As screen sizes/resolutions continue to grow, more and more web users have stopped browsing the web in fullscreen mode. Since a lot of websites are designed in a fixed-sized fashion, they usually create humongous white space on either side of a site’s content pane. This is especially so at screen resolutions of 1680*1050 px and up.

Maxto Illustration

Windows Vista has a just a few  measures in place to order your windows in such a way that you can take advantage of your screen real-estate optimally. These measures are limited to stacking windows next to each other vertically and horizontally. With some manual juggling you can get the windows just right, but you’re bound to continually repeat yourself many a time since Windows doesn’t generally do a good job of remembering window positions (yes, even if you use the shift-click-close trick).

MaxTo is a free Windows app that has a more elegant take on efficient window management. This lightweight [free] piece of software provides a straightforward UI in which you can define so called “regions”. After having defined these, just place a window approximately within a region and hit the maximize-button. The window or dialog will maximize right up to the limits of the predefined region. This simple but ingenious concept will undoubtedly inspire a flurry of optimal workflows for your Windows PC. And if you do prefer a window to span the whole screen occasionally, just press and hold the shift key while maximizing a window.

My laptop (Dell XPS M1710) sports big, high-resolution screen (17″ at 1920×1200), so I’m very prone to the issues of window management. Not only does the illegibility of these types of screens make you squinty-eyed, websites also reveal huge amounts of white space along the sides. Therefore, I prefer not to maximize windows — ever. I had been using Windows’ manual provisions to order my windows for the longest time and was growing more and more frustrated with the utter clumsiness of it all.

As I’ve only used MaxTo for a little while, I can’t testify for its performance in the long run, but my short experience with it is all positive. It doesn’t show signs of bogging your system down very much [despite its .NET underpinnings]. The only point of improvement that I could find is that one should be able to define regions more arbitrarily. The current implementation enforces strict table-like layouts, save for ‘cellspanning’ (it’s hard to explain, try the app out and you’ll see what I mean exactly).

Advanced window management features in Windows 7

Windows 7 — Microsoft’s upcoming iteration of Windows — will include more advanced window management facilities out-of-the-box. If you’ve been keeping your eye on the evolution of 7, you may have seen demos of Aero Snaps:

While AeroSnap is certainly a step forward, Windows 7 still lacks the flexibility of something like MaxTo. On the other hand, one could argue that integrating MaxTo’s functionality into Windows would over-complicate things for regular users, since it’s more geared towards power-users. Either way, MaxTo is a valuable find for a great price (free!) and will mostly likely become one of my essential Windows applications as time goes by.

(via)