
There's a
lot of apps out there that will let you control your windows' levels of transparency in, er, Windows.
Vitrite's snappy tagline is "useless window
transparency since 2002," and it does two things: Lets you change a window's transparency by holding Ctrl and
pressing the number keys, and toggle the "Always on Top" mode with another keypress. What's it have to
recommend it over other such apps? Well, not a lot, really, but it is lightweight (a 43kb download) and open source,
which are two things we're big fans of here at Download Squad.
Tags: alwaysontop, free, opensource, transparency, transparent, vitrite, windows
Comments
5
Subscribe to commentstylerApr 26th 2006 12:00PM
I like this much better than Froost. More stable and the hotkeys are "key".
mattApr 26th 2006 12:23PM
At least they're honest - most useless graphical "feature" everrrrr
brianApr 27th 2006 2:39AM
So it says no CMD.EXE transparency... what are you using in the screenshot?
Lo SchiaccianociApr 28th 2006 8:59AM
Brian the window shown in the screenshot is not CMD.EXE it's PUTTY.EXE!!!
William C BonnerApr 30th 2006 1:48PM
One of the things I liked about Vitrite is that it is distributed with source code, so I could look at what they were doing, to see how much overhead the pogram might add. I don't want it on my laptop that doens't have enough ram as it is, but knowing the proper API calls to implement transparency is a good thing in windows programming in general, and not obvious in the windows help system.
It turns out that the program uses very little overhead, and simply sends a windows message that converts the windows transparency bit. The overhead all comes in the windows video driver at render time, so it's not really measurable.