Lebendig is a Windows enhancement that will animate your windows, making them twist around as they open, recede into the horizon when closed, or perform any of 15 different actions when opening or closing. Works on programs, windows, and dialogs.
The world is split into two kinds of people: those who like to customize their desktop and like a lot of eye candy, and those who like to strip their OSs from any software that is not 100% necessary.
Those in the former category will like this program. Here are more notes on this one:
- The animation: what’s interesting about the animation is that it is mostly illusionary; your window doesn’t actually, say, spin around, but rather an animated frame precedes the window right at the point of display, creating a very effective illusion.
- Launching and ending actions: Expand/Shrink Rectangles, Spin 180 or 360 right/left, Windows Zoom, Expand/Collapse inward or outward, Slide:top/down, bottom/up, right/left, left/right, Roll:top/down, bottom/up, right/left, left/right, Fade in and Fade out.
- Starting and ending points: can be defined, either from the location of the mouse or another set point on the screen.
- Windows affected: you can select from a number of Window types (e.g. Apps, explorer windows, dialogs, etc.) Make sure you check the types you are interested in.
- Other controls: include the resolution (number of steps used), delay, etc.
- Memory use: just over 5 megs. Not bad at all for a program like this one.
- Stability/performance: quite good. I usually expect problems with this sort of program, but encountered none whatever.
- User interface: options accessible through an icon in the start menu, including the ability to quickly enable/disable and/or shut down. It would have been good if it allowed you to not display the Lebendig icon in the start menu.
Ok so perhaps there is a third kind of user that is in the middle of the two described above, an “average” user that wouldn’t mind adding customizations to Windows if they are nice enough, problem free, and do not cost too much by way of system resources. I am guessing that a good chunk of these users will like Lebendig as well.
The verdict: a nice distraction that doesn’t tax the system but otherwise not too practically useful. It is fairly well implemented though, as eye candy goes. Try it out for yourself.
Version Tested: 1.0 (build 4th May 2008)
Compatibility: Windows XP /Vista..
Go to the developer’s page to download the latest version (approx 658K).
