The main application has a basic window that allows the management of various layouts. Adding new ones, editing existing ones, configuring the options, all the basic things you can expect from any normal application. When closed or minimized it sits in the tray and offers a tray icon with quick access to layouts that are enabled (it’s possible to exclude layouts from populating the tray menu since some layouts are not meant to be applied directly).
A layout is a collection of window definitions that contain conditions and actions. Conditions that describe the window and how it should be detected and matched and actions that allow various actions to be taken such as minimizing, moving, relocating, moving it to a different screen, offsetting the position, maximizing it to a certain screen, etc. There are three types of layouts:
- Normal Layouts: these contain window definitions where the entire layout can be applied to a current desktop.
- Individual Window Layouts: these contain window definitions that can be applied individually through an active window context popup menu.
- Live Layouts: these are layouts where the system is monitored and when windows that match any or all definitions it will apply the actions to that window as it becomes available and gets noticed.
Sounds complicated? Not really, but the Window Layout Manager offers enough features and combinations that it does need a lot of fine tune control over how the application behaves, as can be seen from the main configuration options:
- Restoring a layout after a specified time-out (if enabled) will pop up a small window after a layout or other actions are applied so they can be kept or undone.
- Ignoring certain process names for the Automatic Capture feature.
- Options that fine tune what is included in an Automatic Capture of all the available desktop windows.
- Detection options that control what types of windows are looked at and considered when a layout is applied.
- A check newer version on startup because I had to implement a common approach to that for a different product and I used WiLMA as the test application in which I tried out the best approach for it. Needless to say, I never have to check for newer versions because I’m quite aware when I modify it and compile a new build. :-)
Get Windows Layout Manager [>>]
