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Clutter Cloak

What is Clutter Cloak?

Clutter Cloak is a simple anti-distraction program for Windows XP.

Where can I download it?

Download stable version here (requires installation of Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0) or download the new version (beta but uses much less memory, runs faster and does not need .NET).

[NOTE - the beta version is falsely detected by AVG as containing a Trojan. Also Photo/Video mode is extremely slow on Vista if you have Aero enabled, I’m still figuring out if I might be able to fix this].

What does it do?

Clutter Cloak is activated by a hotkey (by default this is Ctrl-F11). It then obscures everything on the screen except the child window immediately under the mouse pointer. Most usefully, this would be the content pane of an editor, web browser or other document viewer, but Clutter Cloak doesn’t care and will happily cover up everything on the screen except a toolbar if that’s what the pointer is over when it is activated.

What is Photo/Video mode?

Pressing Ctrl-Alt-F11 (this can be changed to another combination) activates Photo/Video mode. This performs basically the same function as the standard mode, but it determines the borders of the image by capturing the screen and looking for lines of solid color or regular dither patterns (like the light area of a standard scroll bar). This means that Photo/Video mode is able to conceal player controls within an embedded video, or show you just one image within a web page.

Unfortunately, because this mode works by trying to detect borders, it can’t always get it right. To improve accuracy, it won’t detect borders that have the same color as the pixel under the mouse pointer. If your image contains a large block of one color, Clutter Cloak is more likely to find the right borders if you place the pointer within that block before activating Photo/Video mode. You can also increase the minimum length for a single edge of the border in the settings dialog box which will reduce the chance of false positives [NOTE-for the new beta version the minimum length is determined by how long you hold down the hotkey for, the configuration option is gone]. Another thing you can do is try to position the cursor in the image in such a way that it is not directly in line with any long blocks of color or solid borders in the image.

If you want to hide player controls from YouTube, note that there is no solid line between the video and the controls which are split into different regions. The mouse pointer needs to be in an area of the video that is horizontally over the larger region that contains the play button and the time slider when you activate in order for Clutter Cloak to see a long enough border underneath to be able to hide the controls. To put it another way, the pointer needs to be within the left hand half of the video pane.

This mode is not yet tested on a system with multiple displays, I will be able to do that within the next few days. Also, you may see the memory usage increase significantly when you activate and deactivate this mode many times; the program is not leaking memory but the garbage collector can be a bit slow to kick in. Let me know if this is causing trouble.

What is blind input mode?

Blind input mode is activated with Ctrl-Shift-F11 (configurable). It covers the whole screen with the cloak, while still allowing you to type into your current application. The purpose of this feature is to make it faster to write the first draft of a piece of text by reducing the temptation to re-read and edit before it is completed. Make sure your application has input focus before activating to ensure that your keystrokes will be registered!

How do I turn it off?

Just press the hotkey again or click in the obscured area. Pressing the hotkey again is the preferred way to deactivate the cloak because that way your application will keep input focus.

What settings can I change?

You can set Clutter Cloak to run on startup, change the opacity of the cloak, change the hotkeys, and change whether or not the cloak obscures all screens on multimonitor systems.

Why not just use full screen?

Not all applications have a full screen mode, and even when they do, I tend to find that full screen leaves me with too much stuff in front of me at once.

It uses a ton of memory!

The new beta version is much more reasonable.

I want something a bit like this, but this is not it!

Try this page of similar software at Lifehacker. There’s Mac stuff there as well. Clutter Cloak was inspired by Jedi Concentrate which does a similar kind of thing but always leaves an entire top level window showing.

Any other tips?

I have the hotkey assigned to the extra thumb button on my mouse, which works really well for me. If you don’t have extra buttons you might want to use a single key for the shortcut (maybe Pause/Break).

I have a comment, who do I contact?

Email me at tomcooke@fastmail.fm or leave a comment on this blog.