Programming My Life

This week I discovered several new applications for personal use.   I plan to review most of them in the near future, but it would not be fair to review them without diving into most of the features.  Therefore, I’ll be waiting on the more complex programs.  Stardock’s Fences is a simple enough application that I feel comfortable reviewing it after only a few days of use.

Fences is a simple program that organizes a user’s desktop icons into groups such as ‘Programs’, ‘Recent Things’, etc.  The icons for these groups are then sectioned off into fences whose size and location can easily be changed.  Previously, I had organized my icons into groups this way, but with no real structure or formality.   Just the small change of having them in identified groups makes the desktop a bit cleaner.  It also makes for easier sorting when I create a new icon.  Additionally, Fences allows the user to double click the desktop to hide all icons for a cleaner look.  Another double click brings them all back.

While these features are great for organization, the most useful feature is the time saving Snapshots feature.   Instead of simply taking a picture of the desktop (my previous way of remembering how things were arranged), Snapshot actually creates a backup of the fences and their locations at the time of the Snapshot.  Now, instead of matching the icons to an image I took if my icons get jumbled after a Windows crash, I can just restore a Snapshot.

I am generally a software minimalist.  That is, I don’t like having large numbers of plug ins for Firefox or mounds of applications to do everything; I find that just means more troubleshooting if something is giving me problems.  But Fences is such a small program that performs its simple task so well, I can’t imagine not using it on any future Windows machine I work on.