Tuesday, May 10, 2011

W7 libraries a way you can reorganize your content

There are two kinds of people in the world, those that like change imposed from the outside and those that find it pointless at best and annoying at worst. Guess which camp I am in? Windows 7 isn't going to be officially released until October but already people are excited with the RC1 released the other day as a free (beta) download. With windows vista being as lousy as it is, people are relieved to see the back of it. There's a lot of buzz about the new windows 7.
Clearly the microsoft spin-meisters are doing a good job for their money, but is there any substance behind the hype? What happened to the annoying UAC and the numerous bugs in vista? The general view is that windows 7 is a step in the right direction (how could it be worse?) and there are in-depth reviews on the subject.
Today I will focus on windows 7 explorer, the desktop file manager. Is it any better than vista's lame explorer? It looks cute and friendly for the average computer novice or granny. In fact it looks almost the same as in vista (don't be fooled by the "7"; the internal windows version is 6.1 which shows how close internally they are). There is still no menu, dual panes or tabs, but there is a useful preview pane on the right and an oversized status bar with extended details on the selection below. The only big difference is the W7 libraries, a way you can reorganize your content regardless where it is stored on disk. That's useful but you could do that already using folder junctions. There are many interesting view modes like stack view and variable size thumbnails. Useful if you  windows 7 explorer
are uploading pictures all day to facebook I suppose. File search is quite quick but like in XP you get partial results.
In the end of the day nothing much have changed in windows 7. If you want your software cute and fluffy, use windows explorer — or get a Mac <g>; if you need a tool for precision file management use xplorer2. Below you'll find a table comparing windows explorer and xplorer2 features in detail. Click on symbols for demo videos or further information.
Now will somebody tell me what's the point of renaming "Add or Remove Programs" in control panel so that I have to spend half an hour trying to figure out how to uninstall a program in windows 7? Not a happy camper with all these pointless changes!

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