SeeThroughWindows [ -h | -i | -u | -V ]
SeeThroughWindows is a task bar app that makes the foreground window transparent when you press a hotkey, and turns it back to opaque when you press the hotkey again.
The transparency level and the hotkey are configurable.
When you run SeeThroughWindows, all you get is an icon in the System Tray that looks like blueish sunglasses.
Double-clicking on that brings up the Options window. Here's where you configure the hotkey and the level of transparency to use. Check the Preview check box to see the effect of the transparency setting.
SeeThroughWindows has the ability to make transparent windows 'Click-through'. In essence, this makes the window disappear as far as the mouse is concerned. You cannot click it anymore: mouse clicks will 'fall through' to underlying windows. You can still activate the window using Alt+Tab, however. (You'll need this to untransparenticize the window again!) Optionally, when a window is rendered 'Click-through', you can choose to keep it in front of other windows. This creates a sort of overlay on your screen that's impervious to mouse clicks - almost as if there's a glass plate with an semi-transparent image on it in front of your monitor. I'm sure you can think of some good use for that ;-)
When pressing Windows+Up and Windows+Down (i.e. the Windows key in combination with the up and down arrow keys) maximize and minimize the current window. To avoid conflicts with Windows 7 itself, SeeThroughWindows uses Control+Windows+Up/Down/Left/Right. Try it and you'll love it. Also, if you use multiple monitors, you'll wonder how you ever got along without Windows+Left and Windows+Right, which move the current window over to the next (or previous) monitor.
If you experience problems with the use of these keys (for instance, if they conflict with another application), you can disable them by unchecking the appropriate check boxes in the Options window.
Pressing the hotkey (Shift+Control+Z by default, which is really easy to press) will turn the foreground window transparent.
Press the hotkey again to go back to the way things were. Incidentally: you don't have to do that: you can 'transparenticize' as many windows as you like, and turn them opaque again in any order you like - or not. When exiting, SeeThroughWindows will change all windows back the way they were.
While this is somewhat of a useless example, you could use SeeThroughWindows to keep an eye on some running task, whose status is obscured by the window in front of it, or have a quick look at the web page you're writing about, etc. I find myself using it all the time, anyway.
This is free software; see WA2LWinTools/man/COPYING for copying conditions. There is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.