If Fences was perfect...

A nest of proposed features

First, I should explain why I need the features described below. It is because Windows 7 has discontinued support of certain features which I had come to rely heavily upon, namely:

  1. One could turn off the automatic rearrangement of icons within a folder, allowing me to choose an arrangement meaningful to me.
  2. One could drag a folder to an edge of the screen and turn it into a tool bar. This could be made to hide (or not) and summoned by moving the mouse cursor to that edge.
  3. A tool bar could contain other tool bars.

I had a dozen or so tool bars, containing an aggregate of about a hundred items. These items were programs and data files that I used in my work. My forced move to Windows 7 has been a disaster for me.

Requested Fences features

  1. For convenience, let's give a name to a fenced area. Let us call it a Corral.
  2. In order to reduce clutter, we need to be able to minimize a corral. Let use of the shift key with the mouse on the name field of a corral toggle it between a minimized size of just the name and its former size.
  3. Toggling corral size must be done in-place, avoiding having the name jump around.
  4. The corral name should be pinned (at user's choice) on the top or bottom of a corral, and on the left, right or center in its vertical position.
  5. A minimized corral can be dragged and dropped like any other item.
  6. I feel that it would be useful to allow a corral to contain other corrals, but I have not worked out how that would behave.
  7. Corrals must be able to take on the attribute of "always on top", where they completely obscure what is behind, in min or max configuration, that is: they are totally opaque. Enough of this Aero glass crap!
  8. A maximized corral should return to its minimized form when the mouse cursor leaves the corral. This would allow, for example, a column of minimized corral names to be maximized one-by-one by moving the mouse cursor over them (in the proper direction) with the shift key held down.
  9. The contents of a corral must not be rearranged, and should remain as placed by the user, just as desktop items do.

 

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