before and I couldn't even get it to run properly - it was alot of graphical corruption on my nvidia geforce fx card. However, the latest version (2.7.2) runs like a dream on xp and is easily the best looking and nicest program and well worth the 8 bucks, as long as it works on your machine. It's just one of those programs that won't run on every configuration out there, and you do need a snappy machine from the last 2 years or so to really run something like this without slowing yourself down. Otherwise, stick with alt tab.

Posted at 6:18AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Alex

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