15-Minute Reviews :: BeeIcons v4.0.3

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is BeeIcons version 4.0.3 by ArcticLine Software – A software title to change your desktop, drive and other icons.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“This program is intended for all fashion-conscious PC users who are willing to go beyond desktop beauty standards and make computer desktop the ultimate expression of their style. Bee Icons allows changing over 250 system icons by applying themes to them.

Your PC will stand out from thousands of boring look-alikes, generating the OOOHs and AAAHs.”

Quick Pros

• Interface is relatively easy to use
• Capability to change icons on a significant portion of system
• Tons of icon sets available online
• Capability to build your own icon pack

Quick Cons

• Little more challenging to mix and match icons
• Pop-up messages a tad irritating

Expansion

This application is a simple concept; Allow for customization of pretty much all of the system icons for your computer. The interface is relatively easy to use, though it is a bit cluttered. There is a series of icons along the top of the application, allowing actions such as opening icon themes, creating new themes, refreshing icons and so forth. Directly below this you find a tabbed area in which all the different kinds of icons that can be changed will fall; Desktop, Start menu, drives, folders, files and others. The tabs are laid out very logically to make life a little simpler. Within each tab is found a list of icons that can be changed, as well as a display of icons in the current theme/file that is open to assign icons, as well as an area to change the file used to pick the files and a few other buttons for managing the icons. Directly below the area managing the icons is an informational box; Displaying information on themes as well as managing drive, folders and file association icons. Overall the interface isn’t too difficult to use, though it would be nice to see a better system for picking icons from different packages; Really, this application is definitely more geared towards using a theme at a time, though it is not impossible (For example the push-pin icon allows you to lock in icons so you can change the active theme without changing that icon). One of my biggest quirk with this application is that there are way too many pop-up informational/warning dialogs all over the place; The redeeming value here is that you can disable the ones you don’t want anymore (And trust me, there is a good number of them you’ll want to disable).

I was rather surprised at the number of icons that can be changed in this application. As mentioned above, there is a lot of coverage such as all the desktop icons, to most of the built-in functions of the Start Menu, as well as drive icons, folder icons (Including the folders with custom icons such as fonts, control panel and favorites), the shortcut overlay and file association icons as well (there is much more too). I guess the only thing really missing here is the capability to easily update application icons.

While the application comes built-in with 6 themes (5 if you concider the two OS-specific Crystal Icon theme), I counted a total of 205 custom theme packages at BeeIcon’s theme index (41 pages at 5 themes a page). While not in direct scope of the review, I thought to mention that the theme index should really have some sort of organization system such as categories or tags; It is pretty hard finding theme that will work good if you don’t know a good search term and don’t want to wade through 41 pages of themes.

Finally, you can create your own theme pack as well, however just as mentioned above, it likely would become quite tedious to build a theme pack with this application. The ability to create your own icon theme pack would be handy for distributing amonst your computers your theme pack, passing onto your friends, or even submitting to BeeIcon’s using this page.

Final Verdict

For such a simple application, this does seem to do a pretty good job at what it does. While granted it is a little more complex and difficult to stray from using an entire theme to picking and choosing icons at your will, many likely may just stick with the packaged themes anyways. For free, if this is your type of application, it may be worth picking up for yourself today while free. As for paying $19.95, it isn’t a bad application and I likely would recommend someone check the features and available themepacks before purchasing this application. There is even a licence of this application that allows you one install on your desktop and one on your laptop for $25.95. There are alternatives to this application however: The most popular is StarDock IconPackager. It is priced at $14.95 by itself or $49.95 as part of Object Desktop – There is a lot more icon themes for this application (Though granted a lot of duplicates and garbage themes as well).

Posted by BladedThoth on Tuesday, December 04, 2007