Montage - Get the most out of your display

Montage ─ Windows productivity software

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Montage

Get the most out of your display

What's wrong with a cluttered desktop?

It's convenient to put things on the Windows desktop, but there is only so much room for shortcuts, and most of the screen will be obscured by application windows. Multiple windows can be very useful, but they gobble up your screen, leaving little room for visible shortcuts or usable space on the Windows desktop, even with a large display.

Your computer's screen is a precious resource, typically the costliest component of the machine. With the increasing popularity of compact notebook and tablet computers, screen space is not something to be wasted. But aside from that, the display is the most important connection between your brain and your computer. Unlike computers, we need some semblance of order to cope with large numbers of tasks and amounts of information. A cluttered desktop leads to a cluttered mind!

How Montage helps manage screen space more efficiently

Montage gives you a neater, more useful way of keeping your shortcuts, instead of strewing them all over the desktop or burying them in the "Start Menu". Each Montage Shortcut is as easy to create and use as a Windows shortcut, but Montage adds a number of enhancements.

For example, a Montage Shortcut not only can launch an application, but also it allows you to monitor and control the target application window. Thus Montage Shortcuts combine the capabilities of both Windows shortcuts and the Windows Task Bar, adding more features while consuming less screen space.

Working efficiently in a tight space requires precise, consistent placement and sizing, whether one is dealing with shortcuts or application windows. Montage makes it easy to preserve and recreate the exact arrangement of screen objects that works best for you.

The following screen shot illustrates efficient utilization of screen space through Montage:

Shortcut highlighting makes it easier to navigate this crowded screen.

In the above example there are many open windows, but they are in an orderly arrangement that still leaves room for temporary files or shortcuts on the Windows desktop. This sort of layout, cascading from upper right to lower left, assures that there are plenty of visual cues, so you can activate the window of interest much more easily than resorting to the crowded Windows Task Bar.

While your computer probably can handle it, the time you'd have to spend to laying out so many windows into such a configuration would normally be a big deterrent to working this way. But Montage makes it easy, because it remembers precisely how you placed each window. With a single click you can open or close an entire view, comprising one or more Montage Desktop windows, plus a diverse collection of application windows, as illustrated.

Montage also has unique monitoring and highlighting features to help navigate through a large number of windows. You can tell at a glance which Montage Shortcuts are open, and whether the associated application window is minimized. A red border indicates it is running and in "normal" zoom, or minimized if the border is green. Double-click on a highlighted Shortcut, and it immediately activates the associated application window.

When a Shortcut points to another Montage metafile, Montage automatically detects whether that montage has already been opened. In such auto-detected cases, the Shortcut is displayed with a gray background. This makes it possible to construct a logical network of interconnected montages, where you can quickly navigate to any related one without having to hunt for its window.

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