Cool App Friday : HyperDock (Mac)

So one of the cool things to come from the fiery train wreck more commonly refered to as “Windows Vista”, was Aero. Aero was a set of UI tweaks that Microsoft built into the OS to make the interface look a little niftier (More nifty? #English). I actually really enjoyed some parts of it, in this post were going to talk about one of my fav features of Aero and how you can add it to the mac.

The Problem
So, as most of you probably know – windows has a task bar, its where your OPEN/RUNNING apps live and how you organize programs while multitasking. If you have two different apps open, its typically not an issue managing running apps, you want your word file, you click on the running task bar app that looks like word and boom – your open file pops up. This gets a little muddier when you have say, 5 word docs open and windows has grouping enabled, so instead of having 5 items on your taskbar – one for each file, you have a group of icons layered ontop of one another, one for each running instance of an app (your 5 files). The issue arises when you want to find a specific file, you sort of have to – sort through the running apps to get to the one you want. Mac does this even worse, I – having used mac os for years, am sometimes still slowed down by this.

The Solution
Instead of just having a little icon representing each open file (running program) stacked ontop of one another, Microsoft built “Peak” into their UI that would show you a little screenshot of the running app so you could quickly identify it without having to open it, thus allowing you to more efficiently locate the file/program you have open and get back to it.