Magic Boss Key 4.10

Overview

The anxiety of being caught while surfing the web instead of working (Facebook, 9gag, YouTube, and other websites that seem the most interesting when you’re busy) is a big nightmare for office workers that leads to major problems such as alienation from the rest of the coworkers and decreased productivity. This needs to be fixed, but how? Not by stopping the surfing of course, but by getting better measures in order to hide better from your boss. Magic Boss Key was designed (probably by someone who had the same problem in the past) to let you quickly hide your browser, open windows, desktop icons and taskbar just by pressing a simple hotkey.

Installation

Installing Magic Boss Key is a piece of cake, since it requires no advanced technical knowledge and the installation process finishes fairly quickly.

The program is clean from viruses, spyware and other types malware, as well as any additional 3^rd party item.

Supported operating systems are Windows 98, Me, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 7 and 8.

Interface

When you run the program you will see a window with a list of running applications. At the top of the window there’s some information on how Magic Boss Key is used; basically from there you check applications from the list that you want to exclude from hiding when pressing the assigned hotkey. There are a few buttons below the list, one for opening the Help file, one for accessing the options menu and one for refreshing the list, in case you opened more windows after running the program.

Pros

You have two options for going into stealth mode: either by pressing F12 or by clicking left and right mouse buttons at the same time. Depending what’s easier for you, take your pick and use it to hide the open windows. This configuration can be found in the Options menu, along with other settings such as enabling Magic Boss Key to hide all desktop icons or the taskbar, mute the sound when windows are hidden and automatically run on system startup.

The program uses very low resources and is extremely fast. There’s no chance that open windows will not hide in time.

Several languages are supported: Arabic, Czech, English, Hungarian, Korean, Polish and Spanish.

Cons

It would be perfect if the user could change the assigned hotkey to one of his choice. Other than that everything else is great.

Alternatives

A good alternative with a similar name is Boss Key (paid) by Mindgems. It has more features than Magic Boss Key, like hiding tray icons too and letting the user assign hotkeys for hiding/restoring windows. Both of them work the same way, and if you don't have a specific hiding plan in mind then both of them will be of use to you.

Conclusion

For general use, Magic Boss Key has got you covered. There’s nothing more you would possibly want than what this program offers, if you’re just trying to hide open windows quickly when your boss steps into the office. It’s lightweight and does its job; how about you do the same?