Much fuss has been made over Apple’s ExposA? feature, which lets you see all your open windows on-screen at the same time… it’s basically an enhancement to the old “tile windows” (right-click your taskbar), and “show desktop” (Press Win+M or Win+D a couple of times) features that have been in Windows™ for years.

Essentially: when the apps are tiled they are kept in the same relative on-screen position as they were, and they don’t forget where (or what size) they used to be! This is a pretty big deal if you’re a visual person (and what Mac user isn’t?). Of course, there’s also some eye-candy added, in terms of the animation of the windows into their new positions, and actually shrinking the window-contents, instead of just resizing the windows (so all the content remains visible). But anyway.

There are a lot of attempted clones of this on Windows, but none of them seem to measure up to the full list of enhancements I just described.

Entbloess is probably the slickest (as far as I can tell from feature lists, I haven’t tried all of these), your windows are still interactive and updating when they are tiled in Entbloess, and you can use your mouse to click on them (eg: to start playing music by clicking the play button on the tiled image of WinAmp) but they are arranged in alt-tab order (which is to say, in the order they were most recently used) instead of relative to where they were on screen. It also has to restore minimized windows so that it can take a screenshot when you press it’s key (this has a profound impact on Window’s memory management, but we won’t get into that) Entbloess is XP and 2K only (the 2K version is missing some features) and costs $8 U.S.

Second place is a close thing: WinGlance is from Usable Labs. It also allows mouse or keyboard selection of windows from the tiled display, and has the same limitations about window order and minimized windows as Entbloess, but without the workarounds. WinGlance cost $9. Winplosion also works best on Windows XP, but features support for Windows 98 as well as 2K. It seems to have the same ordering problem (at this point it’s clear that they ALL have this problem), and does not really allow interaction with (or live updates of) tiled windows. Winplosion cost $10.

In the third-level rank are: Windows Exposer at $7, and iEx which is free. As a side note, I want to mention Pycage Exposity a Linux program written in python which offers this functionality to linux users.

I also want to mention TaskSwitchXP which is my current task-tool of choice, and which is due for a new version this month. It does NOT tile all your windows on the screen at once. Instead, it offers a simple enhancement to the alt-tab window, which shows an icon list and a thumbnail shot of a single window as you select it — which you can do with your mouse, your arrow keys, your alt-tab/alt-shift-tab combo, or your mouse wheel (something which does NOT work with the other apps I tried) Most impressively, it works so fast that even though it replaces my Alt-Tab, I can still alt-tab just as fluidly as I did before. TaskSwitchXP is not only free, it’s open source. And the more I use it, the more I think I might actually want to use it’s code to write an expose clone. After all, why should Windows users not have the latest and greatest version of “Tile All Windows?”