Fences By Stardock Doesn't Do Multiple Monitors

I was very excit­ed when I saw in my Stardock Impulse appli­ca­tions list a new one–Fences™ Clean up your desk­top clut­ter. Unfortunately, like many oth­er Stardock user inter­face and user expe­ri­ence cus­tomiza­tion appli­ca­tions (ObjectBar, ObjectDock, WindowBlinds, DesktopX), Fences does­n’t do mul­ti­ple mon­i­tors well (at all, actually).

The Fences page describes the new prod­uct thusly:

Fences is a one-of-a-kind pro­gram, allow­ing you to draw labeled shad­ed areas on your desk­top, which become mov­able & resiz­able con­tain­ers for your desk­top icons. These groups can help bring orga­ni­za­tion and con­sis­ten­cy to your com­put­er’s desk­top, solv­ing the ‘con­stant mess’ prob­lem that has plagued the desk­top since its inception.

Fences also helps you final­ly appre­ci­ate the wall­pa­per you have hid­ing behind all that clutter.

In addi­tion to its orga­niz­ing fea­tures, Fences offers a nov­el quick-hide fea­ture (in-patenting-process). Double click your desk­top, and all your icons will fade out. Double click again, and they’ll return.

If you use only one mon­i­tor, Fences is a very cool desk­top orga­niz­er. Hell, even if you don’t need desk­top orga­ni­za­tion, it cre­ates a stun­ning visu­al effect. And it’s free!

But, if you do use mul­ti­ple mon­i­tors, Fences takes away more than it gives.

Specifically, Fences sets both mon­i­tors desk­top wall­pa­per to the wall­pa­per applied to the first or pri­ma­ry mon­i­tor. Most mod­ern video cards allow sep­a­rate wall­pa­per to be set per mon­i­tor, and/or a sin­gle, large image to span both. Fences does­n’t work with either set­ting. So, to para­phrase Stardock’s own mar­ket­ing hype, “Fences also helps you final­ly appre­ci­ate half the wall­pa­per you have hid­ing behind all that clutter.”

Fences also does­n’t use the sec­ondary mon­i­tor for its “fences,” or icon pan­els. None of the pre­sets in the Fences set­ting will reach over to a sec­ond mon­i­tor, nor will it save the posi­tion of a fence man­u­al­ly placed onto the sec­ond mon­i­tor. On reboot, fences placed out­side the area of the first mon­i­tor snap back onto the first monitor.

Despite Stardock’s long stand­ing rela­tion­ship with, and cham­pi­oning of, NVidia whose best of breed video cards have sup­port­ed mul­ti­ple mon­i­tors for more than a decade, Stardock still has­n’t fig­ured out how to cor­rect­ly inte­grate mul­ti­ple mon­i­tor sup­port into many of its appli­ca­tions. That leaves hun­dreds of thou­sands of cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als, pro­gram­mers, and oth­er Windows pow­er users who’ve rec­og­nized the tremen­dous pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and usabil­i­ty enhance­ment of two or more mon­i­tors unable to make full use of the soft­ware Stardock pub­lish­es alleged­ly “for everyone.”

Stardock notes that Fences will con­tin­ue to be free, though begin­ning in August 2009 a “Pro” ver­sion will be avail­able for pur­chase. The price of Fences Pro has not yet been revealed, nor have what addi­tion­al fea­tures will be added to make it “pro.” If I had to guess, based on Stardock’s pre­vi­ous prod­ucts that have gone “pro,” I would say that Fences Pro will include options for set­ting per con­tain­er back­ground images, chang­ing fence title­bar fonts (cur­rent­ly Fences only allows chang­ing the col­or of the too-large title text), and sup­port for sav­ing and shar­ing Fence themes. Again, based pre­vi­ous Stardock prod­ucts, I doubt even the paid ver­sion will include gen­uine mul­ti­ple mon­i­tor support.

Fences is a very cool new desk­top cus­tomiza­tion application–unless you have mul­ti­ple mon­i­tors. But, that’s to be expect­ed. It is from Stardock afterall.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Unclutter Your Desktop With Fences (ghacks​.net)
• Stardock Fences adds KDE 4 style desk­top orga­ni­za­tion to Windows (down​load​squad​.com)