Today's giveaway is a 1.6 Mb download, Folder Marker Pro 2.1, which lets you "mark" your folders by giving their icons a different look.
Installation
No typing in of keys needed. Just run the single exe file provided. On the first run however, a window alerted me that version 3 is available, along with the option to download the latest version. I skipped the offer, and according to some of the guys who tested the software earlier, the GAOTD offer is not valid for version 3.
Ease of Use
I didn't expect such a program to be difficult to use, and Folder Marker Pro's interface is uncluttered, separated into 3 steps required to change folder icons - choose folder/s, choose the icon, and apply changes. In fact, the easiest way to customise a folder icon is to bypass the program's main interface, and choose an icon from the Folder Marker sub-menu added to right-click menus.
The right-click menus can be customised from the program, and the interface for doing this is quite straight forward.
The program allows you to add your own icons which you may have downloaded off the internet. Unfortunately, this process is tedious, as you need to add icon by icon - there's no way to add a bunch of icons at once. Same goes to importing icons from .icl files.
Features
For an icon-changing program, one of the requirements would be a decent collection of icons for users to choose from. In my opinion, the icons supplied look pretty normal. I suppose Folder Marker, as it name suggests, focuses more on helping you organise stuff, rather than letting you "beautify" your folders. That considered, the icons, albeit being plain-looking, would allow users to organise their folders.
The program has an option to make folders distributable. That is, the program will put the customised icons in the respective folders and create the relevant desktop.ini files. This allows you to move, rename etc your folders and preserve their icons.
Testing the program on my Windows XP PC, I was frustrated that some of the context menus did not work as expected. The "More icons" and "Restore default" options didn't do anything. Same goes to some new icons I added to the context menu.
Summary
Some annoyances in the program left me with a less-than-positive impression of the program, and I have to give it a thumbs down. Some of the context menus did not work, and there are no options to import many of your own icons at once. The lack of support for Vista adds to the list of cons.
For this list, I'll focus on programs which come installed with folder sets that let you tag/mark folders, rather than those which let you change icons for aesthetics reasons.
Shedko software has two similar utilities that help you mark your folders. Folderico does something similar to Folder Marker, and comes with a few themes. Shedko Badges lets you visually tag your folders by adding "badges" on top of their icons.
iColorFolder works nicely, and comes with a few themes, each with a variety of folder colours.
MyFolder allows you to easily add custom icons to its context menus, which lets you apply them to folders.
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