Leading the charge

Last summer, I took some flack for hating on Apple and the way they name their operating system.

But despite the fact that I’m a real PC-user, I’m not in the habit of turning my nose up at cool features just because they came from the brains at Apple. Part of what I like about using a PC is that I can do just about anything on it.

Two of the features from OS X that I’ve always really liked are expose and the object dock.

[Image removed]It turns out that there are two apps for the PC that let you do both of those things in XP. Stardock makes a free app called ObjectDock that is really simple and it works perfectly. It integrates seamlessly and it’s really cleaned up my desktop - I just put all the old icons onto the dock, and I’ve had no problems with it.

[Image removed]The other app is not free, although it gives you a very generous 30-day trial period. It’s called TopDesk, and it works really well. I did end up buying a license to use it, and the full version has turned out to be more stable than the trial version I was using (occasionally it would hiccup and have trouble resizing my open windows). There are other apps that give Windows XP the expose-like functionality that I’m after, but none of them have the same smoothness and polish that TopDesk offers. In my mind, it’s definitely worth the $10.