I spent the last few days doing a major overhaul on Window Hider.  Rebuilt the GUI, added some features, and overall just beefed it up.  I also added a page dedicated to Window Hider since it is one of the most popular downloads.

I expanded the hot corner features a little to allow you to choose if the hot corner will only hide the windows or if it will toggle hide and show.  I added this feature mostly because when you lock your computer it puts the mouse at 0,0 and will unhide your windows without your knowing it.  Also it is a little to easy to hit that corner on accident while your boss is standing there.  Set this feature on the settings page.

Second I added the ability to filter the processes based on their title.  So now you can have two copies of Internet Explorer for example, one with work on it and the other with hulu or some other favorite site.  The filter just looks to see if the title contains the string so partial strings work as well.  Further you can leave the process name field blank to just hide all processes by name.

Third I improved the process adding method.  Now there is a form that pops up and gathers information so you can more easily define what your looking for.  Also I added an icon on the add process dialog that when drug over the top of other windows will fill in the boxes with that windows process and title.

Check it out here

So this poor guy stopped by our office with his son to ask a quick question.  What did the people in my office do? Well they gave his son silly string of course and pointed him down the hall at his dad.  He enjoyed it so much he kept asking for more silly string, we were out unfortunately.

silly string attack

My boss is a bit more tech savvy than your average management employee and he also reads my website periodically and so he assumes, quite incorrectly i assure you, that I am always running Window Hider and misconstrues and frantic keyboard mashing when he enters the room as me attempting to hide things from him. Which got me thinking that while a key combo to hide/unhide your windows is a good idea it is also a bit noisy.

My solution to the problem was to add a “hot corner”. What that means is if you move your mouse to the upper left hand corner of the (primary) screen it will also trigger the hide/unhide mechanism. This is a much quieter and stealthy operation. This can of course be disable by a check box and it does nothing to interfere with the key combo to hide/unhide. Anyways not much else to it so I present you with

WinHider1.1

Back to the low tech for today’s article. I don’t know if you remember this one but back in the day it was fun to take the mouse ball from your friends/schools/coworkers mouse and let them be confused for a while. This sort of fun can still continue with optical mice and it is actually easier to be sneaky about it. What do you do you might ask? Simply slap some masking tape over the sensor and the mouse is a ball-less optical mouse. An important note though, don’t use scotch tape, it doesn’t have quite the same effect.

Another fun one is just to hook an extra wireless mouse up to their computer and “help” them get their work done.

Have fun!

Made a couple small revision to owexec at the request of  readers.  PSEXEC has a flag that allows you to reference a local file and have PSEXEC copy it over to the destination which is kinda handy.  So I added the -copy flag to owexec.  If you add -copy to the command line then it will find the file on the local computer and copy it over to the admin$ share on the destination computer.  Then execute it from there.  Not a terribly necessary flag but it can be helpful.  The second update is the flag -nowait which just makes it not ask you to press a key at the end before exiting.  Enjoy.

owexec page