Which Expose clone is better: Entbloess or Winplosion?

Hey guys,

Looking for an expose clone. From what I hear, these are the top two programs for windows that do this. Which of these is better? Having 512 MB Ram, I'm somewhat concerned about memory usage. I heard that Entbloess has great OS X like functionality, but uses an incredibly high amount of memory, while Winplosion is pretty good, and has very very low memory usage, but not as much functionality. I also heard that Winplosion doesn't work well with Konfabulator, but that could've changed with a more updated release.

Anyways, which program is smoother, easier to use, nicer on the eyes, and with my amount of RAM, should I be concerned about the 30MB or so memory usage of entbloess?

Any help would be appreciated. Thankee

#292914

well... with 512mb ram, i don't think you should be concerned about mem usage... in my opinion anyway (although i worry about mem usage myself... )... what else do you have running (theming-wise)?

besides, you can tell entbloess to clear its cache (or something) and the ram consumption would go down... i personally use the ram optimiser build into truelaunchbar to do it... although, its widely accepted as a bad idea to use ram optimisers (screws up the disk access/ram priority thingy...), i do it out of habit (which is bad, anyway)...

back to the point in question... i personally use entbloess, and for me (even if it eats up 20MB ram most of the time) it has gotta be the smoothest, fastest,coolest looking expose clone out there...

but, there's a catch. development seems to have stopped (probably apple and their cease-and-desist letters again, look what happened to the dock-which-shall-not-be-named-or-i'll-get-banned), and there is no way to tell the program to clear its own cache after a prespecified amount of time (at least not that i know of)...

tried winplosion too, some time before deciding on entbloess. suffice to say, i moved on rather quickly.

there's something called TopDesk, too. And people say that its working wonderfully with widgets (or something)... but i haven't tried it yet. google it and try it out? last i heard it was at version 1.3...

finally, there's Siwu's expose thingy. Check his category in community apps for details... Haven't tried that one either...

P.S. I have 746MB of ram... and i still feels thats its not enough... maybe its just the way that WinXP squanders away free ram?

#292924

I've been using Topdesk trial version... It's pretty good about memory; still definitely in development. There's a bug with Firefox that they know about and are working on.

It definitely plays well with widgets/Rainlendar on the desktop, etc.

#292937

I bought the full Topdesk version (about 5 quid) and I love it, never had any problems with it. The resource usage is lower than Entbloess, and it deals with widgets, Avedesk, Winamp skins etc perfectly. It does minimised windows really well (translucent effect) and the animation's incredibely smooth. I used to use Winplosion and Entbloess, but I like Topdesk the most.

#292941

hmm... gotta try topdesk myself... but before that, how smooth is smooth...

Edit: Just tried it out... woahhhhh, smoooth... Not gonna replace my entbloess tho, but, darn....

Buttery-smooth...

#292948

hmm... gotta try topdesk myself... but before that, how smooth is smooth...

Edit: Just tried it out... woahhhhh, smoooth... Not gonna replace my entbloess tho, but, darn....

Buttery-smooth...

Why wouldnt it replace your entbloess if you like it so much?

Btw, I just got entbloess. it's goodness alright. thanks for the help. though i may have to try topdesk

#293031

I loved Entbloess, but its Multi-Monitor support blows. So bought TopDesk now and that has been great. Only one bug in it to do with hibernation, but they have already fixed that and will be released in the next update.

#293091

Why wouldnt it replace your entbloess if you like it so much?

Well, maybe is part blind customer loyalty, and part the huge customizablity (is that even a word) of entbloess... besides, i only have one monitor....

#293093

haha true.

So you guys would recommend that I stick with Entbloess or try out TopDesk? I guess Winplosion is completely out of the picture now, right? lol.

#293165

I think you should at least try topdesk, it really is a great program!

#293199

Out of Entobless or Winplosion, I'd have to say that Exposé is the best

// Lou

#293312

Nothin beats the original, eh Louie? What's different between the real deal and entbloess anyway... been wondering for a long time... somebody somewhere said that it was nearly the same. is that true?

#293396

The differences are in the architecture: Exposé is virtually zero-memory consuming, because it only has to invoke the window instances from the Quartz Extreme Window Server, and render the content as a texture onto a polygon. So Mac OS X can do whatever it wants, 2 or 3D with the window with zero memory penalty.

The live update of the contents is more or less "fake" in the clones. They refresh the window screenshot periodically, but it is still not the same thing as having the real window being manipulated directly by a window server. You can watch a dozen movies simultaneously with Exposé, try to watch just one with entbloess.

Exposé also provides navigation features. That is: click and hold over a file, drag it to the corner to activate Exposé, drop it into the window you like most, and it's done. The clones cannot do anything like that, because Windows is just not meant for that. It is more or less the same as in the Spotlight case: it's built into the core of the system, so it can do many more things for free (memory speaking), instead of having limited access to the windows or file system and consuming a lot of memory.

Exposé, to finish, also includes the Dashboard, which is just amazing. You have to use it to know how superior to everything else it is.

It is very very hard to describe the experience of the Aqua User Interface: it is not only that well publicized apps, it's the whole design that is very superior to the WIndows interface, almost two years after switching I still find myself being suprised by some other neat detail that I previously ignored, or delighted by the "Mac way of doing things". I don't know, you just gotta try it. Please. Do. You'll understand.

#294683

Ooooh... Heard great things about quartz... but to think that they were rendered onto polys... oooh... darned need to switch... but horribly expensive... oh...

Oh well... with another few years of savings... i might just probably be able to switch (or be able to create a free port of OSX running of the intel build of openDarwin... thats probably how long a few years could be...)

EDIT: Going off topic for a while (sorry unbe and all the other mods)... Just tried out my friend's Powerbook G4... PowerPC 1.6, 512MB ram... Tried out everything (like a kid in a candy store...). It's like... woah... Darned i gotta switch...

Back to Expose, it was like... woah... Smoother then anything i've ever seen before...

Viva la Quartz Extreme...

#294762

Geez... I wonder why Embosse won't work on my computer? It said that I need to install Direct X 9.0c, but I can't install it! After downloading the Direct X 9.0c client for Microsoft, I install it and it saids that 'It have been installed!' It's weird coz' when i check 'dxdiag', it still stated Direct X 9.0B. I wonder can anyone cope with my prob?

#296010

Guess...although yes Entlboess has really sick features blah blah and is better than Winplosion. It SUX up memory.

i Have a 3.0 GHZ computer w/ 1 GB of ram

and it takes as little as 30GB of memory and as much as 170MB!!..yes you heard me. i was owrking on an excel spreadsheet and word document and i looekd at the recourses and it was eating up 170 MB of RAM..thast more than Half Life 2!!!

I'll have 2 try top Desk.. Entbloess is out of the quesitonf for me until they fix there memory usage.

Right Now I'm using winplostion and love it...its really fast and real smooth. Though could use more functions.

#305370

everytime i run winplosion (before) i had problems with the background defaulting to 16 colours when i was in the window switcher, but it ran very smoothly. entbloess does seem a lot easier on the eyes (to me, anyhow) but i would go with winplosion (though using neither anymore, i've run out of hotspots! lol).

#307975

can you provide the actual link to the TopDesk website

#308964

@orrange27: ever heard of google?

#308966

sorry kind of answered my own question.kind of found it already.

here's the link:

http://www.otakusoftware.com/topdesk/

#308967