CinemaDrape

Working on a crowded desktop or with too many apps open at the same time may affect both your attention and your productivity when writing or reading an important report or e-mail.

You have two choices – either close or minimize all those disrupting windows or use CinemaDrape. This open-source utility will help your focus on a specific area of your desktop by blacking out the rest at a click of your mouse.

This tiny yet efficient tool allows you to open a focus area that will highlight the app or document you’re working on by drawing a black curtain around everything else on your desktop. Actually, it doesn’t need to be black – you can change the color of your drape at any time, and by adjusting the level of opacity of the selected background, you can fully customize the way the surrounding objects around your focus area will look like while working on your main task. You can then save your preferred layouts to disk and load them any time you need them without going through the configuration process again.

Creating a new focus area is as simple as drawing a rectangle with your mouse. Left-click on your screen and drag the rectangle to cover the area of your choice, and open as many focus areas as needed just by repeating the operation. You can move, resize, and delete them at any time in the most intuitive way. Activating and deactivating CinemaDrape is equally straightforward – just double-click on your desktop and the drape will disappear until you need it again. Alternatively, you can define a key combination of your choice and use it to toggle on and off your focus area. You can always “peak” through your curtain – with the level of transparency of your choice – by hovering your mouse over it at any time.

Some of the program’s functionality is still on experimental status, but all the basic functionality you need to make the most of CinemaDrape works fantastically. As mentioned, this program is open source, meaning that it won’t cost you anything and that it’s open to further improvements from both the developers and the users at all times. Therefore, I can find no reason not to recommend CinemaDrape to anyone – having it installed on your computer won’t harm its valuable resources and will offer you a quick and convenient solution to unwanted distractions.