Smart Icons appear and disappear from your Windows desktop, quick-launch bar, and/or user-specified directory, as CDs, DVDs, and USB drives are inserted into and removed from your computer, or whenever you connect to a network drive, just like they do on Macs and Linux computers.

As well as specifying where icons should be placed, you can also choose which types of drives—optical (CD, DVD, etc); removable (USB sticks); network; RAM disks; and fixed (internal hard drives)—are given Smart Icons, and exactly which drive-letters should be monitored too.

Now, in version 2.0, you can also specify a particular directory in which to add smart icons—handy for use with dock programs, or your Links folder in Vista.  Each of the three locations (desktop, quick launch, custom directory) can also receive different icons, so all attached drives can appear on the desktop, while only discs appear in the quick-launch bar, and only letters from F to J appear in the custom directory, for example.

Smart Icons is available as a straight-forward application that will install and run automatically, but it can also be run in Portable Mode for use on a USB stick.

The open source code can also be downloaded below, along with sample settings and locale files for further customisation and translation.

• Smart Icons Setup (924 kiB) for automatic installation
• Zip file (321 kiB) of the executable program (for portable use), example configuration files, and AutoHotkey script (source code) and icon.

The Smart Icons source code is released under a GPLv3 licence. Smart Icons was created using AutoHotkey; the Setup program was created with InnoSetup.