14 DAY TRIAL // For some users boss keys are godsend especially if they work in a more restrictive environment. This is also the target for NCS WinVisible, a simple program that allows you to quickly hide the application windows on your screen most likely to get you displeased looks from your office mates if caught.
Installing the application on the system is not a tough job and it doesn’t take long to complete, either. The application shows a classic interface that is simple to use and sports all the options in the upper part of the screen. To make things more comfortable for the user the developer eliminated the menu bar and instead left an intuitive toolbar.
The moment you launch NCS WinVisible it will display all the tasks currently available in Windows taskbar, and Windows explorer, which is best left alone.
What the app misses are the applications minimized to system tray or the notification area. However, as soon as you bring them into full view, they will also be picked up by NCS WinVisible and available in the application list. Besides the possibility to make the application windows of the entries in the list disappear, the program can also be used to terminate their processes.
The screen showing the processes featuring an application window also comes with some information on the available entries. It is not much, but it is of help when trying to identify an entry. Thus, apart from the name of the process NCS WinVisible also makes available the name in the title bar as well as the process ID and the current visibility status.
During our testing we noticed that this boss-key utility does not perform perfectly with any application windows it encounters. Generally it manages to successfully hide an application window from view, leaving as trace of its activity only the running process. But in some cases, apps minimizing to notification area may not obey and still display the icon.
For NCS WinVisible to detect all the windows these have to be present on the taskbar. As such, windows automatically minimizing to system tray are not shown in NCS WinVisible if this is launched after they start. Even so, the moment they hit the taskbar the utility automatically detects them.
On the downside, sending them back to the notification area will cause a change of their visibility to “hidden” in NCS WinVisible processes screen, although their icon is still visible.
These are the exceptions, though. And in most cases, any window visible on the computer screen can be hidden with NCS WinVisible, even if it is set to minimize to the notification area.
For all this window hiding to be as comfortable for the user as possible the developer lets you trigger “show” and “hide” commands by pressing a key combination. The default one is Shift+Alt+H for making the screens disappear and Shift+Alt+S to make the visible again. There is also the possibility to set a shortcut for terminating their processes.
The principle driving NCS WinVisible is fairly simple. You select the processes (tick the checkboxes next to them) whose windows you want to be affected by the program.
As far as the configuration of the software goes, the program is not much of a challenge. All the options it puts at your disposal are easy to understand and definitely come in handy.
You can set it to launch with Windows and thus have it around at all times, check for updates at each start and minimize to system tray. Behavior settings let you enable automatic checking of new processes as well as set it to remember the last checked processes. Additionally, when pressing the hotkey to hide the windows you can also include NCS WinVisible itself in the process.
The application seems to cover all angles, since it also features an option that allows you to determine the visibility status of checked processes after the boss-key utility has been terminated.
NCS WinVisible is definitely not able to hide absolutely all applications from view, such as full screen games for instance. But it does a great job most when it comes to applications that run in normal conditions. A simple press of the hotkey and the application windows of all checked processes are automatically hidden from view. The only trace about them is in the list of running processes in a process manager.
During our tests we could not hide full-screen game windows. Also, in the case of full-screen video the window would become invisible, but sound would still be betraying its activity on the system (and in some cases some elements, such as codecs would be available in the system tray). The freebie brings a small but handy set of options and lets you toggle visibility on applications by simply hitting a key combination you define.
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