miniMIZE is a small desktop enhancing application that catches windows that you minimize and puts a thumbnail of the main application window onto your desktop. You can set the direction for which way across the desktop the icons go to suit the best layout for your desktop. For easy identification the icons from each program are displayed on the thumbnails
miniMIZE is no longer developed and the website has all but gone. It does seem to work pretty well on Vista/Windows 7 32-bit, Windows 8 and 64-bit versions do work up to a point although most of the built in Windows components like (Internet) Explorer, Notepad, Paint etc don’t minimize.
Although it isn’t compatible with 64-bit operating systems, Thumbwin is a more reliable tool than miniMIZE for minimizing and restoring application windows to thumbnails on 32-bit versions of Windows XP, Vista, 7 and also 8. ThumbWin’s feature set is very much like what miniMIZE has to offer.
The thumbnail arrangements can be either top to bottom or left to right with options to auto arrange or display them on a secondary monitor. Also 6 hotkeys can be configured and thumbnail or icon sizes can be reduced or enlarged up to 300px with transparency. The Exclusions window is slightly less useful than that in miniMIZE because it only allows a window or class name to be excluded and not a whole application.
If you right click on the tray icon there are some options to hide, arrange, minimize or restore all open windows. Despite the options and functions on offer, Thumbwin is very low on memory usage and used only around 600K even with several open windows minimized to thumbnails. Unfortunately the program’s official website is in the Japanese language.
This tool comes from Microsoft Research and is a prototype software which presumably was a concept they looked at for integrating into Windows at some point. Scalable Fabric works on the idea of a boundary on the desktop, and dragging a window out of this area will minimize it to a thumbnail in an animated way similar to Windows 7’s “Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing” option. You can also click on the window minimize button and restore it again by clicking on the thumbnail.
It’s worth noting that Scalable Fabric dates back to 2005 and was just a development release, the side effects being that it’s still quite buggy in how it deals with the windows and memory usage can fluctuate quite a bit. That being said, the program seemed to work in Windows 7 32-bit without major issues (64-bit was patchy) although the .NET Framework 1.1 is required.
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