Icon Chaos

Icon Chaos is an application that animates your desktop icons and makes mouse clicks explode, being designed exclusively for entertaining purposes.

It applies to situations that involve playing a prank on one of your friends, but it can also be used as a screensaver (although it isn’t one) for more eccentric users.

Accommodating it on the system is quite easy, especially that it comes in a portable archive. Simply decompress it and launch the EXE file included in the ZIP package.

The default behavior of the animations and effects are a little too much to take in at first. All of the icons are included in an interesting, but very speedy choreography, making it a challenge to actually access any of them.

Then, there is the matter of mouse cursor explosions, which are accompanied by specific sounds; although impressive at first, they are a little bit unpractical, since they completely cover the part of the desktop where you click. Several clicks will lead to a screen full of fire and explosions, which is fun at first, but will pose some discomfort later.

Fortunately, all of these effects are customizable, thus we strongly recommend to tackle the Settings window, where you can adjust parameters such as frame time, velocity and mass range, as well as preferences for the explosion feature: energy and radius (set it to a low value for smaller size).

These will help you to somehow dial down the impact of the animations and explosions, making it easier to actually work on the computer during the time that Icon Chaos is active.

Also, during our tests, we couldn’t get the explosions to trigger on Windows 7, but they seemed to work on Windows XP. Not to mention that on Windows 8, nothing works, but this could be on account of the fact that Icon Chaos hasn’t received updates in a long time.

Also, it is important that we mention the following: once you exit the application, the icon order will be restored to its original state.

On an ending note, Icon Chaos is fun, but a little outdated and definitely, not the most advanced desktop animator we’ve seen. The upside is that you can adjust the parameters of the graphical effects, thus being at liberty to customize its speed and visual impact.