I’ve been using a freeware utility on my computer for a while now called Glass2K that lets you set the transparency on any window – from 0% to 100%, and also to set a window to be “always on top”. It’s come in useful from time to time, and it was the only (free) one of it’s kind that I’d been aware of. But it did have some annoyances – like always showing a splash screen at startup, requiring a slightly unintuitive Ctrl-Alt-Shift key combination as you right-click in the title bar of a window to activate it, and, sometimes, “going nuts” while doing this and setting a transparency seemingly automatically and against my actual desire – causing me to have to go back and fix things.

Well – just yesterday I came across another freeware utility that does all of this and more, and which also dispenses with all of the above mentioned annoyances. It’s called PowerMenu. Not only does it let you set a window’s transparency, and make it “always on top”, but you can also “force” an application to minimize itself to your traybar (next to the clock) rather than to your taskbar. In addition, you can change the priority of an application via PowerMenu’s interface (you can do this from the Task Manager anyway, but it’s more easily accesible this way). All you have to do is right-click on the minimize button or the title bar and the options come up as context menu items. You can do all of this without ever having to take your hand off the mouse in order to reach for keys. Best of all, it has no splash screen, and it comes with various command line options for such things as disabling its own tray icon (so it just runs invisibly) and for automating the transparency level, tray icon-ifying, etc., of specific application windows for scripting purposes. As I had with Glass2K previously, I have it set to launch as a System Run process so that it’s always available to anybody currently logged in.

If I have any criticism of it, it’s that I’ve found it doesn’t work with a small number of application windows. So far, I’ve seen this incompatibilty with both DOS boxes and Pegasus Mail (the context menu items simply don’t show up). And, to give due credit to Glass2K, it doesn’t have Glass2K’s ability to remember transparency settings across application sessions. But these are more than made up for by its ease of use and increased functionality in comparison to the other application.

I like this utility so much that I’ve made it available as a download from my own site – this way I’ll never forget where to find it.

If you’re running Windows NT/2K/XP+ Give it a try. It’s cool.