Every once in a while I do something that causes the icons on my desktop to be rearranged.  Sometimes it’s a video card driver upgrade.  Sometimes the OS decides that it must change the resolution for me.  Whatever the reason, I finally had enough of it after installing the latest ATI driver on my machine.  I spend enough time arranging the icons on my desktop that I get irritated when they get moved all about.

This is a problem that the operating system shell should solve.  When I worked at Microsoft - on the Shell team no less - there was a video making the rounds on the team produced by some folks in some who knows where part of the country that I thought showed a lot of promise.  It allowed you to associate icons on the desktop with each other and to move them around like you would papers on your desk.  The visuals were cute; well, more than cute, they seemed really useful.  Unfortunately the concepts presented by the video were universally scoffed at by all.  Too bad.

Today I went on a hunt for a solution to this problem.  I was hoping for something cool like what I saw in the video.  Alas I couldn’t find it.  Maybe I didn’t enter the right keywords to search on.  In any case, I did find something that would solve the problem.  All I really need is to be able to save and restore my icon positions.  Being able to save positions for different resolutions would be a bonus.  I found two packages that looked interesting.

Iconoid-Positions

Iconoid

Iconoid is freeware from SillySot Software that provides a boatload of features, including saving and restoring icons, changing the desktop background colors, hiding icons, temporarily moving them to one side or the other, etc.  It had the basics of what I needed and then some.  It’s been around for a while, but the last time it was updated was on February 6, 2007.  It claimed support for Vista 32-bit, so I decided to try it.  After installing and running it, I found that it did funky things with my task bar.  It almost seemed like it caused the explorer process to crash.  That wasn’t a good sign, so I decided to exit and uninstall.

One good thing about the package, though, is that the source code is also available.  If I ever want to develop my own solution at least I can see how this package did it.

Icon-Keeper-MenuIcon Keeper

Enterra Icon Keeper is a super simple package.  All it does is add save and restore icon positions.  You can’t save multiple sets of position. You can’t do anything else.  It’s a very elegant solution, and it’s free.  They also sell Icon Keeper Deluxe for $9.95 which will handle multiple profiles.  Both packages simply add an option to the desktop context menu which will allow you to perform the save and restore operations.

I went with Icon Keeper.

At some point I’d like to see someone implement an icon grouping interface.  Maybe the folks on the Shell team were reacting to there being too many similarities with the old Program Manager in Windows 3.1 - who knows.