AltDesk

AltDesk
Introduction
AltDesk, powerful, flexible and easy to use Virtual Desktop Manager for Windows. With AltDesk you'll be able to ease your daily work by managing numerous task more efficiently than before. Virtual Desktops technology, implemented in AltDesk, allows you to work with a single display nearly as effective as if you used several monitors at once. Unlike competing products, AltDesk uses icons and thumbnails to represent tasks, which makes task management more effective as you can reach any given task in the shortest time. AltDesk doesn't use a lot of screen space, you can even hide its window and manage Desktops with hotkeys. You can also change program's appearance by applying skins, which can be found on our home page.
You won't need to spend your time on configuring AltDesk as it has excellent predefined settings, designed to fit most users' needs. Even in case you'll need to tweak something, you can do it through the friendly configuration menu. The program is friendly to both novices and experienced users, which could use it even more effectively by following our hints, described in this help file.

AltDesk's main features:
• Simple yet powerful user interface
• Hints for even more intuitive configuration
• Skins for changing program's appearance and behavior
• Adaptive skins: skins can adopt user references
• Transparency effects for Windows 2000, XP and above
• Ability to set different wallpapers for each Desktop
• Tasks switching can be done both by "Drag and Drop" and through the window's menu
• Hotkeys for all actions
• "Boss" key for immediate hiding tasks you don't want others to see.
• Multimonitor systems support
• Autorun for each Desktop
• Modest resource requirements
• A build-in window manager
• Informative tooltips (with thumbnails snapshots of each window) for each task
• Recovery of lost applications
• Multilingual user interface
! If you're unable to find your native language translation in AltDesk's package, please, check this page for updates.

Quick reference
AltDesk comes preconfigured to bring you the best experience out of the box. However, you'll need to learn some basics in order to use it more efficiently.
Usually AltDesk's window looks somewhat like that:


! Actual look of the program may vary depending on your settings.
• AltDesk's window consists of rectangular areas, called Cells. Cells are put together in a matrix which can be as small as two rows (columns).
• Each Cell represent a single Virtual Desktop and Cell icons are actual windows located on that Desktop.
• You can switch Desktops by clicking the Cells or individual icons.
• Moving icons from one Cell to another lets you swap windows between Virtual Desktops.
• Minimize button minimizes AltDesk's window and Options button displays Preferences dialog.
• You can get more information about a certain window by placing cursor over its icon.
Now you're ready to start using AltDesk.
Read the Effective use section of this tutorial in order to get some useful tips and tricks.
System Requirements

• Windows 95/Me (Windows 2000/XP or above recommended for using program's advanced features such as transparency effects and modern skin format)
• Intel Pentium/AMD K5 or better processor
• at least 32 Mb RAM (128 for Windows XP)
• At least 1.5 megabytes of hard disk space for program and skins
• any videocard, supporting true color mode
• keyboard
• mouse (recommended)
In general, AltDesk runs well on any computer capable of running Windows 98 and above operating system.