What is the point of Aero Peek?

Question

Basically, see the title of this question.

By Aero Peek, I am in this case referring to the 'hover' effect you get when you move to the rightbottom of the taskbar area, the 'Show Desktop' button effect while hanging over it (NOT clicking it). The same effect can be manipulated by the WIN+SPACE key combination, which would make me think it might be more useful given the freedom my mouse has in wandering around. But yet, all it allows me to do is look that I can tell, so what is the point of it?

I get to see all my icons, so I would expect I could go click-click-click of only wanting those windows minimized/maximized, or actually allowing access to my desktop icons till I let go of the WIN key in the key combination.

It seems like a totally pointless feature to me at this point.

Answer 1

The "Show Desktop" (bottom right of screen) part of Aero Peek is used to see gadgets on the desktop without messing with your window layout.

Answer 2

Peek gives you the power of X-ray vision, so you can peer past all your open windows straight to the Windows 7 desktop. Simply point to the right edge of the taskbar—and watch open windows instantly turn transparent, revealing all your hidden icons and gadgets.

So far so good, and here is where it gets 'useful'

To quickly reveal a buried window, point to its taskbar thumbnail. Now only that window shows on the desktop.

You can follow this tutorial in case you want to disable "Aero Peek"

Off Topic: if you want to pep up Aero Peek a little bit, have a look at T3Desk, a slick, 3D window manager with Aero Peek support.

Hover a specific thumbnail, and Aero Peek kicks in to display the program's shrunken 3D view.

Kudos to Lee @ downloadsquad.com for this find.

T3Desk is freeware.

Answer 3

My guess is that Aero Peek was added for consistency. If you are able to peek at a window by hovering on the window's thumbnail, you should be also able to do it with the desktop, which, after all, is a window by itself (it does show with the other windows when you press Win-Tab)

And, if you have gadgets, the Aero Peek is definitely useful, just as useful as when you hover on your Twitter app thumbnail to peek at your timeline.

Answer 4

It (mouse over effect) likely exists for the same reason why the vast majority of windows applications have a Icon > Menu > Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize. If you can have a shotcut key, you're likely to have a button/menu combination associated with it. I never understood the reasoning for having this menu and include a menu option for Move when the title bar is right next to it... unless you consider automation tools that tangentially link into the UI.

There are tools that don't make UI calls, but they can find a button in a window, and press it. There are also accessibility tools that can only interact via these controls. For every control that has a keyboard-only method, there usually exists a mouse-only method. I'll admit there are a lot of shortcuts that don't make sense, but for completeness I can understand why they exist.

As for the peek itself, I find it useful to find covered gadgets.

Answer 5

Short-cuts are used mainly by power users. Typical users are not usually aware they exist, and it can be hard to teach people who are not good with computers why something happens if they don't see the virtual extension of their hand (the mouse pointer) actually go ahead and change something.

Also, if you are working with the mouse a lot, say web browsing, and you want to quickly check an RSS feed, the weather, a webcam, any kind of real-time gadget you might have on the desktop, it is a really easy spot to hit: slide all the way down and to the right.

Windows has this kind of placement for a lot of their key UI pieces. The close button is all the way to the top right, and the start button is all the way to the bottom left. Actually you will even notice on dual monitor setups that there is a bit of a hitch which traps your mouse if you dont move too fast past one of these points (actually only tested on the start button)