Just installed this, I'm on Mavericks (Mac OS 10.9.2), works just great! Entire screen (except for menubar) turns totally black, including even the desktop wallpaper. Very easy and simple to use.

You can change the color from black to another solid color of your choice, if you want. The color can be total, or it can let the actual background leak through, and you can decide the strength of that leakage, that's your choice too. You can also decide the fade speed. I left that at the original setting, at nearly immediate.

Whatever you want to focus on has to be selected first before you turn on Isolator. Isolator's icon appears only in the menubar. To turn on Isolator, you click its icon, then within its drop-down menu you click "on." When you're done, again click Isolator's icon, click "off" in its drop-down menu, then regular screen returns. That's it.

If you want to use the keyboard instead of the mouse, you can use the hotkey of your choice to turn Isolator on and off from the keyboard. The icon showing in the menubar is optional, you can still access it through the hotkey.

I see no bugs; it seems totally stable. This doesn't feel like it's a beta at all.

I did have two questions I couldn't resolve. In Preferences, under the tab titled "Background windows," there's something called "Filter type" where you have the choice of: None, Blur, Bloom, Crystals, Desaturate. I tried them all but couldn't determine what these options actually did. So I left this at the original setting, None. There's also something called "Filter radius," which you can change along a continuum from small to large. Tried this out as well, didn't seem to do anything either. I left this alone at the original setting as well. There's nothing on the developer's website that explains these two options either.

I have only recently started using this app, so ratings for stability should be taken with a grain of salt. But it does what it is supposed to very effectively. It stops me from being distracted by the web and allows me to get along with my work. It is very simple to use, and flexible - it is simple to add new web pages to block.

I think this may be the most useful 'productivity improver' that I have installed! I am very excited by this!

I love Isolator for its simplicity. Thank you!! A wish list item for me would be application exclusions.

Really nice app. Does what it says and does it well. Lots of options to adjust to your liking.

This is a great tool, but I did have some troubles with it.

I do not like a lot of things in my menu bar, so I switched this option off. I use a (very huge amount) lot of software at the same time, so I erased the keyboard shortcut so it could not interfere with some other app.

...and now I could not control the app anymore and had to quit it in Activity Monitor (clicking the app icon did not do anything).

But it did help me to focus, works very well and the 'filters' to hide the desktop are great!

Does not work properly with TotalFinder

I would imagine a lot of people would want to use this with word processors, so they can concentrate, but while using Word I needed to access another window within Word and when I did, it automatically hid the first document and the only way I could get back to it was to turn off Isolator. Also, it gives you the option to Hide Dock, I assumed it meant that it would disable it while you were working so when you got to the bottom of the page it wouldn't pop back up, but there it was. If it just hides the Dock, you can set that up in your regular OS X preferences. I was really hoping this product would be for me. If I'm doing something wrong in Word, I'd love to give this bad boy another shot. Thanks!