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.
I 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.








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