Swept Away

[razorsedge]

Windows only: Swept Away is a simple system tray utility that automatically minimizes applications that you aren't using.

Attachment 35751

What it does: Minimizes inactive windows after a user-defined period of time to keep your working desktop clear. Swept Away was inspired by the Mac-only SpiritedAway.

Usage: There's really nothing to it - just run Swept Away, set the Time before minimizing (it defaults to 300 seconds (i.e., 5 minutes). You can choose to have Swept Away run at startup through the preferences menu, but by default it will not start up with Windows.
swept-away-exclusions.png

There are some windows that you just don't want to minimize no matter how long they're inactive. To compensate, Swept Away has an exclusion list that lets you pick the applications you never want Swept Away to minimize. To exclude a running application, just right-click the Swept Away icon and pick the application you want to exclude on the Exclude list. Unless you deselect it, Swept Away will never minimize windows from that application.

How much you use it is up to you, but I find it very useful in conjunction with Dropcloth, which is on Swept Away's default exclude list. Using the two together is a great way to create a really focused workspace.

Swept Away is portable, so you can grab just the .exe here. It's also open source, so you can check out the source code here. Swept Away is written in Autohotkey.

Changelog:

* Version 0.3: Bug fixes, adding ability to change polling time for computers seeing higher-than-desired CPU load, changed minimizing method to work with Firefox's trim_on_minimize tweak for saving a bit of RAM.
* Version 0.2: Few bug fixes, lots of code optimization. Addresses reported high CPU usage.
* Version 0.1: Released