There are times when you really need to pay attention to your work, but you have to face all sorts of distractions such as flashing web ad banners, incoming chat messages, notifications….etc. Disabling all of these temporarily over and over can prove to be a time-consuming task. CinemaDrape is a brilliant freebie that you can use to cover the screen, except for user-defined areas and focus on your task.
Installation & Requirements
The lightning-fast installation has only a few basic settings and doesn’t include any adware to complicate and lengthen the process. CinemaDrape is also available in portable format, with the same features included, for those who want to avoid having too many installed apps.
CinemaDrape runs on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8. Older versions of Windows are not supported.
Interface
Every time you launch CinemaDrape the screen becomes black. By default, a Quick Start screen appears showing users the basic actions they can perform using the program such as adding, modifying and deleting focus areas. Drawing a rectangle with the mouse adds a new, transparent focus area. This area can be moved and resized and you can add as many focus areas as you need. You can also decrease the opacity of the black area temporarily by holding the Shift key or the left-mouse click.
CinemaDrape has two interesting options available in the program’s menu. It can detect the window under the cursor as well as the area. The latter option is quite useful when you watch videos online, but it only works in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Hopefully support for other popular web browsers will be added in the near future.
CinemaDrape offers the possibility of creating custom layouts with as many areas as you want and saving it for future use. It’s quite a time saver if you need CinemaDrape repeatedly for the same website or application.
The focus area also has its own menu, which you can access via right-click while holding the mouse cursor on the edge of the focus area. From this menu, users can delete the current focus area or resize it using one of the offered common windows sizes such as 800x 600 and 1024 x 768.
For our visual satisfaction, the program allows us to change the background color and opacity. Not many options are available in the Settings pane. The program’s settings enable users to change the keyboard shortcut used to pause/resume CinemaDrape, the peek through opacity and turn on/off automated restoration of the focus area at program start.
Pros
– Extremely fast setup with minimum amount of settings and no bundled adware.
– Intuitive context menus for the program and the selected focus area.
– Users can define the background color and opacity of the “drape”.
– Allows you to create as many focus areas as you want.
– Users can save and load custom layouts.
– The focus area can be resized manually or using predefined formats.
– Capable of detecting area under cursor (supported web browsers are currently limited to Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox).
Cons
– None worth mentioning.
Conclusion
CinemaDrape is a great solution for when you want to focus on an application or a piece of text without being distracted by other events that take place on your computer like notifications, incoming chat messages or flashing add-banners on websites.
