Neowin Review: Fence your desktop with Stardock Fences

Windows Desktop - A place where every installed application likes to place a shortcut and also a place to hold all your shortcuts and favorites. Things can become very messy when you have lots of desktop icons, like mine below:

Well, there's not that many on my desktop, but I still place them in categories. Microsoft Office Apps all reside together and Windows Live Apps reside together. Each time I bring a new shortcut to my desktop, Windows places them in a separate order which it thinks to be right and then I move that shortcut icon to its appropriate group. For example, If I install a new game, I would place a shortcut where all my games shortcuts reside.

For a start, this arrangement looks simple - not a big job - but as days pass by and my number of shortcuts increases, this becomes very hard to find where my shortcut belongs.

Stardock's Fences exactly addresses this issue. It allows you to organize your desktop icons and create fences. Visualize fences as blocks of icons (shaded areas) grouped together. Now it becomes very easy to organize my icons using Fences according to the categories I had arranged earlier!

To create fence, you can just right-click on your desktop, drag it to draw a rectangle and release. Your new fence is now created and you can group your icons to that fence. Fences can be re-arranged anywhere on my desktop and are also re-sizable.

And what about those so many icons issue? - They are still there, except that they are now fenced. I really like to see my icons only when I use them. Using fences, it is very easy to hide & show all your icons with an easy double-click on an empty space in your desktop! Now, this is one such shortcut which I think anyone would love to have!

You can also exclude fences from this quick hide behavior

And here is my fenced desktop

You can download the community-preview of Fences here. Fences runs on all of Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. On Vista and Windows 7, both 32bit and 64bit versions are supported.

Remember, Fences is just an add-on to your desktop and does not replace your desktop