Stardock recently released a program that had previously been an integrated part of Desktop X as a stand alone. That program was dubbed Icon X. In the time I have been playing with Icon X I have discovered a lot of powerful, interesting and innovative features of Icon X. By no means am I an expert in these sorts of programs, nor in programming itself. But, as I have in the past, I don't think that precludes me from discussing both the strengths and shortcomings of the program that I have discovered as an end user.

At its most basic, Icon X is a program that allows you to customize the icons on your desktop. Certainly there are programs such as Icon Packager that allow you to change the icons on your desktop. This will apply an entire set of images to the different default icons of the system. Icon Packager is a fabulous program, but Icon X takes the abilities of Icon Packager and extends them even more.

One of the first things you can do with Icon X is adjust the size of your icons. For someone like me who uses their computer at a pretty high resolution (1600x1200 in my case) the icons can be a bit small at time. Icon X allows me to make them much more large and visible.

I can take my recycle bin that normally looks like this

and by simply turning Icon X on and adjusting the default size of the icon to something much larger like this:

Notice that, thanks to the high quality icons that are in the icon package I am using I don't lose any quality by increasing the size. That would not be the case with the default Windows icons. They would look less clear. That is just an FYI.

Using Icon X I can also drop a shadow from the icon, and can make it as big or small, dark or light as I want. I can even change the angle of the shadow at my will. I can also add a shadow with all the same properties to the label of the icon. I can change the font, the color of the font, the size, etc. So you can see, I have a lot of power over the default appearance of my icons thanks to the program.

Of course, it would be pretty boring if that was all I could do, so there is more.

I can make my icons grow when I move my mouse over them. Notice that this icon, with the mouse over it, is now significantly larger than the above image. In addition (though hard to catch with a screenshot) I can adjust the brightness and contrast of the image, making it perhaps even more clearly and focused, as well as more bright when I mouse over, really bringing it into view. Conversely I could make the icons in the default state darker, more blurry, well, you get the idea. I can animate the transition so that rather than suddenly becoming larger the icons grows slowly. I can even make it change color as it grows. And even a dumbo like me can figure out how to make these alterations relatively simply.

There are a number of other really cool things I can to. I can make it so when I do something (mouse over, select, mouse away) I see flashing blue circles, red circles, green circles, or even radiating white circles. For the sake of space I will just link to those:
Blue Circles
Green Circles
Red Circles

Finally (at least for the scope of this blog) I will use the example of an image file to demonstrate another cool feature. Normally when there is an icon on your desktop it has the appearance of whatever the default icon for that type of file is. In the case of the icon package I am using, an image file (a jpeg in this example) looks simply like this:



Not only is that small, but it can be pretty boring as well. Turn on Icon X though, and what you see is much more interesting. The image file (jpegs, bitmaps, pngs, and probably others I haven't looked at) now is represented by default, with a thumbnail version of what the file actually is. So the above icon becomes what you see below:



Pretty cool if you ask me. And if you don't want to have little thumbnails all over the place, you can go in and change the icon to be whatever you desire. This is possible for every icon on the desktop. Right click it, bring up the Icon X properties box and just select any image file you want to represent that icon. Piece of cake.


But all is not roses. There are still some problems, and I can only hope that somewhere down the line these are addressed, as they could take a neat program and make it truly great.

First off, Icon X seems to be losing settings left and right. I notice it happening more when I am actually using Desktop X rather than Icon X alone. But that may simply be a factor of using Desktop X more often than Icon X alone. It doesn't seem to be losing the settings as long as I am not opening up the settings dialog. But the second I open that up, things are all messed up. Which means I have to go back and reset everything the way I want. Even when I have saved a theme those settings are often getting corrupted. Irritating to no end, and really unnecessary. And according to the newsgroup I am not alone in this issue.

Second, the icons often will pile up on top of each other. Perhaps this is supposed to be a feature, but I find it to be difficult. Rather than tiling the icons as Windows does by default, letting them each occupy their own discreet amount of pixel by pixel space like this:

Icon X will just let them pile up on top of each other like this:



Not only does that look funny, it also requires that you manually move and separate them before you are really able to be certain which icon you are mousing over in order to select it. I find this to be inconvenient and waste time, especially if you have quite a few icons there. Another problem I have noticed is that Icon X will truncate long names on icons. Whereas Windows normally does this by default, once selected the full name will show. This isn't the case with Icon X. This can make dealing with files that have long names difficult, especially if they are named similarly. Also, often there are icons that simply don't appear right. I downloaded a game demo the other day and the icon I got on the desktop was the standard with box with a blue titlebar icon. I turned off Icon X and there actually was an icon for that program. After installing the game, the same problem occured with the icon for the shortcut. Icon X gave me the same defualt white box, turned off I had the nifty little icon for the Nexus demo.

The final missing feature of Icon X, that would really take it to the next level in my opinion, is the ability to have each icon have its own attributes. Having global settings that by default apply to every icon is certainly a must. I don't think anyone wants to go in and alter the attributes for each icon. But having the capacity to have overrides for icons if desired would be amazing. Case in point, let's say I want to have icons for my drives on my desktop. My C, D, E, and F, drives. Now, I don't use my E and F drives nearly as often as my C and D drives. So I would like to make those two more prominent. Make them bigger by default and grow a little more than the others. And I don't want my other icons as large as those drive icons. At this time I don't have an option. All icons are the same default size (whatever I set it to), and grow to the same new size (again, of my choice). Allowing individual icons to have some sort of override to the global settings would simply be amazing.

So there you have it in a nutshell. A pretty cursory overview of some of the great features of Icon X, as well as some of the aspects of it that prevent me from using it on a daily basis. In theory I love the program. In practice, it hasn't quite hit prime time for me. But I don't doubt that Stardock will get it there soon.

As a final note just let me say, if any of the problems I have with Icon X are at my end I will gladly admit to them and happily be proven wrong.