I Think I’ve Got It

It has long been a soul wrenching divide in my personality: I love crazy, well designed desktop patterns, and I like to design and work with dark background screens. I like having a ton of windows open, hate minimizing windows and using the dock, but like uncluttered workspaces. I was taught that a designer should work with a 50% grey desktop. Eck, I can’t stand it. So what am I to do? Along comes Think, yet another wonderful piece of mac freeware.

Think basically lets you pull one or more applications forward, putting the rest behind a translucent, dark backdrop. You can use it’s built in switcher and some handy (reconfigurable) keyboard shortcuts to switch between applications and bring multiple applications forward. In combination with Quicksilver, it’s really quite powerful. And when I want to see my desktop, I just switch to it and ⌘-H it and presto!

The one thing that bugs me is that the task switcher requires a keyboard command to pull it up, but doesn’t allow for keyboard control; you have to switch to your mouse. I took my Logitech mouse, which has way too many buttons, and mapped the “one-touch search” button to pop up the Think task switcher so I can do it all with one hand.