If the Windows Start bar doesn’t suit your application management needs then there are plenty of alternatives around. And the latest, Stardock’s Tiles, provides an intelligent sidebar which works as a program launcher and a tool for managing your running programs.

To get started you might say, launch an Internet Explorer window, then hold down Shift as you drag that window’s title bar, and drop it onto the Tiles sidebar. What you’ll then see is an active tile, a live thumbnail of the contents of that window, which updates as you browse from one site to the next. And if you open new browser tabs then thumbnails for those will also be displayed below the main tile; again they’ll show thumbnails of the site they have opened, and you can switch to any of them with a click.

Manage your running applications from the Tiles sidebar

The program isn’t just about active applications, though. You can also drag and drop shortcuts there, or have it display recently opened documents, enabling you to use the sidebar as a simple program launcher.

You’re able to drag and drop the tiles to rearrange and reorganise them, so it’s easy to find what you need, and you’ll improve your productivity by being able to more quickly switch from one application to another.

And if you don’t like the idea of losing a large chunk of screen real estate, then it’s worth checking out the Tiles configuration options, where you’re able to reduce the size of the Tiles bar, or even have it automatically hidden when it’s not in use.

Tiles plainly isn’t the most essential of applications. It looks good, though, and may be useful if you regularly run lots of applications at the same time, particularly if you’ve a multi-touch enabled display (Tiles already supports the technology and can smoothly scroll and switch between pages).

And unusually, you may extend the free version by purchasing additional features individually. So if you want multimonitor support, say, it can be yours for around $2; click Add Features in the Configuration dialog to find out more.