It takes all your open windows and makes an endless tape out of it. When you need to switch to another window, instead of using Alt+Tab you simply move your cursor to the edge of the screen. Depending on the position on the tape another windows scrolls into your view and moreover, another little loop appears in the center of the screen so that you have a better control of all windows on the tape. The windows are blurred when moving but they sharpen after reaching your destination.

The last feature you get with this utility is an overview bar on the top of the screen with thumbnails and count of all open windows. You can click any thumbnail to activate the loop and bring that window in front of you. You can even save the active tape of windows as a session and activate it later. I was really surprised by the number of options available, including loop speed, transparency, arrangement and more. Deskloops is a nice and powerful replacement of the standard CoolSwitch.

Working with this concept is a little bit strange at the beginning. I had to create a screenshot in Gimp using copy paste and I had to switch between the main Gimp window and the screenshot window several times to finish the process and save the image.

The left image displays the way the Alt Tab Replacement handles this process. A small window pops up whenever you press ALT + TAB that displays the information that are shown in the left image.

A preview image of the current active tab will be displayed if it has not been minimized in the taskbar. Switching through the open windows displays a screenshot of the current window that would be opened.

If the window has been minimized only the information in the taskbar are displayed. Programs that reside in the system tray are not shown at all. But those are not shown as well with the original way of handling things.

The software is free for personal use and can be setup with ease. What the software does is the following, it creates a layer for the software that you want to install and emulates the surrounding operating system. Everything the newly installed software does is now done inside this layer and not in the underlying operating system.

Update: Symantec has bought Altiris and integrated the company’s product line. The program is now know as Symantec Software Virtualization Solution (SVS). Information about the products are still available on the Symantec website.

A free version is unfortunately no longer offered by Symantec.

Update 2: The product’s name has been changed again to Symantec Endpoint Virtualization Suite. The program is only offered to small business and enterprise customers of Symantec. Key features of the program are application virtualization, on-demand application streaming, desktop connection brokering and data-on-demand services.

Desktop users looking for alternatives can take a look at Sandboxie or Returnil
for functionality that is similar to that provided by Altiris’ Software Virtualization Solution.