Afloat - Rescue an Application from Window Chaos

Though apps like Think are a great aid for focusing your attention on a single task, it’s not often that I’m doing one thing and one thing only on my Mac. For instance, while writing this post in MarsEdit a total of 14 apps are open and 11 windows are scattered across my screen. The various Exposé views make it a snap to find the window that I want to address, but one of these windows is VLC media player wherein I’m watching one of my all time favorites (The Tragedy of Macbeth). It would be great if I could keep this application on top of the pile no matter where my primary focus lies.

Afloat from Infinite Labs makes this possible. With Afloat installed, just bring your chosen application to the front of the pack and look in its ‘Window’ menu. Select ‘Keep Afloat’ (or press Cmd + cntrl + A) and now no matter what application you switch to, your chosen application will stay visible. Afloat also lets you adjust the opacity of your floating applications as well, which is great if you want to keep a window open, an Adium chat window, for instance, but still need to see what’s happening behind it. If your on a MacBook Air or new MacBook Pro, you can use trackpad gestures to access Afloat’s features, and you can even have multiple floating windows if you choose.

I’ve been using Afloat for quite some time (mostly to keep VLC windows floating while I read in NetNewsWire), but Leopard’s architecture changed the way the system interacts with input managers, and as this was the method that Afloat (as well as a bunch of other applications) relied on to modify the behavior of windows, Leopard effectively killed the plugin. Afloat now uses a new plugin-manager called PlugSuit. From their website:

PlugSuit uses a different loading method than other plug-in managers, which are predominantly based on InputManager loading, a way of loading plug-ins that Apple will remove. When this happens, PlugSuit will still be able to load your plug-ins.

Obviously, Infinite Labs (the makers of Afloat) were somewhat shaken when Unsanity’s APE (Application Enhancer) caused so many problems when Leopard arrived and decided to design their own. PlugSuit is designed to be ‘future proof’ and makes managing other plugins easy from one central place in System Preferences.

Afloat doesn’t work with all Mac apps, but I have yet to personally encounter one that I’d like to keep on top and have Afloat fail me. Let me know if you find any cool uses for Afloat besides what I have listed here.

Download Afloat from Infinite Labs. It’s freeware.