VistaShades

When using the computer as your main tool for work, distractions are slightly difficult to ignore. The Internet is the main concern, but nearly anything on your desktop that pops in sight can tempt you to pause work for a while. Luckily, applications like VistaShades let you dim your screen either to better focus on work, or to reduce the overall brightness.

The application does not require a sophisticated configuration in order to properly run. It uses little of your system's resources and the amount of space taken on your hard disk drive is not something to worry about.

You instantly get accommodated due to the simple and straightforward design. A slider is put at your disposal in order to carefully adjust the brightness level, hitting the “OK” button minimizes the application and lets you attend to your duties.

Unfortunately, there is no hidden treasure behind what the application has to offer. When minimized, it goes to the taskbar, taking up space, rather than going to the system tray.

Moreover, efficiency is drastically reduced because you are constantly dependent of the main window to adjust brightness level. There is no integrated hotkey support to have controls at the tip of your fingers.

The application's purpose is slightly unclear, as dim effect only applies to the desktop layer, any window, active or not, keeping default brightness level. If used for concentrating at work, it's not quite efficient, not giving you the possibility to select a custom area to dim or leave unaffected.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that VistaShades does not manage to live up to expectations, regardless of purpose. You can only dim at a desktop level, which does not really help. Moreover, you need to manually run it each time you turn on the computer, with no options to make it launch at startup.