Really when you think about all those desktop icons residing on your desktop are pretty stupid. Other than being graphical commandline’s for launching a program or a related file type they do diddly squat. Even the Recycle Bin with it’s empty or full icons is wasted desktop real estate. Sure it tells you if the Recycle Bin has stuff in it or when clicked launches Explorer displaying the contents. It doesn’t show you however the percentage of full it is; or how many folders and files are in it.

A lot is being made of widgets or gadgets as the next generation of information providers on your desktop; which really makes desktop icons even more useless. This begs the question then of why desktop icons have remained dumb all these years. Ever since Windows 3.1 they have been an integral part of our desktop but have never provided any usefulness beyond opening files or programs.

One would think that given the prime screen real estate that desktop icons occupy that at some point some-one would have realized that they could do much more than just sit there waiting to be clicked. After all given that these icons can be displayed at sizes up to 128 pixels by 128 pixels that is really a lot of room to display graphical information. This is not to mention the uselessness of the context menus for desktop menus.

Now we see that Apple is seeking a patent (via CrunchGear) for multi-size icons

Accordingly, in order to present a more informative and personalized user interface, a manner of describing to a user relative importance of an icon in relation to other icons in a system is desirable.

Whoop - dee - doo .. so we can have different sized icons on out desktop all at the same time. Can we say YAWN? … if this is the best we can come up with for desktop icons then they will remain the stupidest use of valuable screen real estate.

Conversation Tags: Windows, XP, Vista, desktop, icons, Apple