At work most of the people have to deal with lots of open windows at the same time. You can switch through them easily using the Alt + Tab switcher hotkey, but all the open windows make you delirious as you have to concentrate only one of them every time you look at your desktop screen. The free LeDimmer application can easily solve this problem by dimming all of the desktop screen except the foreground window. This makes it very easy to concentrate only on one window at a single time.
You can download LeDimmer from the website of Lionel Lemarie, the developer of LeDimmer. The download is a portable application packed inside a ZIP file. You can download the ZIP file, extract its contents to a folder and run LeDimmer.exe from there. The application has no GUI at all. All it does is place an icon in the system tray icon. But it keeps running in the background and dims everything else but the foreground window as you switch from window to window.
Although there is no GUI for LeDimmer, but it allows you many different options by specifying the command line parameters. You can use the command prompt window or a shortcut to use these parameters. To view all the supported parameters, you can right-click on the system tray icon and select About from the context menu. This would show you all the possible command line switches and what they do in a window.
The command line switches are very useful to customize the LeDimmer functions. For example, you can change the transparency of the dimmed background by using the -alpha switch, you can choose a custom dimming background picture by using the -image button. In the following snapshot, I have used a small kitty picture as the dimming background with the alpha value of 200.
LeDimmer is a very nice and useful application for everyone who feels lost in the desktop jungle of multiple open windows. You can use this simple to use application to easily highlight the foreground window and avoid getting distracted by anything that is going on in the desktop background.
You can download LeDimmer from https://sites.google.com/site/llemarie/ledimmer.