gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials » desktop icon

Find perfect icons with Iconfinder

Daniel Pataki — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:22:07 +0000

Martin wrote an article in May about IconLook, a website where you can search for icons. I recently found another one, simply called Iconfinder, and as you would expect it enables you to find icons as well. During my testing I found that Iconfinder has more large icons in the 128×128 range. It also seems that IconFinder has less numbers by number, but what they do have extremely relevant and high quality.

Iconfinder is easier to use because it let’s you view License details and tags without going to a new page, and lets you download the icon as well without switching pages (this is rare). IconLook also has some good options, for example you can select sizes before performing the search, narrowing your search instantly. Iconfinder has the same functionality, but you can narrow only after your initial search.

Overall I like both sites, perhaps the best practice is to use both. Since neither will provide pages and pages of results, you can easily scan through both sites and find the best icon for you. If you know any other icon finding sites I’d appreciate you sharing, I’m always in need of some good icons!

Manage your Desktop Icons

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 07:56:34 +0000

Shock Desktop is a Windows application to manage the desktop icons. Users can create profiles which save the current icon layout of the desktop. Loading that profile again resets the desktop to that icon layout. It happens for instance that icons get moved if the user changes the screen resolution. This can be undone with the application.

Another feature is the ability to display the desktop icons if windows or applications hide them. The hotkey CTRL Q displays the hidden desktop icons and the user can interact with them normally.

One click hides the text of the files and icons and another the complete icons which might be nice if you want to take a screenshot of your desktop for instance.

The last function is not that practicable in the daily work routine but I could think of some applications for it. It is possible to arrange the desktop icons in certain forms, like hearts, stars or triangles. Create a heart for your loved one for instance but be prepared to undo the changes as well.

Fix to remove Sony Ericsson Desktop Icon

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 09:19:31 +0000

A good friend of mine recently brought her mobile with her and connected it to my computer. The phone was the Sony Ericsson W810i and I had to install the software for the mobile that I downloaded from the official homepage. Everything worked fine until I uninstalled the software again and realized that the desktop icon was not removed during the uninstallation.

I tried to delete the icon by selecting it and hitting Del and was puzzled that the file was still on my desktop afterwards. Right-clicking the icon revealed that many menu entries were missing. There was no way to delete the file or take a look at the properties. Moving the icon into the recycle bin had no effect as well.

After some frantic researching on the internet I found a way to delete the icon directly in the registry. The icon – and many others – is located in the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace\. The key was {A5110426-177D-4e08-AB3F-785F10B4439C} but could be different for your icon. All I had to do was to delete the complete key (starting with A5..) and restart the computer afterwards.

Finally, after restarting the computer, the icon was no longer on my desktop. Hope this helps everyone else who is having troubles with the Sony Ericsson icon or icons from other companies.