TidyDesk

The desktop space can quickly become crowded with too many elements, making that pretty background picture difficult to see. There are various ways to clean it up, with the possibility to create custom taskbar links, but there are also specialized applications like TidyDesk that want to bundle everything inside a neat launcher.

The application is portable, and can even be stored and launched from a USB flash drive. As such, it gives you the possibility to create a custom launcher for other portable programs. Another advantage of portability is that system registries remain unchanged, thus not having an impact on the health status of the target PC.

When launched, the main window shows up, with various predefined groups like office, image, audio, video, Internet, clean, misc, and games, all related to some default Windows features. These can be rearranged, or even renamed, but you can’t create more groups than the available slots, so you have to work with the presets.

Selecting a group displays content. What’s more, a group is not defined by a specific folder on your computer, so you’re free to add stuff from different locations. Sadly, this can’t be done by dragging target items over the main window, so you need to rely on the browse dialog.

There’s an additional view that can be toggled at the press of a button. It further reduces the main window to a single column so it takes even less desktop space. Navigation is done by going back and forth through groups.

Customization feels a bit shallow, with no other options that to arrange and rename groups. It would have been useful to set colors for applications, especially since icons cannot be attributed. However, if it does manage to come in handy, you can make the application run with Windows for more comfort.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that TidyDesk manages to live up to expectations and provides a straightforward, and simple method of keeping your desktop a clean space. Although customization options leave more to be desired, its simplicity and custom design makes it easy to use, and can blend in any kind of desktop style.