I’ve blogged about some of the bits of this before, but just for convenience sake, here’s all the steps together.

1. Open up regedit and go to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics

Create a new String Value called MinWidth and set the value to -255.

2. Right click on the taskbar, and click properties, tick ‘Group Similar taskbar buttons’ and click OK

3. Install Visual Task Tips from http://www.visualtasktips.com/ and log off/on again.

Here’s a Screenshot of your resulting Windows XP Super Taskbar in action:

The Windows 7 bar also allows programs to show up little submenus with actions. This feature has been much talked about as a brilliant new addition to the taskbar in Windows 7, but it is already possible in XP. Not many apps seem to support it, but it can be done, as demonstrated by the lovely J River Media Jukebox:

One Missing Feature

The first screenshot above is showing two instances of chrome, rather than two tabs in chrome. This is one advantage windows 7 has over this. Until someone writes an XP util that duplicates this functionality (which, lets face it, will likely never happen) then we’re stuck with only showing window instances.

One Unfortunate Side Effect

Windows minimized in Photoshop CS3 (and probably other versions) seem to inherit the width from the MinWidth value, so you may come across this problem:

 
I can’t find a way around it except to access these windows via the window menu, if anyone comes across a fix let me know.

Tags: freeware, windows, xp

This is a picture of my current taskbar.

As you can see I’ve applied a hack which removes the text from each item on the taskbar, similar to the Windows 7 super bar (or whatever its called). It’s a registry hack. The thing I love about registry hacks is that they’re overhead free. I didn’t have to install any extra program to make this work. Here’s what you do:

1. Go into Regedit and find the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics

2. Create a new String value, name it MinWidth and set it to -255

3. Restart (or log off and log on again)

Simple!

Although we’ve installed nothing, we could now install VisualTaskTips (http://www.visualtasktips.com), which would give us a windows 7 style preview of any item we hover over in the taskbar.

Coincidentally, I’ve been experimenting with using Taskbar Shuffle to colour code my taskbar icons during particularly long sessions.

I know it sounds daft, but I have this theory that when we look for an icon for a program, we identify by colour first. Thus, if we need firefox, our eye is drawn to the orange / red hues at the end of the taskbar, and we find it faster. It also looks way better:

Tags: freeware, windows, xp

Whenever I take a pic with my camera phone, transferring a file is as easy as right clicking on the bluetooth icon in the taskbar, sending the file and clicking 'next' on the Bluetooth dialog. Microsoft have made it wonderfully simple to transfer a file to your PC from a bluetooth device.

Transferring lots of files, however, is a different story. by the time your on the 5th or so file, you'll be getting fairly tired of right clicking on tray icons.

I put the following command in my autohotkey script, using WIN + SHIFT + B as the shortcut key.

%windir%\system32\fsquirt.exe -receive

Now if I want to transfer ten photos, I hit WIN+SHIFT+B ten times, ten dialogs spring up, and I can fire away all my photos from the phone end.

PS: fsquirt? Who thinks up the names for these things?

Tags: freeware, windows, xp