Dropcloth is a free software that lets you fade desktop screen and bring your current application to focus, so that you may concentrate working on it without any disturbances. You can choose the color of your choice to fade desktop, and adjust its transparency. You can also set a toggle key, which you can use to toggle Dropcloth with other currently opened apps on your system. Plus you can set it to show in taskbar, so that you can quickly switch between Dropcloth and other opened apps using Alt+Tab key combination.
Desktop is a place where you keep icons and shortcuts for all frequently used applications, folders, and files. However, creating lot of shortcuts on the desktop makes it look clumsy and mismanaged. This might be a distracting factor when you are working on some important application which you can not maximize to full screen. So here comes this utility that lets you black out the desktop background or fading it to a certain extent, so that you can properly focus on the app you are working on. This could also be helpful for taking screenshots of some app on screen; as it helps in quickly clearing up the background, without having to move the desktop icons anywhere.
If you want to organize your desktop icons, you may check out My Cool Desktop, and Fences.
Fade Desktop and Bring Current App to Focus with Dropcloth:
Dropcloth can be grabbed free of cost using the link given at the end of this article. It gets installed in your Program Files from where you can launch it. As soon as you launch the app, your entire desktop will be filled with Black color. You can change this color (if you want), or adjust its transparency from the Preferences menu that appears on right-clicking on the tray icon of the app.
As you can see in the above screenshot, you can enter the HEX value of the color you want to fill your desktop with. And if you don’t know the color’s HEX value, you can use the help link provided by the app itself to pick the color.
Once you choose the color, you can set its transparency using the slider given at the lower bottom section of the Preferences window. Below this, there’s a text box where you can specify the Toggle hotkey you want to set for the app. After finishing up with your preferences, you can close this window by clicking Ok and continue with your work.
Dropcloth will keep running in background until your Exit it (again from the context menu option of the tray icon), and allows you to focus on the current app hiding rest of the screen with the chosen color.
Key Features of Dropcloth:
- Free software to fade desktop screen.
- Lets you focus on one app.
- Choose desired color to fade screen with.
- Provide HEX value suggestions for all colors.
- Hide screen with opaque colors or adjust transparency.
- Hotkey support.
- Show in taskbar option.
- System tray integration.
The Final Verdict:
Dropcloth is a handy tool to focus on a single app hiding rest of the desktop screen. Using this, you can clear your desktop screen in one go and get it back using Win + D keys, whenever required. The “show in taskbar” feature makes it work like other apps and removes the need of accessing it through the tray area again and again. This is something unique about this kind of an app. Try and tell us how much you like it. Also check out Blackout for Windows to hide specific parts of screen.
