If you’re ever feeling overwhelmed by an excess of open windows on your Mac, a new tool called Later can help. By clicking a button on the Mac menu bar, you can hide all open windows from your desktop, then bring them back at a later time. I’ve been using a review copy of Later provided by the developer and have found it useful for clearing out desktop clutter when it’s time to focus. It can also be helpful for hiding apps and browser tabs during a Zoom presentation. To hide your apps, just hit Later’s big blue “Save windows for later” button, or press Cmd+Shift+L. You can then restore your session through the menu bar or by hitting Cmd+Shift+R. [Animation: Jared Newman]Later also has a few other useful options for clearing out Mac window clutter: You can choose to quit all applications instead of hiding them, automatically restore your windows after a certain amount of time, and leave system windows such as Finder untouched. (Unfortunately, there’s no way to exempt non-system apps from being hidden.) Other options With its $20 price tag, Later may not be for everyone, and there is another way to achieve window-clearing clarity if you’d rather not buy another app: Just open Mission Control on your Mac, then hit the + button on the right to create a new “Space.” This doesn’t work as well with multiple monitors, since you can’t hide both screens’ windows with one click, and you won’t get Later’s auto-resume and quit-all capabilities. Still, it’s good enough for opening a fresh desktop in a pinch. [Screenshot: Jared Newman]Windows users also have a couple of different options: Press Win+D or click the bottom-right corner of your screen to minimize and restore all of your apps, or create a new desktop space through Task View (pictured above), which you can open by hitting Win+Tab or clicking the box-like icon next to the Start menu. Hitting the + creates a new space that even spans multiple monitors. Meanwhile, a Windows app called CloseAll allows you to quit all of your Windows apps at once. Like Later, it costs $20, though the free trial version has no apparent limits on usage.
This tip comes from Advisorator, Jared’s weekly tech advice newsletter. Sign up to get tips like this every Tuesday.
Login to add comment
Other posts in this group
After Pope Francis’s funeral was held over the weekend, attention has now turne
Shares of Deliveroo, the food delivery service based in London, are hitting three-year highs on Monday after it received a $3.6 billion
Social media users have been having a field day with Waymo’s autonomou
If you’re not on TikTok, you may not have heard of Aaron Parnas. But for many young people across the U.S., he’s a prominent political news source, with over 3.5 million followers on TikTok and ju
Getting a sense of the scale of social media platforms can be tricky. While tech companies often share self-serving metrics—like monthly active users or how likely users are to buy products after
Fun fact: The saying “work smarter, not harder” is coming up on its 100th birthday. Coined
