Some people love to listen to the music on their iPod when they are working. This is great to keep your mind focused on the job at hand. But I am not that big of a music fan. Instead of listening to the music, I like to watch live TV through my TV tuner card on my computer as I go through everyday programming or typing tasks. Although Windows 8 has snap-to-edge ability that helps you use half of the screen for one application and another half for some other application, but this does not really work for watching videos or live TV (because the aspect ratio gets distorted). Instead you can use the free OnTopReplica that can show a copy of any window on the top of all the windows, allowing you to watch videos or live TV broadcast while working in other applications at the same.
OnTopReplica is great when there is some live sports event is being aired on the TV. You can use it to watch the live match using your TV tuner card on top of any window and take care of your work simultaneously.
OnTopReplica comes both as a portable application as well as in a setup installer package. When you run it, a small window without any titlebar is shown. You have to right-click on this window and choose any other window that you want to be cloned. Typically you would choose a video player window or the window of your TV tuner application. The original video window must not be minimized for this to work.
As soon as you select a window, it gets cloned by OnTopReplica. Now you can drag the cloned window anywhere on your screen, resize it, change its opacity level etc. It always stays on the top of other application windows, so you can browse the web, use MS Word, or any other program without having to stay away from your favorite TV show.
Though OnTopReplica window can be dragged to almost anywhere on the screen, I keep it either near the top-left corner or close to the top-right corner. You can choose the position of the cloned window by right-clicking on it and choosing an item from the position lock sub-menu.
Because most of the configurable items for OnTopReplica are included in the right-click menu, there are not many options in its settings window. You can only choose the default language for OnTopReplica and define the hotkeys to show/hide the cloned window or to clone the current window.
Conclusion: OnTopReplica allows you to clone any of your windows and keep it always on top while you work through other applications. It also has opacity, resizing and position locking features. This is a great tool if you want to work and watch videos or live TV at the same time.
You can download OnTopReplica from http://ontopreplica.codeplex.com/.