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

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

Fences makes it easy 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 come Microsoft doesn't build a feature like it right into the OS.

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

At its simplest, Fences groups your icons into virtual folders on the desktop. You can have a bunch of icons for your favorite applications, and another bunch for frequently used documents, and yet another for Internet bookmarks. It's a similar system to what some fastidious users may already be doing on their own–but it makes the process of grouping your icons together easy enough for the rest of us. When you first launch Fences, it offers to group your existing icons automatically, so you get three fences to begin with. They won't be perfect, but they're easy to customize: You can rename them, pull icons out or put new ones in, and move them around the desktop.

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

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

Taking a cue from the world of smartphones, Fences 2 introduces a feature called Desktop Pages. Just 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 space for fences. This sounds like it could conflict with some Windows 8 gestures which also use the edges of the screen, but on my desktop it doesn't. If moving your mouse all the way to the edge of the screen is too much work, you can also click the desktop, hold down Alt, and rotate the mousewheel to quickly flip pages.

Another interesting feature new to Fences 2 is Folder Portals, which let you place interactive shortcuts to folders on your desktop. If you have a folder with many files and subfolders, you can create a Folder Portal for it, and then get at those files directly. It's basically like having that folder constantly open on your desktop. It's an interesting feature, but has drawbacks: You can't use the keyboard to quick-search within a folder, and you can't drill down to subfolders (clicking a subfolder just opens it in your file manager).

The Folder Portal feature lets you quickly put the contents of an entire folder on your desktop.

Fences was an excellent product to begin with, and Fences 2 keeps the good parts and largely manages to avoid bloat. I'm not convinced Folder Portals are all that useful, but Desktop Pages are a welcome addition, and feel fast and natural. Even 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 page will download the software to your system.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
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Free Twitter/Facebook Manager SocialOomph Includes Useful Features

It's no secret that looks matter, even when it comes to the software and Web services we use. Take SocialOomph, for example. This social-media management service is held back by its plain-Jane interface, but if you can overlook this shortcoming, you'll find that it offers a pretty powerful set of features for managing your Twitter account.

SocialOomph is easy to use, but its interface is really lacking some oomph.Unlike rival TweetDeck, which is completely free, SocialOomph offers both free and paid versions. The free version is limited to managing Twitter accounts, while the Professional Account ($17.97, bi-weekly) adds support for Facebook and various blogging services, while also offering additional Twitter management tools. In addition to the Professional service, SocialOomph offers two additional paid subscriptions: one for its Twitter Advanced Scheduling Service ($12.97, bi-weekly) and another for its Auto-Follow & Auto-DM service for Twitter ($3.97, bi-weekly). This review focuses on the free version of SocialOomph.

The experience of using the unattractive, text-heavy SocialOomph is very different from navigating the slickly-designed TweetDeck, yet the end result is the same: Accessing the service's key features is pretty easy. You can easily schedule a tweet for future posting, and I like that you can save the text as a draft for future updates. The free version of SocialOoomph lets you manage an unlimited number of Twitter accounts, and it's very easy to switch between them--even more so than when using TweetDeck.

Even in its free version, SocialOomph emphasizes the social aspect of Twitter. It includes features for vetting new followers, allowing you to see information, such as the ratio of accounts they're following compared to how many followers they have, how many status updates they've posted, and when their account was created, among others.

SocialOomph also helps you promote yourself by offering you the ability to create an extended Twitter profile to provide more information about yourself. But all this does is send anyone who clicks on the Web link that appears on your Twitter profile to a page that's hosted on SocialOomph's site. Sure, you have the option to fill in the text, but you could do the same thing on your own Web site--and chances are good that you could make it look a lot better.

SocialOomph also offers a few features that will appeal to users who are looking to wipe their Twitter slate clean. It allows you to delete all of you tweets, without deleting any followers, and offers an option for purging your DM inbox.

SocialOomph's free features compare nicely with those of TweetDeck--as long you're looking to work with Twitter only. The free TweetDeck also include support for Facebook, something SocialOomph only offers in its Professional version. But its Facebook features are more extensive than TweetDeck's, as SocialOomph lets you schedule status updates and wall posts. Additional features in the Professional version include the ability to post tweets via email, as well as some security and business management tools.

Business users will appreciate the extra features that the Professional account offers, but SocialOomph's free version offers plenty to make Twitter power users happy. The service definitely suffers from its bland interface, which sometimes makes navigating its many features less than pleasant. But if you can deal with that flaw, SocialOomph has a lot to offer.

--Liane Cassavoy

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