Review: Fences 2 makes desktop icons smarter, cleaner, and more useful - foltzchai1944

At a Glance

Adept's Rating

Pros

Intuitive
Customizable
Unobtrusive

Our Verdict

Fences 2 is well valuable the money: It makes the background useful again.

I have no icons happening my desktop. I experience two broad monitors totaling almost 4,000 horizontal pixels, and not a single icon— because one icon often begets many, ending dormie with a messy, disorganized screen background and crowding my beautiful wallpapers. But $10 utility Fences 2 has me rethinking my anti-icon stance.

Fences makes it unchaste to get started by automatically categorizing your existing icons.

Stardock's Fences 2 eliminates all of the annoyances traditionally linked to desktop icons, and makes what's good about them even better. Installed, it feels like such a natural part of Windows, it makes me wonder how get along Microsoft doesn't fles a feature like information technology right into the OS.

Fences integrates tightly with Windows, becoming division of the Control Panel.

At its simplest, Fences groups your icons into realistic folders on the desktop. You can have a bunch of icons for your favorite applications, and some other bunch for frequently misused documents, and yet another for Internet bookmarks. Information technology's a similar system to what some fastidious users may already equal doing on their own–simply it makes the treat of grouping your icons together easy enough for the rest of us. When you first set in motion Fences, it offers to group your existing icons mechanically, so you get triad fences in the first place. They won't be perfect, but they're easy to customize: You toilet rename them, rip icons taboo or put inexperienced ones in, and move them just about the screen background.

For reasons of both aesthetics and privateness, you may not always going to neediness icons cluttering up your paper, so Fences can hide the icons once you depart the desktop slothful for a patc. When you deprivation to reveal the icons again, double-click anywhere on the desktop and all of your Fences soda pop back into view. It's instant, and it's my favorite feature because it lets me delight my wallpapers and still use the icons whenever I want them. You can also disable the timeout and opt to obliterate or show the icons yourself.

The default option fences may not categorize well the icons you already have on your desktop, but they're soft to customize.

Taking a remind from the world of smartphones, Fences 2 introduces a sport called Desktop Pages. Reasonable like home screens on a smartphone, you can have multiple "pages" on your desktop. Bring your mouse to the edge of the screen, hold the mouse button down, and drag: The screen swipes over, revealing more than infinite for fences. This sounds like information technology could conflict with some Windows 8 gestures which besides use the edges of the screen, merely on my desktop information technology doesn't. If animated your mouse all the mode to the butt of the screen is too much work, you backside besides dog the desktop, hold down Alt, and revolve the mousewheel to quickly flip pages.

Another interesting feature new to Fences 2 is Pamphlet Portals, which let you place interactive shortcuts to folders on your background. If you have a folder with many files and subfolders, you can make over a Folder Portal for information technology, and and so stick at those files directly. Information technology's basically like having that folder constantly naked on your desktop. It's an interesting feature, but has drawbacks: You sack't use up the keyboard to intelligent-lookup inside a folder, and you can't drill toss off to subfolders (clicking a subfolder just opens IT in your filing cabinet handler).

The Folder Portal lineament lets you quickly put the table of contents of an entire folder along your desktop.

Fences was an superior product to start out with, and Fences 2 keeps the solid parts and for the most part manages to avoid bloat. I'm not convinced Folder Portals are entirely that useful, only Desktop Pages are a welcome addition, and palpate high-speed and natural. Even off if you're not the sort of user who enjoys having icons on your desktop, Fences 2 may convert you. Give it a shot.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information pageboy will download the software program to your arrangement.