AetherGrid
A borderless, transparent, customizable desktop icon grid for Windows (x64 and arm64).
Website & Download Page:
Tech Stack
Application
Tech & Tool Stack
Website Tech
Stack
App Features
- Invisible Grids and Pages: AetherGrid creates invisible grid areas so you can fit more files and shortcuts on your desktop without the clutter. This is done by automatically creating pages as needed based on how many icons you have, and the size of each grid.
- Seamless Desktop Integration: The default configuration is designed to feel like a part of your desktop, remaining behind all other applications and seamlessly blending with regular desktop icons. You can make AetherGrid align with your preferences by customizing icon hover/select colors, icon spacing, icon size, and more.
- Multiple Grids per desktop: Enable multiple independent desktop grids, each with its own set of icons, layout, and appearance. Grids are managed from the settings window.
- Set and Forget: For each enabled grid, select any folder on your system to act as the source folder. Any items in that folder will be reflected in the generated grid. Changes to a selected source folder will be reflected upon restarting the app. Once you have configured everything, enable the “Start with Windows” feature for AetherGrid to automatically run on startup.
- Overlay Mode: When enabled, Overlay Mode results in a widget-like behavior for the selected grid, keeping it on top of all non-full screen applications. This provides a quick access area similar to the taskbar to enhance your workflow.
Challenges Behind AetherGrid
- Correctly extracting and caching icons while considering many edge cases and 20+ file/shortcut types
- Dynamically rendering icons in grids from the created cache based on icon size and more
- Designing the core behavior that handles auto page creation/deletion, and icon placement upon resizing grids
- Reverse-engineering the original Windows 10 and 11 RGBA color values used for hover/select on desktop icons (Simply measuring them directly isn’t enough)
- Measuring and recreating pixel-perfect (or extremely close) default values for icon size, spacing, and more as part of the intent to make the grids blend in
- Creating a visually polished and fully functional user interface to manage grids (the settings window)
- Considering countless UI/UX design choices so new users don't feel lost or overwhelmed
- Making sure settings are saved and read on startup (And providing the option to make AetherGrid run on startup)
- Automatically detecting changes to items within source folders and updating the cache/grids as needed (Was a file, shortcut, or folder added/renamed/removed?)
- Discovering, analyzing, and handling as many exceptions and edge cases as possible through user-friendly dialogs, rather than allowing the app to crash
- Optimizing CPU and RAM usage, and ensuring no memory leaks
- Spending an entire day on designing a logo/icon from scratch, then converting it to .ico and integrating it into the project
- Configuring lengthy and complex IDE and project settings for debugging/building
- Creating polished Windows .exe installers for both x64 and arm64 that also create uninstallers found in the Control Panel (and they must clean up registry values and leftover folders/settings)
- And much more...