Mission Control on Windows 8 or Exposé Feature of Mac OS on Windows 7

Mac OS users probably know how useful Exposé or Mission control feature is. For those who don’t know, it makes switching open tasks/windows visually beautiful and easy. You can get a overlook of all the running windows and programs in one Desktop View.

Thumbnails of windows and programs are used to represent running apps and you can switch over to any one easily. Not just switching but all the fancies of zooming are included to give it more sophisticated appearance of Mission Control or Exposé.

Here is how, you can bring this novelty of Mac, Expose or Mission Control on Windows.

Mission Control on Windows 7 and 8

How to Install and Use Mission Control on Windows 7 / 8

Mission control is a portable standalone application for Windows. It comes in ZIP archive and doesn’t need installation. Just extract into any folder and double click on it to execute.

Important Actions

  1. Open the Selected Window / App – Left Mouse Button Click
  2. Open app and Minimize others – Left Button click holding CTRL Key.
  3. Zoom in/out application – Right Click on Thumbnail

See the working in action in Mission Control on Windows Demo Video. Watch it Full screen to get exact idea:

Grouping Thumbnails

In addition, it allows you to specify that multiple applications be grouped in the same pile. For example, you can specify that thumbnails of all web browser programs, such as Chrome, Opera, IE, Firefox, etc., be displayed in a single pile.

To do that- Open mc.cfg file in any text editor (may be notepad). There enter the names of Group or add names in existing groups like Browsers, Office, etc.

You may also specify application to exclude in Thumbnail view by mentioning in Mission Control Configuration file (mc.cfg) file.

Software has been tested on Windows 7 and Windows 8. It works perfectly on 7 while on windows 8, fullscreen Metro apps are ignored. I hope future releases support that too. It is indeed a nice initiative taken up by developer to bring Mac functionality on Windows.

[button-red url=”http://sourceforge.net/projects/mcsoft/” target=”_self” position=”left”] Download Mission Control W7 [/button-red]
Click Here to Leave a Comment Below 2 comments
David Steiner - November 21, 2012

Emcee is our commercial, but inexpensive version of this program, with full support for Windows 8 “Metro Apps.” It has a number of new features, such as a easy to use settings editor, hot key customization, mouse activation (hot corners or mouse wheel), better zooming (including ability to zoom an entire pile of thumbnails), a rewritten “engine” for smoother performance, InstallShield installation, and more.

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Dyrver Eriksson - January 10, 2013

Can you add one more function for Windows? For example the thing I love on Mac and KDE/Linux is the ability to have a scroll function in scroll-able sections of programs without any other application losing focus.

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