I have no icons on my desktop. I have two wide-screen monitors totaling almost 4,000 horizontal pixels, and not a single icon— because one icon often begets many, ending up with a messy, disorganized desktop and crowding my beautiful wallpapers. But $10 utility Fences 2 has me rethinking my anti-icon stance. Fences makes it easy to get started by automatically categorizing your existing icons. Stardock's Fences 2 eliminates all of the annoyances traditionally linked to desktop icons, and makes what's good about them even better. Installed, it feels like such a natural part of Windows, it makes me wonder how come Microsoft doesn't build a feature like it right into the OS.

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• Desktop Program Icons

Fences integrates tightly with Windows, becoming part of the Control Panel. At its simplest, Fences groups your icons into virtual folders on the desktop.

Desktop Icon Separator Software Download. Even if you opt to use the REG file method, I encourage you to read through the manual steps in case you later decide that.

You can have a bunch of icons for your favorite applications, and another bunch for frequently used documents, and yet another for Internet bookmarks. It's a similar system to what some fastidious users may already be doing on their own–but it makes the process of grouping your icons together easy enough for the rest of us. When you first launch Fences, it offers to group your existing icons automatically, so you get three fences to begin with. They won't be perfect, but they're easy to customize: You can rename them, pull icons out or put new ones in, and move them around the desktop. For reasons of both aesthetics and privacy, you may not always going to want icons cluttering up your wallpaper, so Fences can hide the icons once you leave the desktop idle for a while. When you want to reveal the icons again, double-click anywhere on the desktop and all of your Fences pop back into view.

It's instant, and it's my favorite feature because it lets me enjoy my wallpapers and still use the icons whenever I want them. You can also disable the timeout and opt to hide or show the icons yourself.

The default fences may not categorize well the icons you already have on your desktop, but they're easy to customize. Taking a cue from the world of smartphones, Fences 2 introduces a feature called Desktop Pages. Just like home screens on a smartphone, you can have multiple 'pages' on your desktop. Bring your mouse to the edge of the screen, hold the mouse button down, and drag: The screen swipes over, revealing more space for fences. This sounds like it could conflict with some Windows 8 gestures which also use the edges of the screen, but on my desktop it doesn't. If moving your mouse all the way to the edge of the screen is too much work, you can also click the desktop, hold down Alt, and rotate the mousewheel to quickly flip pages.

Another interesting feature new to Fences 2 is Folder Portals, which let you place interactive shortcuts to folders on your desktop. If you have a folder with many files and subfolders, you can create a Folder Portal for it, and then get at those files directly. It's basically like having that folder constantly open on your desktop. It's an interesting feature, but has drawbacks: You can't use the keyboard to quick-search within a folder, and you can't drill down to subfolders (clicking a subfolder just opens it in your file manager).

The Folder Portal feature lets you quickly put the contents of an entire folder on your desktop. Fences was, and Fences 2 keeps the good parts and largely manages to avoid bloat. I'm not convinced Folder Portals are all that useful, but Desktop Pages are a welcome addition, and feel fast and natural. Even if you're not the sort of user who enjoys having icons on your desktop, Fences 2 may convert you. Give it a shot. Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.

I really like the superbar, gouping is awesome and a fresh feature. But it is possible it becomes a chaos when you have lots of stuff going on there. I wonder if it wouldn't be better if you can add seperators? Like separating active/non active icons, or whatever you want to separate.

It would make sense, and it will give a clean feeling I think. But then again, it'll be much like the old quicklaunch/taskbar combination, and I think MS don't want to go there on purpose. I would also like if you can add things like a direct link to a folder. Now it's just pinned to the one explorer icon which kinda sucks if you ask me, because you need to do right-click to acces it. I just want to be able to click on my download folder directly from the superbar, and go to it.

Doesn't it seem kinda inlogical the way some things are handled in the superbar? What grouping would you separate? If it's active vs inactive, the bar was designed so that the icons remain in the same position unless you move them, so they wouldn't dynamically jump to either side of a separator. I would put a separator between the pinned icons and the ones aren't pinned.

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I don't want it to move any icons to a 'group', i.e. Active and inactive. It seems like this is a very simple request/idea. I sure wish MS would start trying to add features that people want. Many people, I believe, would want a separator, for those who don't, they simply don't have to add it to the taskbar. Also, when will MS wake up and make a stacks feature build into this so called 'superbar'? I really want a separator too.

It just needs a small 1px vertical line. I would put a separator between the pinned icons and the ones aren't pinned.

I don't want it to move any icons to a 'group', i.e. Active and inactive. It seems like this is a very simple request/idea. I sure wish MS would start trying to add features that people want. Many people, I believe, would want a separator, for those who don't, they simply don't have to add it to the taskbar. What's the purpose of that separator? All it does it make the taskbar harder to use since you now have to think about which of two identical icons you want to click on, and you have to deal with the fact that items move around all the time.

Sometimes people ask for things that don't really work better for them. Like asking for a classic menu in Office 2007. In usability studies they found that if they offered a classic UI, everybody just turns that on and never uses the ribbon. But if the ribbon is the only option, they actually turn out to be more productive and (once they've gotten used to it) like it a lot more.

What's the purpose of that separator? All it does it make the taskbar harder to use since you now have to think about which of two identical icons you want to click on, and you have to deal with the fact that items move around all the time. Um, I think you misunderstood the request. He's just asking for the ability to place a separator on the taskbar.

It won't make the taskbar harder to use, nor will it create two identical icons. It'll just be a little line, to visually organize the apps for the user. His example was to place it after your pinned apps so that unpinned apps would appear on the other side. This could also be extended to allow the user to separate apps of different kinds (media, internet, system tools, etc.). The ONLY downside to this would be the possible coding & development time.

It's a nice idea, really. What do you mean? There's already the Jump List, and you can add folder toolbars that contain a list of shortcuts or items.

That's been there since Windows 95 with IE 4. I think he is referring to the stacks feature that the OSX dock has. It's prettier and has cooler animations. Here's a screenshot using rocketdock that mimics the feature: In RocketDock they also have a 'grid' view which I like a lot and actually prefer. If the superbar had that feature I'd probably go without using RocketDock altogether (I like being able to see the icons n stuff for quick access to all of my games and I personally don't like the folder toolbars). I'll never understand people that use Windows and want it to look like Mac OS X.

That's not a screenshot of my desktop in case you thought it was. I just found that off the rocketdock website. I do use the dock though (set to auto-hide) because I like it a lot better than having a ton of quick launch icons/desktop icons (have like 40 icons on my rocketdock using the stocks docklet + just regular icons). It's a lot faster to access my apps/games plus it looks a lot better.

I'd never make my OS look completely like OSX. I just like some of the functionality. 'since you now have to think about which of two identical icons you want to click on, and you have to deal with the fact that items move around all the time.' I was referring to placing the pinned icons into a group with a separator to it's right to differentiate it from unpinned icons. I would have the pinned icons first on the taskbar, and none of the pinned icons would be moved, so that won't be a problem.

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These guys are correct. I know about the folder link thing but think the stacks look prettier. Lol I've never owned a mac and am not a apple fanboy. The stacks function was probably the most overrated feature in it.

Desktop Program Icons

It didn't let me sort it in reverse order (for instance, you can't sort it by oldest first) and it took up a lot of room to display few lines of items. It also didn't look very smooth in the fan view (things got pretty jaggy). I prefer the Windows way of just putting a folder on the taskbar because you can hover/link through folders too. It'd be nice if the look of it could be updated. Maybe with an icon instead of just text or have the list popup carry the same aero borders as jump lists. 'since you now have to think about which of two identical icons you want to click on, and you have to deal with the fact that items move around all the time.'

I was referring to placing the pinned icons into a group with a separator to it's right to differentiate it from unpinned icons. I would have the pinned icons first on the taskbar, and none of the pinned icons would be moved, so that won't be a problem. These guys are correct. I know about the folder link thing but think the stacks look prettier. Lol I've never owned a mac and am not a apple fanboy.

Please no, that looks terrible. The separator is something that one uses to delineate different grouping of program icons. For example, I can group all my browsers together, all Office 2003 programs together, and my engineering programs together. The picture below show an implementation of the separator. The bars are set to be 100% transparent, so you can't see them.

However, you can clearly see how grouping each application types make it much more recognizable. It wouldnt hurt to have THAT feature, but only as an option, so you could choose weather you want to have it or not. I'm glad Windows doesn't have anything that cartoony in the primary UI:p I'm all for additional (useful) functionality, and I actually think an overhaul of the folder toolbar / cascading menu stuff would be great. But I also think the current functionality is better than that 'stacks' stuff, as it's much more practical and powerful. Plus, I think there are some good opportunities for add-ons to the new taskbar simply by using the Jump List APIs. I completely agree.

Frankly, the default stacks feature is stupid looking. I really can't see the visual appeal at all. Now, the grid look is tolerable, but still offers less functionality than the taskbar toolbars.