Emptying out my Tray - V (Transparent 4)

Member Name: yhwman

Product:	Transparent 4
Date:	03/08/01 (203 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Does the job for free

Disadvantages: None

“I have used many great freeware utilities in my life; and I feel like I should pay back a debt. I will never ask for money for this program; it will always be free.”, so says Jay Guerette author of Transparent. But what is Transparent? Well, it’s a teeny little program that removes the background from the text under the icons on your windows desktop. Obviously this is only worth having if you use wallpaper on your computer (And as such it makes a great companion program for Panorama) otherwise you see through the desktop coloured icon background to, um, the desktop coloured desktop.

There are several programs that perform this sort of task but a lot of them take the kitchen sink approach and end bloating in a Microsoft style. Transparent does exactly what it says on the tin (webpage) and only that. The executable (That I run anyway, more later) is only 25k, it’s using a mere 20k of memory and has used 3 seconds of computer time in the hour and half it’s been on. So it’s hardly a big drain on your resources!

However, these svelte like resource requirements do come with a downside. The user interface is, well, there just isn’t one! The default way of telling Transparent to behave is to use /command_line_switches. Oooh, I’ve come over all DOS like. You can set the text colour in several ways, one of which is to set it to the desktop colour, which means you can control it with Panorama as long as all your wallpaper is full screen.

But if that sounds like a complete nightmare to you, don’t worry – Jay has provided a few different versions of the Transparent executable that come with various switches on as default and it’s one of these that I use.

Well, I don’t think there’s much left to say really. Transparent does the job better than any of the other options and does it for free! You can get hold of it from http://people.ne.mediaone.net/jguerette/transparen
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