Managing Icons

Imagine a desk with all the usual accoutrements: telephone, calculator, calendar, pens and pencils, the
documents you’re using, and a big stack of bills. Now imagine you have the power to touch any one of
those objects and shrink it to the size of a pea, just to get it out of the way temporarily. That power
would certainly help unclutter your desktop. When you need to use one of those pea-sized objects, you
could tap it with your finger, and bingo: The object would open in its natural size.
Of course, no real-world desktop works this way. The Windows XP desktop, however, works exactly
that way. You can make things grow and shrink, appear and disappear, just by clicking them with your
mouse.
A pea-sized object on your computer screen is called an icon. As you saw back in Chapter 1, there are
probably some icons right on top of your desktop, as well as some smaller icons in the Quick Launch
toolbar and Notifications area of the taskbar. Icons also appear within many of the program windows
you open on your desktop.