I love ThinkGeek. I get their newsletter and get a kick out of checking out what new products they're carrying. I also maintain a wishlist there and occasionally add items that I think are cool. That way, whenever anyone asks me what I want for Christmas or my birthday, I can just tell them to check out my wishlist on ThinkGeek and Amazon (I keep one there too).

I often forget what I added to the wishlist just because I thought it was cool at the time. At Christmas this year, my brother in law surprised me by getting me something from there that I'd forgotten about. The StealthSwitch!

Hiding windows at work is pretty juvenile. When my father saw what I'd gotten, he said that some people at his office had installed a program called "the big cheese" or something like that, which would display a fake spreadsheet when they hit F1. He had the IT department un-install it and limit his employee's rights so they can't install applications now. Of course, he was concerned that I was doing something at work that I wanted to hide. But that's not the case!

I wanted the StealthSwitch foot pedal to play with as a third input device. I'm not a keyboard Nazi, but I am particular about the input devices that I use. I use the Microsoft Natural MultiMedia Keyboard and love the over sized Delete key arrangement, but really don't like what they did with the function keys. I am really a mouse guy and I fall back to using the mouse even when I know keyboard shortcuts for some things. For instance, I know that Ctrl+B builds in Visual Studio, but I have a custom toolbar shortcut that I use instead.

I used to have a cheap mouse with a thumb button that I had configured to enter the Alt+Tab keystroke. I found it to be VERY convenient since my right hand is on the mouse so often. When that mouse went bad, I got a Microsoft USB Comfort Optical Mouse 3000 because it has a thumb button and the scroll wheel features the horizontal tilt. While the mouse looks good, the horizontal scrolling isn't useful, and I'm disappointed by it because the Intellipoint software doesn't allow me to enter Alt+Tab as a keystroke for the thumb button. Tab isn't captured by the keystroke form, and I even tried to enter it directly into the registry but the driver didn't recognize it.

Enter the StealthSwitch. The software installed from the CD that came with the device only allowed for hiding windows, and even then it was limited to hiding all windows, the current window, or all but windows with a short list of keywords in the title. Even if I was going for the window hiding functionality, I would want to specify particular windows to hide and this didn't allow that. I figured I was going to have to write some software to use the pedal's input.

Then I found a newer version of the software on the (incredibly bad) StealthSwitch website. The latest version not only allows you to list the windows you do want to hide, but also has a screen to configure custom actions. Eureka!


Now I can have my Alt+Tab functionality again, and I don't have to worry about where my hands are ... I use my foot! Maybe I should look into the specialized foot pedals meant to replace the mouse or augment game play.

Or, I could give the Zero Tension Mouse a try ... nah, never mind.

Labels: devices, tools