Yes, I have too many Icons on my desktop. It’s been that way since Win 3.1. It’ll be crowded like that when they throw me in a hole and put a tombstone over my head.
Sometimes when I upgrade software it updates the desktop Icon. It also moves the Icon. :smack: I have my Icons carefully placed and organized so that they can easily be found. Moving them around on me is a nasty trick.
I open Explorer and search my Desktop. Find my wayward Icon. I can click it from Explorer and run the software. But it does nothing to help me find it visually on the desktop. No flashes, no blinks, bolding etc.
Any tips or tricks to find an Icon? Something that will make it blink or flash? Some kind of visual cue?
Finally resorted to checking every Icon on my desktop. one by one. Line by line. I finally found my lost one. The color in the Icon was quite similar to my desktop picture. Making it difficult to spot.
MY Question is still valid for future use. Something that visually cues an Icon’s location would be quite helpful.
Pressing the key on your keyboard that corresponds with the first letter of your icon will cycle through each icon that begins with the same letter, highlighting the icons as it goes. That is the method I usually use when I’ve lost track of the icon I need… And I have used the word icon far too many times, so now it looks weird to me.
You don’t have to just keep pushing that first letter. You can just start typing the full name of the thing that you’re looking for, like “Fire” and it’ll highlight Firefox.
If you’re using Windows Vista, 7, or 8, you can also push Start/Windows key on your keyboard and start typing and it’ll search all of the Start Menu for apps and various other places. There’s no need to have icons on your desktop anymore. Just push start, start typing what you want, and launch it.
It’s many years since I had Icons, but I seem to remember one could find Icon Editors free on the internet and change them to whatever shape or colour one desired.
And usually right-clicking Properties will find you a dialogue for changing them, with a selection of whatever icons your operating system can find, You could choose any more memorable one.
Anyway, I find icons distracting, and arranging them a time-wasting distraction. I have a few, for document/text files, bur they are on a virtual desktop, of which I have 20 ( to show 20 different desktop images ) so I only see them if I want to. ( KDE has two separations, ‘Activities’ and ‘Virtual Desktops’’: I’ve been using the latter only for nearly a decade. And I think I read Windows will soon have the same feature, if you want it. ) *
I can’t imagine anything quicker than choosing one’s application from the classic menu with a mouse. It shows what one can’t remember, and opens instantly. No icon-hunting or typing needed.
KDE started Virtual Desktops in 1998, Windows had the capacity since XP, but only as an add-on Powertoys utility Now it’s ready for Prime Time.
[ul]
[li]Right click an empty area of your desktop.[/li][li]Choose “create new folder”.[/li][li]Name new folder, “icons”.[/li][li]Drag and drop icons, one by one, into new folder.[/li][/ul]
Now you will always know where your icons are, jus look in the icon folder!
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But a huge fraction of the user base finds tree-structured menus totally baffling and opaque. And they find spatial organization clear and obvious and accessible.
The obvious problem is one method (trees) scales much better than the other. And our OP has hit his scaling limits.
Most CS/IT folks have been living with tree structured, well everything, for so long they’ve adapted to thinking of organizing everything in those terms. Trees are in fact a deeply artificial and limiting way to organize a large mass of strongly connected information.
Tag and search is a vastly more intuitive approach, much more closely resembling the processing that happens naturally in the user’s brain. The problem today is we don’t have easy visual tools for tagging nor searching. Nor are users conditioned to do the tagging up front that enables effective searching later.
The majority of the time I know exactly where to find my needed icons. I have the desktop organized into sections. Its only when the icon gets moved that I have trouble finding it.
I use folders for some icons. For example, links for articles that I want to save. I don’t want to clutter up my Firefox Favorites. I save the link as a shortcut and save it in a desktop folder. I have one “read later” and another “news archive”.
that’s exactly the tip I needed.