Stardock Fences [Download of the Day]

Do your desktop icons misbehave? Wouldn’t you love to send them to their own corners and somehow make sure they stay there? Well Stardock’s Fences might just be the solution for you.

The desktop is very convenient place to dump any content you are working on. Nearly all the applications you install create shortcuts on the desktop, and some create more than just the one. If you’ve used your computer long enough, chances are your desktop will be a collection of application shortcuts, documents, images, videos, urls, folders and more.

Fences is an applications which helps you organize this mess, by creating —as the application’s name suggests— “fences” which border collection of icons. You can section off different areas on your desktop and assign them different names, and any icons which you add into these sections stay within their “fences”.

You could for example, create a fence for you essential shortcuts such as your user folder, Documents folder, Computer, Recycle Bin etc. Another fence could hold you applications shortcuts, and yet others could be used to segregate your Documents, Images, web shortcuts etc. The icons in each fence will stay within the defined area, and you will be able to access any overflowing icons by scrolling.

When you install Fences for the first time, you can have to automatically lay out your icons, however subsequently you will need to manually rearrange them to keep your desktop organized.The “Pro” versions of the Fences product allows you to define rules according to which newly created are automatically sorted.

Fences lets you take snapshots of your desktop layouts, so you don’t lose your carefully arranged icons in case something goes wrong. If you screen resolution changes as you play a game, normally you would lose your icon arrangements, however Fences ensures that such a thing does not happen.

Another one of Fences’ salient features is the ability to hide your desktop icons quickly. A simple double-click on an empty area in your desktop will hide away your icons, and another double-click will bring them back. That’s not all, you can select which fences to exclude from hiding so you can hide away the lesser used desktop icons while still ensuring that the desktop remains useful.

Check out this video by Stardock which explains its features:

Fences is a free application by Stardock, the creators of WindowBlinds. and other useful desktop customization applications. A “Pro” version of Fences is also available, which offers additional features, and is available for a price of $19.95, (currently for $9.99).

You can download the free version of Stardock Fences from here.

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Kshitij Sobti