How many people here have ever accidentally closed an application window? Maybe Firefox? Word? Chat window? [Insert window here]? Don’t worry; it happens to the best of us. Maybe our mouse slips. Maybe our hands slip. Maybe we meant to close that other window. Whatever the case may be, the end result is always the same: a few under-the-breath naughty words and frustration that we just closed something we were using/working on.
Well be frustrated no longer. GoneIn60s is a standalone, portable and lightweight application that allows you to recover closed windows within 60 seconds of when you close them (after 60 seconds the windows are unrestorable; 60 seconds is default – you can change it).
GoneIn60s sits in your system tray; whenever you want to recover a window, all you do is right click on the GoneIn60s icon and select the window you want to recover:
[1]
For example, if you accidentally close a Firefox window that you had all your important tabs open in, all you have to do is right click on GoneIn60s and select the entry that corresponds to your Firefox window. Firefox will open up with all the tabs you had loaded before you accidentally closed it.
GoneIn60s works with more than Firefox. It is supposed to work with all application windows. So far I have tested it and it works fine with Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 8, Digsby [2], MSN Messenger, FastStone Capture [3], Microsoft Word, and Windows folders.
Since I am particularly bad at accidentally closing my chat windows, I find GoneIn60s to be extremely useful in helping me restore my chat windows.
There are some things to note about this app:
- The “Settings”:
[4]
- If you right click on the window button in the Windows taskbar and select “Close” GoneIn60s will not be able to restore it. GoneIn60s can only restore windows that are closed via the X button at the top right or via Alt+ F4. Of course that is not that big of a deal because the purpose of GoneIn60s is to allow you to restore windows you close by accident; if you closed a window by right clicking on the taskbar and selecting “Close” I highly doubt it was on accident.
- If you double click on the GoneIn60s system tray icon, you will restore all closed windows instead of just one specific one.
- There seems to be no built in feature to run GoneIn60s at Windows boot. Seeing how useful of a program this is, I find it surprising that it cannot run at Windows boot by itself. No problem though; just use Windows Task Scheduler to start GoneIn60s at Windows boot. For people that don’t know how to do that, XP users can learn from here [5] and Vista users can learn from here [6].
- Vista users should run as administrator.
Ready to download GoneIn60s? You can download it from the following links:
***Update***
Some dotTech readers are reporting GoneIn60s is a little bit buggy. I have yet to personally experience these bugs but I trust the people who informed me. Just thought I should let you know you may also face some bugs.