hey; Is there a way to have two taksbars on one screen? When i'm programming away, i usually switch between a few things (editor, documentation, ect), but i have also my media player open, and another browser and a few instances of explorer. i would like them to be excluded from the normal 'alt-tab' and also in an extra taskbar that auto-hides on top or so. Is there any way to do it, preferably native to windows7 or some recomended utilities? tnx; Alpaca
http://www.stardock.com/products/objectdock/ There are other options out there, but I haven't tried them myself. I don't know of any native W7 methods of doing what you want, but I've been using ObjectDock for years and I find it pretty good. It might suit your needs.
you can try out groupbar. it comes close to doing what you're looking for, though i don't think it excludes anything from alt-tabbing. you can however choose what is displayed on it. make groups out of the programs of your choosing and so on. it's ugly though as it was designed to match xp theme, but still works fine on 7. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/8bd3a415-2628-48e9-8305-f54bc5704d2f/default.aspx
For a native approach... which isn't much, but. You can try and set your programs on the system tray (next to the clock) if they have that options. And you can move programs item on your task, essentially "grouping" them close together. Example: [VStudio 2010][folder][something][something][something][firefox] Let's say you switch a lot between firefox and Visual Studio, so you want them close together. You can drag and drop Visual studio 2010 next to firefox, making: [folder][something][something][something][VStudio 2010][firefox] or [folder][something][something][something][firefox][VStudio 2010] or [VStudio 2010][firefox][folder][something][something][something] for example, among many other combinations. It doesn't change the alt+tab, but it should help.
the groupbar is a very good solution, but it crashed within 20 minutes of using it. It made my firefox crash too. i dont like apps that crash. Objectdock is, while fancy and well build, not really the thing i wanted, i already tried that. And the grouping together is already in use also; is there any recommended multiple-desktop thing in windows; like in Ubuntu and most other lunix/gnu distributions?
true launch bar Has the option to run within the standard taskbar, but can be used in a stand-alone aswell resulting in 2 taskbars. Its really customisable and you can assign hotkeys etc to switch between the tasks running inside it aswell is a myriad of other things. Problem is it's not free, they want $20 for it, but it does everything you've asked for.
Given that you are a programmer, I will assume that horizontal space is largely useless. If the above tools don't work, see how you like dragging the taskbar to the side of the screen. Depending on how you have things set up in terms of the icons and fonts being visible, it likely will give you more room.