Have you ever wanted to make your Windows desktop cleaner and better organized and to still look better than other traditional desktops… That is nicely done in Mac OS X with OS X Dock where you can put icons that you frequently use and it really has some cool effects that make almost any desktop look nice and neat.

Now you can have that thing on your Windows desktop too. Thanks to Vladimir Likhonos who developed XWindows Dock that can be used with Windows XP, Vista and even Windows 7.

Although there are a lot of docking applications for Windows, XWindows Dock beats them all by having an excellent graphical effects such as reflections, transparencies, shadow and blur effects in a single package.

The only thing that could be improved (and I hope it will, soon) with XWindows Dock is that it doesn’t support drag-and-drop function. You can’t move it wherever you like on your desktop. It’s placed on the bottom of your desktop and has fixed location. But this is ongoing deveolpment and I’m sure they will fix that very soon… Before I give you the download link let’s see what this Windows app can do…

Features

User can adjust:

• Opacity and blur of reflections.
• Panel opacity, hide and show time
• Space between panel and screen border.

In addition, XWindows Dock allows:

• Use or create your own skins for 2D or 3D dock.
• Shows indicators of running applications.
• New skin format, now a skin can be created even without specifying some PNG files.

More general features cover:

• Supports many languages. Not yours? You can add it via an XML file!
• Can be started with Windows.
• Option to remain always on top.
• Reserve screen area for the dock
• Option to show dock on mouse-over.
• Two options for what to do when an icon is dragged out of the dock: create shortcut or removal.
• Live preview of video and images

Customizing Icons

• The size and zoom of icons, space between them.
• Number of zoomed icons.
• Spacing between icons and their reflections.
• Spacing between icons and bottom of dock.
• Show icon shadow, define opacity and blur effect of the shadow.
• Icons can be sorted by couple parameters: file-type, name, etc.

Forget about ugly ICO-files. Download high quality PNG icons, apply them and enjoy the great looking desktop!

Minimize applications

If you want to experience something new other than Windows Taskbar…

Advanced minimization of windows is included. You can use two effects of minimization: Scale and Genie. You can easily customize speed of minimization (or maximization). Set maximum speed and all windows will minimize without animation.

When the icon of minimized window appears in the dock you can see screenshot of the application. Now you can choose one of two methods for capturing a window image

Don’t want to minimize some windows? You can do that by adding it to exclusion list.

And now that you know what this app can do, I’m sure you would like to give it a try…

Download XWindows Dock

For more info, you can visit XWindows Dock homepage.

[tags]windows, desktop, enhancements, apps, software, application, download, free, review, rocketdock, os x dock, xwindows dock[/tags]

[via: TechSnack]