Spirited Away has a new slant on the task of giving a conversational interface to the computers we use each day.

For someone like me, conversational often means ‘the barest amount of conversation’ as is possible. Which is why I’m a big fan of Spirited Away, since it hides unused windows that you haven’t touched for a set period of time. Spirited Away provides a nice way of keeping your desktop under control, it also does one thing and does it well.

The only problem is that it suffers the same problem that the Flickr Zeitgeist once did. As Matt Webb noted, (to wildly paraphrase) the sharp way in which things appear or disappear is jarring. With regards to Spirited Away, the window disappears sharply at a time when you’re not thinking about it being there, which causes you to focus on the desktop and try to guess what just flicked away. A slow fade out effect would do the trick here, maybe even the slow motion minimising effect that you can get in OS X by holding down shift and clicking on the minimise button.

It’s a small criticism though, overall Spirited Away is a great app. It’s got a great Pacman inspired menubar icon too, how can that be beaten?