14 DAY TRIAL // That the Internet holds vast amounts of information is no news; neither that for some people it has become the extension of their real lives and they use it to post details about personal events. Personal aspects aside, the Internet is one of the most efficient media tools nowadays, and, as such, it also is a proper environment for advertisements, which, in many cases, do a great job at distracting the viewer from the bit of detail that led him/her to that page.
The point is that the most annoying thing when watching a video on the Internet or simply reading an interesting article is for your attention to be diverted by a blinking ad caught with the corner of your eye; or anything moving and caught by your peripheral vision. Ad blockers can help you get rid of some of these annoyances, but not all of them.
CinemaDrape attempts to alleviate the issue by allowing you to drop a veil on the entire screen except for the part you are interested in. This means that you can control which part of the screen you drop the curtain on and which stays in your focus. With a 103KB installer the application predicts no complex thing, and so it is, because CinemaDrape brings only necessary options to the table. As soon as the installation procedure completes, and this should take less than a minute, the application will automatically take its position in the system tray, waiting for your commands.
All the options of the application can be accessed from the system tray icon or, if the shadow is dropped, by right-clicking on the hidden part of the screen. In order to start using CinemaDrape so that it complies with your needs you have to define focus areas you are likely to use on a regular basis. This means that if you are an avid YouTube watcher you can select the video window to focus on and dim the rest of the desktop. For this to happen all you need is start the app (unfortunately we could not find an easier way to do this than click on the system tray icon) and adjust the size of the focus area.
This is an easy task that can be accomplished by clicking on the top edge to move it around and dragging by the left, right and bottom edges to make it fit the portion of the desktop you want to concentrate your attention on. Next step is to assign a name to this focus window so that next time you need it you don’t have to repeat the above mentioned procedure. CinemaDrape can store up to nine different focus windows.
If presets are more suitable to your needs, the program comes with a set of eight of them. They are standard video resolutions ranging from 640x390 to 1280x1024 and can be toggled through via Alt key and one of the number keys from zero to seven. So toggle custom focus windows using Ctr key and one of the numbers and Alt for the presets. Turning the lights on the entire desktop is a matter of either pause (F2) the dim effect or terminating the application altogether (ESC).
Although CinemaDrape does not come full to the gunwales with options, the developer added a few functions that come in handy. For instance, you can customize the opacity level around the focus window going from zero to 100. There is also the possibility to set it to a random value (click on the button until you find the random level that suits you). This is great because you can set a value that allows you to view the background in case you still need to check on things there (if you click inside the focus window you have access even to the parts of the screen that are in the dark).
Dimming everything to black may appear a bit too restrictive to some users, so the developer included the option to change the background color to whatever color you want. This option also comes with a random button if you are undecided.
CinemaDrape is not quite the most flexible application we bumped into, but it fits a simple purpose, that of helping you concentrate on a particular part of the screen and ignore the rest. All the options it comes with can be activated and deactivated with the keyboard, which makes it easier to handle. However, despite the online help file stating that dropping the veil on the screen can be achieved with the hotkey combination Ctrl+Alt+F12, we found this ineffective on Windows 7; that’s a shame because it would help a lot.
Another feat we did not witness in the program is its attempt to capture the area the mouse is on at the press of Ctrl+F12. Automatic detection of the area that should be emphasized would be an amazing feature to benefit from, especially from a program such as CinemaDrape.
Another missing option is that for customizing the shortcuts. There is no way to define a different set of hotkeys for the actions and the defaults may interfere with some other hotkey layouts in other programs.
Overall, CinemaDrape is a pretty useful application if you want to concentrate only on a specific part of a screen and lose everything else from sight. It’ll sit quietly in the system tray and wait for your input.
When clicking on the system tray icon it would be nice to open up the menu from where one can choose the focus window resolution to use. This article is also available in Spanish: Deja una sombra en su escritorio Follow me on Twitter @Ionut_Ilascu
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