As I was writing the previous post, I discovered that this webpage had vanished from the web. Apparently, I messed up the html in one of my many website makeovers. So here it is again:
Trance is an application I wrote a couple of years ago to allow users to control the transparency (or translucency) of other applications in Windows 2000 and XP. Both of these operating systems have built-in support for transparent and partially transparent windows based on blending the “alpha” channel, and this application allows you to easily take advantage of this, even on other applications that don’t have transparency support built in.
Trance allows you to set the alpha blending level of any application window you wish, and its major feature is that it can “track” windows, and remember what alpha-blending level you want for each one, so you don’t have to set it again! In fact, you can even set the #32768 window and it will set your menus transparent, although it generally takes a moment to apply the transparency, which causes a flicker, but it looks great in screen shots. [ ]
You can download the installer, which includes all the vb runtimes and such that it’s dependent on, or you can just download the exe on it’s own, and download the dependencies seperately if you find you need them later (most people won’t).
Here’s a screen shot with the menu trap turned on, so you can see what I mean:
As you can see, it’s not meant to be a flashy looking application. The idea is that it runs in your system tray and you rarely, if ever, actually bring it up to change the transparency settings of an application. Since it remembers your settings, you should be able to set them once, and then basically forget about it. If you’re curious as to how this all works, the source code is available [ ].
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