I used my notebook to demo something the other day and I got a resounding round of snorts and snickers when my desktop popped up on the main screen. Were people mocking my Hello Kitty wallpaper? Nah. I don't run with wallpaper. Haven't since Windows 3.1, when my color palette would freak out after something caused desktop to repaint... at the time, a quality bitmap caused a slow down for painting too which sucked. You know, back when video cards were video cards - instead of GPU's - and had less memory than... a latte? Like 8MB of on-board VRAM and you were rockin' to have that.

Anyway, no, they weren't mocking that. They were gawking at the position of my taskbar. When pressed with questions as to "why would I do something so weird" I answered. Hoo boy, did I answer. Let me explain why I have a left docked taskbar.

It all started when I wanted to have the taskbar at the top of my screen. I think that originally happened because of some wannabe Mac theme, but once it ended up there, it was sorta nice. You see, my most used application is Remote Desktop Connection. Not Outlook and not IE. Not Word and certainly not PowerPoint. It's RDC. RDC is my gateway to the machines that are running apps like Outlook and IE as well as server boxes that I might not have physical access to. Most pointedly, it's very handy when I'm on my fat ass in the living room, remotely connected to my "main" machine that's in the den, happily collecting email.

What does RDC have to do with the taskbar? Plenty. When I started moving the taskbar around the desktop I was running a notebook that ran with 1024x768 and connecting to desktops running either 1024x768 or 1280x1024. This meant scroll bars. This also meant that when the RDC window opened, the Start button was always hidden off screen, due to the scrolling. If I put the taskbar on the top, I'd always have access to it, without scrolling. I could lose the bottom 10-15% of the remote desktop and not notice it or scroll to it. Yay!

Enter the bad ISV. I hate you guys. While the Win32 API is not a small library and sometimes not an "easy" place to play, it is pretty well documented. Yet nothing can make up for bad coding... you see, there's a way to get the "virtual desktop" area - which takes into account things like screens and taskbar location - and there's a way to get "actual screen size" via code. Most applications will open in a default location or the last saved position, right? Yeah, well, if the crappy coder based these locations on "actual screen size" and told the window to open at 0,0, it will open squarely under a top-docked taskbar - I don't even want to think about what this type of coding would mean to a multi-monitor setup. Pft. Anyway, some windows were opening under the taskbar now - so much so that you can't even get to the caption bar to move it. Alt+Space, M, {DOWN}{DOWN}{DOWN}{DOWN}, and I would see the caption bar, but how is that good much less optimal?

So I said, lemme try docking it on the left. Still keeps the Start button at 0,0. Hey look! The System Tray now shows the day and date in this docking position. I also noticed that my Quick Link toolbar looked empty now... wait - I can actually stack up some serious buttons here, can't I? So I did that. The top toolbar are applications that are on every machine I work with [for this screen shot at home, I've yet to remove the VS6 icon - at work it's VS2003 or VS2005, depending on the box] while the bottom toolbar are "special to that machine". Like having SharpMT on my notebook's second toolbar; work boxes might have VSS, VPC, or something else - home gets Money and TV Guide. That made for easy access and a built-in quick-launcher.

I also found something else that's neat: I put a toolbar in the taskbar for the My Documents folder and then shrunk it to it's smallest size. This put the name of the toolbar - Data in my case - and a chevron. Click the chevron and Lo! - you have access to the entire directory in a popup menu! This was another unexpected bonus: takes up almost no room on the taskbar and saves a few clicks to access stuff in My Documents. And since that's where my RDC shortcuts live... yes, it's a big click saver.

What about the applications themselves? I can fit a hell of a lot more on the taskbar this way... they stack vertically, so I can have as many as 15-20 windows open at a time and still read up to 15 characters on each bar - this isn't possible when the taskbar is docked horizontally. Ah, and I also get the MSN Search Desktop toolbar to show up here: useable and takes up very little space from the rest of the task bar.

Lastly is that of positioning. My current notebook runs at 1400x1050. My desktops - all of them - run at 1280x1024. With the left docked taskbar on the notebook, I can open any of my desktops and it will drop the scrollbars, without covering my taskbar. This works out really well, when I have two or more RDC windows open. And looks pretty funny when I've got an RDC window open that has another RDC window running within it: three Start buttons in a row... local, remote, and remote-via-remote.

So yeah, there's a reason for it. Quite a few of them and all of them have been worthwhile. Even for the crappy applications that still open under the taskbar, there's plenty of caption bar space to grab and move them out from under it... that gives it an edge on the top-docked bar. Give it a try... you might be surprised and find it useful.

At any rate, I should thank the hecklers from that demo: I wouldn't have thought to have shared this if they didn't say anything!