I’m more of a keyboard shortcut person than mouse user any day of the week and seeing something like WindowFlow that allows for easy control and desktop layout of your typical busy as all get out Mac OS X desktop is more than welcomed.

WindowFlow makes organizing your application windows a breeze:

• Keyboard commands allow you to smoothly move and resize windows that snap into alignment.
• Window tiling instantly reorganizes a messy group of overlapping windows to optimally fill your screen.
• Intuitive window switching gives you an ordered list of windows and a preview of the window on the desktop.
• Ideal for developers, designers and power users who work from multiple windows.
• Keyboard junkies will love being able to keep their hands where they are most productive.
• Optimized for Macs with large or multiple displays.
• Operates seamlessly in the background, only becoming visible when needed.
• Highly customizable: re-define the keyboard shortcuts and WindowFlow’s behavior.

WindowFlow comes in Standard Edition and a Pro Edition and currently is 45% off list price.

[ Links: WindowFlow ]

Guess what I got running via VMWare Fusion? If you guessed the recently shown off Google Chrome OS you’d be right. So far, it feels a bit unoptimized and slow but I’m only giving it only 512mb of RAM, 1 virtual processor on my Mac Mini running VMWare Fusion 2.06. I’ll retry in a bit once I’ve installed VMWare 3.0. Make sure that you use bridged and not NAT for your networking setup otherwise you’ll not be able to login.

This build of the Chrome OS is running 4.0.253.0 (32516). And speaking of logins, at the login screen (seen below) you input your Gmail login and password in order to login.

To get your download running, you will need a couple of things. If you have one of the VMWare [ site here ] applications, on the Mac it’s VMWare Fusion which has recently been upgraded to version 3.0, that’s a good start. Some people have used VirtualBox, which is free, and I have on the PC, but have yet to attempt. Then you will need to head over to via gdgt.com [ site here ] and download the Google Chrome OS VMWare Image.

You will need a login to their site, which is free, painless and takes like 1 minute to obtain a login.

Helpful tips, if you download it:
1.) To use the vmdk file, open VMware and create a new virtual machine. One of the options will be to use an “existing virtual disk.” (In VMware Fusion, this is the last option below, “use operating system disk” and “use OS disc image file.”)
2.) Make sure your VM is set to use bridged networking, rather than NAT.
3.) The username and password to login to Chrome OS / Chromium OS is your google account!

Alternatively, if you don’t have VMware, some users have had luck getting this image to run using VirtualBox, which is a free cross-platform (Windows / Mac / Linux) virtual machine created by Sun Microsystem.

Again, I haven’t tried the VirtualBox method yet, but might try it out on my main Windows PC later today. So far, it’s quirky, has twice randomly stopped on me, but for something that’s coming out next year, I could easily see using this on my OQO 01+ as a web only way to access the web and get to the internet when I’m mobile and want access to a full-blown Flash player and a keyboard. Can’t wait for the final release in the second half of 2010.

[ gdgt ] [ VirtualBox ] [ VMWare ] [ Related: Chrome OS as Open Source Project ]