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2006

EvilDesk 0.8 Released

I've been enjoying my vacation time, spending a good bit of it hacking on EvilDesk. This is something of an eyecandy release, with some visually appealing refinements. I'm always wary of eyecandy for eyecandy's sake, so I've tried really hard to balance resource consumption with visual goodness. To that end, the eyecandy features can all be turned off, and can also be tuned to reduce (or increase, if you like) their memory consumption. So, what features are new?

  • Added the ability to customize the appearance of slits and the task switcher. Each slit can have a custom background tile, as can the task switcher. You can also change the font, style and colour.

  • Added a window thumbnail cache. This is used by the alt-tab task switcher and also by Overview.

  • alt-tab uses the thumbnail cache to show previews of the applications as you're alt-tabbing.

  • The new Overview plugin is inspired by OSX exposé; pressing Win-F9 (configurable) will show a zoomed-out overview of all the open windows on each monitor attached to the system. You can then click on a window thumbnail to switch to that window. Unlike exposé, Overview performs no animation.

I also made it possible to set all the settings from the .evdm, which should make things significantly easier to configure.

Check out the full change log for more details.

You can Download EvilDesk here.

Happy New Year!