Control Your Desktop with Fences

Every now and then, you come across a little utility that just makes life easier.

I’m one of those people whose virtual desktop is as messy as my real world desktop. Yes, I’m one of those terrible users who love to have launch icons for every possible app on their desktop. I also like to have key folders on my desktop. (Note that I don’t hold a candle to Patrick Norton. I once saw his Windows desktop, and it overflowed with icons. I wonder how many browser tabs he opens?)

The Windows 7 taskbar helps mitigate this a bit, but I still prefer to have stuff on my desktop rather than the taskbar. For one thing, my taskbar would be unmanageable, so I only put a few things in it. The real problem is not having large numbers of icons on the desktop. The problem is keeping them organized.

Sure, Windows offers a number of sort options: name, size, item type, date modified. But those options are of limited utility in keeping a large number of desktop icons organized.

Enter http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/ Fences.

Fences organizes my desktop icons.

Fences is a free utility from http://www.stardock.com Stardock Systems. Right now, it’s at version 0.99, but certainly seems pretty bug free. I’m using it under Windows 7, but it works in Vista and Windows XP as well.

Fences is simply a way of keeping your desktop icons organized. It’s not a virtual desktop system. The individual fences around the icons behave a little like any window. You can resize by dragging corners, drag an icon from one fenced off area to another or move them around by grabbing the title bar. In other ways, they don’t behave like a normal window. A fence can never be on top of other windows, for example – they live at the desktop level.

And if you need to see your whole desktop, just double-click on a blank spot. The Fences fade away. Another double-click brings them back. Note that your application windows remain in place. Similarly, if you click on the right lower corner (the small button that minimizes all your apps), your apps are, in fact, minimized — but the fences are still visible.

When you install Fences, you can just take the default layout. After the installation, you can customize the app for different layouts, change the transparency level, enable title bars all the time, only on mouseover or never. As it stands, the free version is quite customizable, and certainly easy to use. You can relabel the default fence titles, too.

Customize layouts, colors, transparencies and labels.

In the end, Fences is a brilliant little utility, although it definitely has that add-on feel. The look and behavior isn’t quite Windows native. I’d love to see a fence for minimized apps, but that might confuse some users if a fence appears and disappears. Using multiple monitors is a bit confusing at first. Fences can live on the second display, but all the autolayout options only put fences on the primary monitor.  But if you’re like me, and have dozens of icons on your desktop, Fences is an invaluable tool.