iTunes is particularly poor at window management, choosing to display the mini player when the button is clicked. Safari and Finder seem to resize themselves without rhyme or reason. We’ve covered other aspects of window management here a few times, but my favorite way to manage my window size is now a little app named Divvy.

Divvy uses the OS X support for assistive devices to automate resizing windows. By default, Divvy is activated by clicking a status bar icon. Once clicked, you can select the size that you’d like your frontmost window to be. When you release the mouse, the window will be resized, and the Divvy window will disappear.

However, if you have multiple windows open, there’s an option to allow Divvy to stay open until dismissed. This helps by letting you choose each window, then select its desired size instead of having to recall the app for each window.

Like all great apps, Divvy’s usefulness is enhanced by keyboard shortcuts. You can define a system-wide shortcut to call the app, and then create shortcuts for common window positions. I’ve created shortcuts to make windows go full screen, center, and take up half-left or half-right positions.

I enjoy Divvy as it is, but I can think of a couple great enhancements. For one, it would be nice to be able to call a shortcut from outside the application, instead of having to call Divvy first. I’m not sure exactly how that would work internally, maybe through some Apple Script or Automator magic. The other addition I would love to see is something similar to Windows 7 and Cinch’s ability to resize windows by dragging them to “hot edges”.

What’s your favorite way to manage window size? Any tricks or apps that help? Sound off in the comments!

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One of my ‘pet peeves’ about OS X is the inability to force a window to remain on top of all the others. Several years ago, when using Windows, this was a functionality that I found invaluable for watching videos and keeping certain web pages or applications at the forefront of my display. Certain Mac applications offer this functionality built in (VLC for instance) but most don’t.

I was thrilled to find Afloat, a simple piece of software which adds the above collection of menu bar items to an application. It allows you to perform a whole new set of operations on a window such as keeping it on top, increasing transparency, and creating ‘overlays’.

Features

The various functions available include:

• Keep Afloat: puts a window always on top of all others.
• Transparency: lets you see through a window.
• Drag Anywhere: lets you move a window by “grabbing” it from anywhere (not necessarily the title bar).
• On All Spaces: makes a window remain on the screen even if you switch Spaces.
• Overlay: makes a window floating and transparent and makes it ignore your mouse clicks (they “fall through” to the windows below it instead).
• Show Window’s File in Finder: if a window represents an open file, it will show the file in Finder.

Keyboard shortcuts are built in for all the different functions, which saves you clicking around to find them each time you need to perform an operation. It is as simple as holding two keys and scrolling the mouse wheel to adjust the transparency of a window – it’s possible to make your desktop look very futuristic, but it is debatable how user friendly transparency really is.

The hidden drawback

The software is far from perfect, however. The main problem is that it only works with Cocoa applications — so Carbon apps such as Finder and iTunes don’t offer the Float functionality. This is a real shame, as watching videos through my media player of choice still can’t be achieved. As mentioned previously, it is possible to use VLC, but I’m still waiting and hoping that they’ll find a way to enable Afloat with iTunes.

The fact that Safari is supported is great for websites such as BBC iPlayer and similar, as their video can be floated. Equally, stock ticker sites and even chat applications such as Adium can be made much more user friendly when allowed to float above other windows.

It’s a great piece of software, and definitely worth giving a go, considering it’s free. Let us know if you find any other inventive ways it can help your window arrangement!

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