Icon ordering--:Feature neaded
Saturday, November 1, 2008 by StephenGear | Discussion: Fences Beta
Their appears to be no way off reliably moving Icons into any dissemblance of order.
You have to accept the default order, or randomly move icons.
A class's/property's is neaded.
Icon Alignment-Left/Center/Right--Top/Middle/Bottom (within a Fence)
Icon Sort-Name-Alphabetical[Assending-Dessending]
I am encouraged to see Icon size working by holding down ctrl+Mouse wheal.
Reply #2 Wednesday, December 10, 2008 3:01 PM
Installed Fences B2 today, and I can't do anything else than love it... It's a definite choice for my top 5 most used desktop utilities list (hmm, I should make one of those lists, just for kicks...)! 
I agree with the previous requests, it would be nice.
I also have an addition. It would be sweet to be able to disable the icon labels within a single fence.
And finally a question;
Since this integrates with the contextmenus, will we get localization support? At the moment I have duplicate menus for view since I use a swedish edition of vista home premium.
I'd be happy to supply a swedish locale for this project. (Since it doesn't contain a billion items to translate) 
Reply #3 Wednesday, December 10, 2008 4:02 PM
Hi guys,
Unfortunatly, changing icon sizes per-fence or per-icon/etc isn't something I can do. Since Fences was written for compatibility / to work with the existing desktop rather than replace it, i'm stuck dealing with some of the desktop's "truths". And one of those is that, yeah, can't do that 
Selectively removing icon labels sounds pretty neat, but again anything that involves changing the size of an icon gets pretty dicey. The difficulty / level-of-sophistication required to even get the partially-invisible icons was very high. Do I sometimes regreat writing Fences to attach on to the existing desktop rather than rendering / doing mouse processing for it myself with full control? Perhaps. But I'm often reminded of why it was a *good idea*, as well! (See how Fences doesn't "mess up" often/ever / behaves exactly how you'd expect you desktop to behave? And uses very few resources? A complete custom desktop would erase those benefits, as then i'd have to spend loads of time worrying about writing all the little bits of the desktop from scratch, emulating all the different behaviors it has that one might not even notice... not to mention compatibility with other 3rd party software / shell-extensions / etc.)
Sorting is definitely something I plan to do. At some point I hope to introduce a whole concept of "Smart Fences". You'll be able to have them sort based on various criterian (none, alpha, size, date modified, etc), and also choose default fences for certain filetypes / force a sort / etc. E.g. "unless otherwise specified, new icons go to fence 'New Stuff'", "all new Excel files go to fence 'My Worksheets'" (with option to "sort my existing icons based on my smart-fence rules"), or "all new icons created while 'Internet Explorer' is in the foreground go to the fence 'Downloads'". Essentially imagine Outlook's "Rules" for incoming emails, but for your desktop icons.
Alignment, I would like to do, but I don't know that it's a top priority. E.g. align center/left. Do-able, but time consuming. Also scrolling as I have it right now only works vertically, so I'd have to update that entire system to be horizontal on top of writing a whole custom sorting routine. So yeah But, that one definitely isn't ruled out for some time down the road. Hopefully Fences will still be helpful for you even with the top-down/top-left alignment only? What are your thoughts
Reply #4 Wednesday, December 10, 2008 5:25 PM
I totally agree with your KISS attitude, it's definitely the way to go.
Fences is totally useful exactly as it is. As far as I'm concerned, the only thing that I really feel is lacking is localization (As the context menu gets cluttered). Any other added features are just icing on the cake.
Reply #5 Thursday, December 11, 2008 6:31 AM
Unfortunatly, changing icon sizes per-fence or per-icon/etc isn't something I can do. Since Fences was written for compatibility / to work with the existing desktop rather than replace it, i'm stuck dealing with some of the desktop's "truths". And one of those is that, yeah, can't do that
Don't mind... this app is just great, changing incons size would be eyecandy only... not necesary
Reply #6 Thursday, December 11, 2008 6:36 AM
At some point I hope to introduce a whole concept of "Smart Fences". You'll be able to have them sort based on various criterian (none, alpha, size, date modified, etc), and also choose default fences for certain filetypes / force a sort / etc. E.g. "unless otherwise specified, new icons go to fence 'New Stuff'", "all new Excel files go to fence 'My Worksheets'" (with option to "sort my existing icons based on my smart-fence rules"), or "all new icons created while 'Internet Explorer' is in the foreground go to the fence 'Downloads'". Essentially imagine Outlook's "Rules" for incoming emails, but for your desktop icons.
That would be kinda useful
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Reply #1 Wednesday, December 10, 2008 10:21 AM
I agree... Fences B2 works great, I installed it this morning and I already love it.... but arranging icons inside the fences could be imporved.
One more thing... it wuold be great if you could change the items size inside the fences... and make one icon being bigger than the others (like in Ubuntu/Gnome)