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Auto-hide your desktop icons when you don’t need them with AutoHideDesktopIcons

November 22, 2011 By 2 Comments

Tired of seeing a cluttered mess of icons on your desktop? Don’t have the time to organize it- for example, using any of the tools discussed in our recent Ten free tools to better organize your desktop icons post? If so then check out AutoHideDesktopIcons, a small app that hides your desktop icons after a period of not interacting with the desktop, and displays them again when on left click it again.

How it works: AutoHideDesktopIcons is a small app that lives in the background and monitors your desktop for inactivity (i.e. for when the focus is elsewhere on other windows or programs); once it detects that a certain period of inactivity has lapsed it will automatically hide your desktop icons, only to reveal them again when you are ready to use your desktop again and left click on the desktop. It can optionally hide your taskbar as well.

AutoHideDesktopIcons Screenshot2

The period of inactivity is user defined and can range between a minimum of 3 seconds and a maximum of 100 (i.e. just over a minute and a half).

AutoHideDesktopIcons is portable software that can be launched minimized to the tray; the program interface can be accessed via it’s icon in the tray. It has a fairly small footprint at around 11 megs in memory.

AutoHideDesktopIcons Screenshot

The verdict: a very nice concept and a clever approach towards a clutter free desktop, although it does take a bit of getting used to. This program should have been included in my aforementioned “Ten free tools to better organize your desktop icons” article, but I somehow missed it.

[Thanks go to reader Brockman for the tip]

Version tested: 1.36

Compatibility: WinAll; 32 bit and 64 bit supported.

Go to the program home page to download the latest version (approx. 22K).


 
 
 
Samer Kurdi

Samer Kurdi

Has been reviewing software since 2006 when he started Freewaregenius.com
Samer Kurdi

@freewaregenius

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November 22, 2011
Samer Kurdi
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  • Alex

    No, you didn’t miss it in your “Ten free tools to better organize your desktop icons”. ;-) You reviewed “DesktopOK” (by the same author as AutoHideDesktop) and he included the same “hide icons / taskbar” function in DesktopOK. It’s no GUI, just options to select in the “Tools / Icon Hiding” menu. FWIW, in “Tools” there’re two other useful functions to enable: Minimize windows to tray and use scroll wheel to activate/scroll background windows. Great little tool..

  • Samer

    @ Alex: I actually didn’t know this same functionality was bundled into DesktopOk; thanks for clearing that up!