So I got to thinking the other day that another potentially nice feature for WindowHider would be a kill switch.  In case of course your boss knows you use WindowHider and comes by looking to see what you are up to, with then intention of double clicking on WindowHider in the task bar and choosing to show the windows.

So ofcource I went ahead and added a kill switch.  Go to the settings page and configure another key combonation, just like you do for the key combo to hide windows.  Then when that key combo is triggered any hidden windows will be closed and so will window hider itself.   Go ahead and download the newest version at the WindowHider page.

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

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

Welcome back folks, So I told you about monitoring processes but sometimes using a script isn’t so easy.  So I bring ProcessMonitor a tool for monitoring the new processes as they launch on your computer.  It monitors the processes and adds them to a list in a text box.  Most recent at the top.

Download Here

It is amaizing how often new processes are launched on your computer, all of them doing their own thing and a lot of times you have no idea they are doing it.  This can be a dangerious thing if your friends have been learning about office warfare and are startring to install things on your computer.  However it does us little good to just watch the task manager since there are a lot of processes that start when your computer starts up and it can be hard to sort it all out. 

However monitoring new processes can be quite useful since that will show you what new things are cropping up all the time.  Fortunately for all of us there is a great scripting language that comes pre built into windows machines called Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) that when coupled with the Visual Basic Scripting language (vbs) will allow us to monitor new processes. 

Lets look at the code after the break. Read more