NiteView

NiteView is a software application that can hide desktop elements to help you focus on writing or reading, for example.
It comes packed with just a few options that can be enabled and disabled with one click.

Hide the desktop shortcuts and taskbar

Following a fast setup operation that shouldn't give you any trouble, you're welcomed by a tiny window that shows three checkboxes for hiding the desktop (program shortcuts) and taskbar, as well as for showing Nite colors.

Enable the dark red theme using Nite colors

When it comes to the Nite colors, the tool turns its bar dark red. However, we've noticed that other colors schemes from outside the utility adopt this dark red too, such as the address bar in web browsers, the navigation pane in Windows Explorer, background in Notepad, as well as the tab bar in Notepad++.
Next, you can either exit the utility (the changes are preserved) or minimize it to the taskbar to carry on with your typical destkop activity. Unfortunately, the application doesn't offer other color scheme options.

Lacks richer options and configuration settings

It would've been useful if the developer implemented hotkey support to be able to quickly show or hide the desktop shortcuts and taskbar, as well as to toggle the dark red color scheme by just pressing some keyboard keys.
The program was originally designed for Windows 95 and 98. Although we haven't come across any stability issues with the newest Windows model and we didn't have to resort to the compatibility troubleshooter, sadly, NiteView has little value to bring.

Conclusion

There are a bunch of other, more versatile applications out there that can help users make desktop tweaks. Considering that the desktop shortcuts and taskbar can be easily hidden using the operating system's built-in options, we fail to see its worth.