14 DAY TRIAL // Just when you thought that there can’t be a way to reduce taskbar clutter even more, here comes Bins, a simple application tailored to combine taskbar icons into groups, no larger than the regular taskbar icon in Windows 7.
The application is currently in beta stage and cannot be evaluated unless you register for a beta preview. Installation goes smooth and no system restart is required; it is ready to start organizing your desktop icon right away.
As “pinning” is an important feature these days, Bins adopted the concept and bent it to serve its purpose. Thus, you can pin multiple items on the taskbar into a single icon to the effect of reducing the clutter in Windows application band.
The procedure is as simple as dragging and dropping an icon on another. They will instantly combine and the contents of the group will be available when passing with the mouse over, without crippling the default aero preview in Windows 7.
Although the Bins taskbar icon is limited to showing only four elements, it can fit in a lot more. We tested the application with more than 7 tasks and Bins handled them with no problem. All the icons look faded when closed but as soon as the tasks are launched they become fully visible.
Bins integrates beautifully in Windows 7 and does not affect the preview functionality of the operating system. It will actually offer two preview types, one encompassing all the currently running tasks in the group as well as individual preview for each of the launched programs.
Despite its simplicity, the application is not without a configuration panel. The options available refer to light taskbar tweaking, but also let you disable Bins altogether and return to the default settings.The functionality of joining multiple icons into a single bin on the taskbar can prove very helpful when you want to group programs of the same feather together, for easy access. Also, the capacity of the taskbar of holding pinned items is greatly increased.
During our tests we found Bins very stable, but there are still issues to be fixed, one of the more important ones being RAM usage, which was pretty high on our machine (~30MB without the “Settings” opened). Also, it seems like thee are still some features the developers are trying to implement, the most prominent of which is jumplist functionality for each of the binned icons.
Bins is currently a pre-release, unsupported software. Also, the version we analyzed is a private beta which cannot be used unless you register for a copy.
