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