This is a picture of my current taskbar.
As you can see I’ve applied a hack which removes the text from each item on the taskbar, similar to the Windows 7 super bar (or whatever its called). It’s a registry hack. The thing I love about registry hacks is that they’re overhead free. I didn’t have to install any extra program to make this work. Here’s what you do:
1. Go into Regedit and find the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics
2. Create a new String value, name it MinWidth and set it to -255
3. Restart (or log off and log on again)
Simple!
Although we’ve installed nothing, we could now install VisualTaskTips (http://www.visualtasktips.com), which would give us a windows 7 style preview of any item we hover over in the taskbar.
Coincidentally, I’ve been experimenting with using Taskbar Shuffle to colour code my taskbar icons during particularly long sessions.
I know it sounds daft, but I have this theory that when we look for an icon for a program, we identify by colour first. Thus, if we need firefox, our eye is drawn to the orange / red hues at the end of the taskbar, and we find it faster. It also looks way better:
