I bet there are a lot of people out there with very un-soliciting jobs. Either they are too good for the position and finish their work in record time or there simply are days when there is absolutely nothing to do, they have to find something to kill some time. Computers are good entertainers and if you add an Internet connection nothing can stop you from making time fly.

There is a problem though. Your boss may enter your office unexpectedly and may agree with your work methods. Trust me, I've been there and my boss could not believe his eyes when he saw me with the latest NFS on my screen, sweating and flexing my fingers in order to catch a 70 000 drift.

I could not believe the face he made either, but that little vein popping out on his temple told me that it was not going to be a pleasant afternoon. Anyway, the conflict was solved by convincing him that there was nothing to do for the rest of the day. However, despite the fact that my boss was understanding, I had to stand as an example and I did not get a raise for six months. Still, had I spent enough time on the Internet I would have bumped into a software designed especially for this kind of situations, just like Second Hide.

The application is tailored to allow you to designate application window hotkeys for quickly hiding any compromising window on your desktop. You can set different boss-keys for all opened programs as well as one hotkey that hides them all at once.

The interface is easy to use, just a list of opened programs (both those in taskbar and in system tray) and the hotkeys for hiding/showing Second Hide, keyboard correspondent for hiding all windows and state of the mouse (it can also be configured to work on your side in hiding applications). Main application window also comes with buttons for accessing the program's Options menu, designate programs to run in the background (hide even icons in system tray) and an option for removing Second Hide's system tray icon and make it run in the background.

Users can also change the icon of the application and its title in order to disguise compromising elements into legit windows necessary in your line of work. Thus you can quickly make a minimized gaming window look like a report or balance or anything you want. It offer 12 icons to replace, include PhotoShop, Notepad, Outlook, MS Word, Adobe Reader, Excel, Windows Calculator, Flash and Dreamweaver. These should be sufficient for a cover up, but you can always extract more icons to fit your needs. Restoring the looks to the original is done with a simple press of a button from the same context menu in application list. Just use "Restore Window and Icon" option and all cover will be blown.

For each element in the list, Second Hide can store a different window hiding hotkey which can be set from right click menu ("Custom BK Window Hotkey" option). Pressing the key combination is enough to define the boss-key.

Configuring Second Hide is not a big deal as all the options are pretty clear. If you need to quickly hide all windows, Second Hide makes available a setting for your mouse's middle click to initiate this kind of action.

Keyboard shortcuts for this action can also be set, just in case. Privacy is taken seriously by the application as you can enable password protection for re-displaying hidden windows. You will be asked to input it each time you want to make all the windows visible again.

The application does a great job hiding compromising windows on your desktop screen and taskbar in a single mouse click or simply by activating a keyboard shortcut. Second Hide provides you with a chance to make all private windows private. A swift press of a button can hide all visible applications in no time. Applications visible in both taskbar and system tray can be sent to background, making them invisible for the prying eye. Making them visible again can be protected by a password. Additional options allow you to make different windows as transparent as you want.

The general idea behind Second Hide is providing the user the means of quickly ducking all compromising windows on monitor screen. It can also hide their tray icons as well as protect re-displaying them with a password.