IconHider
IconHider was, in the words of its own page, "a little utility to hide icons from the menu of your Symbian smartphone. Nothing more, nothing less." It was the last program Symbian Toys added to the catalogue, arriving in 2012 when the platform was already in its final phase.
Archive notice. Symbian Toys was an independent hobbyist software project for the Symbian Series 60 platform, which Nokia discontinued in 2013. These pages preserve the project's own documentation as it was published. The software is no longer distributed here, and no support was ever offered for it. Device and platform names appear for identification only; the project was never affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any device manufacturer.
Description
The application menu on a late Series 60 handset accumulated things: operator applications, preinstalled trials, demo content and folders nobody opened. Most of it could not be uninstalled. IconHider removed the entries from view without touching the underlying installation.
It could also hide its own icon. In that case, getting back to the program meant dialling a personal code from the keypad, at which point the IconHider screen appeared immediately — a neat piece of design that used the dialler as an entry point precisely because the dialler is the one part of the interface that cannot be hidden.
Trial and full versions
IconHider was the only program in the catalogue distributed as a paid application rather than as freeware or donationware. A trial version was free of charge but could hide only one icon and did not allow the default personal code to be changed. The full version could hide up to twenty icons and allowed the user to set their own code. It was sold as a one-off payment granting unlimited use on a single smartphone, licensed against that handset.
That commercial arrangement ended with the project. Nothing on this archive sells anything, and the source has since been published — see the IconHider source repository, released in 2021.
Compatibility
IconHider covered the later part of the Symbian line: 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 and Feature Pack 2 devices, 5th Edition, Symbian^1, Symbian Anna and Symbian Belle. The download page listed supported handsets individually and let a user pick their model, which by 2012 ran to several dozen devices across the touchscreen and keypad generations.
Why the menu filled up
By 2012 a handset arrived with three layers of software on it. The platform contributed its own applications; the manufacturer added a suite of services on top; and the network operator, if the phone was sold on contract, added a further set of branded shortcuts, portal links and trials. Very little of this could be removed, because a large part of it was installed in the read-only portion of the firmware rather than as user-installed software — the same read-only layers that NokiaCooker existed to edit, and which could only be edited by rebuilding and reflashing the whole image.
IconHider took the other route entirely. It changed nothing about what was installed and simply stopped the entries being drawn, which meant no risk to the device, no flashing, and nothing to undo if the user changed their mind. For the specific problem of a menu cluttered with things nobody asked for, hiding is a complete solution and removal was never available anyway.
Where it sits in the catalogue
IconHider is the smallest idea Symbian Toys ever shipped and, arguably, the most immediately useful one. It shares a mechanism with Guardian — both had to make an installed application invisible in a menu the platform did not intend to be edited — but it applies that mechanism to an entirely ordinary annoyance rather than to theft. The release archive records the distribution file, and the project news column covers the era it arrived in.