Make the most of your wide-screen monitor with DExposE2

Posted on May 13, 2008 at 5:36 am

DExposE2 is a great partner for your large wide-screen display, putting that extra screen real estate to work navigating around your documents and applications. Yes, alt-tabbing is quick as long as you only work on a single window per application. Who does that!? My applications always have multiple windows open, especially the case when I am working in MS Office.

The Mac OS X desktop interface has had the flashy and functional task-switcher Exposé since the Panther release in 2003. Windows Vista has a limited feature called Flip3D which has some of the power of Mac Exposé. Vista also has the freeware app called Switcher which is better, but requires Aero to run. Now a new app for Windows XP as well as Vista, DExposE2, brings the original capabilities of Exposé to most Windows users - at a bargain price - free! Available in both a regular installable version as well as a portable no-install-needed flavor, you can check out the download here.

Not familiar with Mac Exposé or what it can do? Here are the basics - and DExposE2 bring these to your XP or Vista PC:

Resize and display all application windows without overlap - F9
Resize and display all windows for only the active application without overlap - F10
Hide all windows and show the desktop - F11
Replace all windows as they were - F11 again. (Windows taskbar won’t do this!)

What’s to like? Well - have you got a large wide-screen monitor? Do you work on multiple versions of documents at the same time? The thing I love about using DExposE2 on my XP PC with 20″ wide-screen display is being able to hit the F10 hotkey and get a view of all my in-process word documents, arranged on my screen with contents visible. I can then click on the one I need next and have it go back to full screen mode for editing.

This is a lot easier and productive than looking at the list of open documents from within Word itself, which just gives me a filename to go by. With DExposE2 I get a live and legible view of the contents of each window.

I can view all windows for a single application (like Word or Excel), or I can get all windows - which of course means they are all a bit smaller. To view all Windows I use F9:

That’s a lot of apps and windows! I go back to where I was either by hitting the same Fkey again, or using Escape. I can focus on just my Word documents, by hitting F10 when I have Word as the focus application:

Here I see just my three active Word documents, with the documents large enough for me to scan them and quickly use the mouse to pick the one I want to work on next.

There are a few other cool features such as resizing in slow motion, closing windows from the display, and creating on-screen hotspots like Mac Exposé comes with. So if you are the proud owner of a wide-screen monitor, maybe it’s time you head over to DExposE2, and at least give the portable version a try! If you need more convincing, here is a Youtube video showing DExposE2 in action. Unfortunately the production values aren’t great. It’s actually just as easy to download it and try it out.

Pete Kushmeider, Writer and blogger

Technorati Tags: Mac Exposé for Windows, DExposE2

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8 Responses to “Make the most of your wide-screen monitor with DExposE2”

Colin said on : May 13th, 2008 at 7:34 am

your wide-screen monitor is amazing.it’s a monster.
i have never seen so big monitor before.
and what’s the dimension, pls?
usually i use two seperated monitor(extend desktop) to work as a helpdesk.
and want to know whether can be tried out the function in my situation.
anyway, i will try for it, and give u feedback by this weekend, if everything goes well.

Pete said on : May 13th, 2008 at 8:50 am

It’s the Dell 20 inch wide-screen cinema display. It is a great, cost effective, monitor.

sikanrong said on : May 13th, 2008 at 11:13 am

Oh.. My… God. And I suppose none of you know that macs have been doing this for since the tiger OS? (like 3 years ago) - way to thieve another good idea. Anybody know where the ‘recycle’ bin came from?

akishore said on : May 13th, 2008 at 3:41 pm

Pete, that is a sweet monitor! You have like 100 apps going across the taskbar! I’ve been looking into one of those 22″ or 24″ LCD screens!

sikanrong - Yes we are poor Windows souls who get excited about stuff that’s already been done! hahaha But I just can’t seem to get away from Windows…might try the MacBook Air and see how that works as my first Mac computer!

Pete said on : May 13th, 2008 at 3:46 pm

Well for me, I can’t wait for MicroSoft to port Windows Live! Writer to the Mac. It’s the best blogging tool. Good thing I have a couple Windows PCs as well.

Canadian Tech Guy said on : May 14th, 2008 at 2:00 pm

sikanrong said: I suppose none of you know that macs have been doing this for since the tiger OS? (like 3 years ago)

CTG replies: You say “None of us know”? Hey, SR, did you even read the post? Look at the first sentence of the second paragraph: “The Mac OS X desktop interface has had the flashy and functional task-switcher Exposé since the Panther release in 2003.”