Shuffler

Having to work with a lot of windows on the desktop can easily become frustrating, especially if they don’t really fit together. Sure enough you can minimize those you need, but there are different types of third-party alternatives which want to make this task easier. For instance, Shuffler remembers default positions and helps you restore them at the press of a button.

The application quietly sits in the tray area for the duration of use. The associated menu is where you find all possible operations, and there isn’t really a main window to work with. The initial launch also asks whether or not to make the application run with Windows so that it’s ready by the time you reach the desktop.

Note that there isn’t a different way to make the application run on startup if the initial offer is discarded, but you can place a shortcut in the system Startup folder to bypass this inconvenience later on. On the other hand, you can simply assign a hotkey to the shortcut to just have it launched when needed.

For the application to be able to arrange windows on your desktop they first need to be added to a list. Sadly, this can take quite a while if the list is large, especially because you need to select the window, and add each at a time from the tray menu, with no function to batch select, or at least choose from a list of active windows.

Restoring is only possible if the window in question is either not in plain sight or in a different spot. When selected from the tray icon, the window returns to its saved position. Unfortunately, you can’t save a permanent list of create multiple profiles to load different ones based on task you perform.

All things considered, we can state that Shuffler isn’t quite prepared to fully fulfill all window management operations. The list of windows needs to be configured with each run, and there are no options to move to a different spot on the desktop, or change size specifications of target items.