One of the things I love about Mac OSX is that folders can be given colors, making it a bit easier to locate the folder you want to access.
I know there are third party programs that can be downloaded to allow this with Windows, but I wonder if Windows will ever ship that option, or hell, with any option to make folders easier to distinguish.
For instance, I routinely access servers crammed with a ton of project folders. They all have project number followed by project name. Problem is, work tends to be with current projects, meaning all the jobs are in the same general number range. It would be so much easier to assign colors.
What other seemingly simple Windows improvements can you think of?
I do actually have Windows 7, and it runs much, much better than Windows XP. I really, really do have to admit that. However, a serious list of changes that irk me:
[ul]
[li]Start menu. Give me the option to use the old one. Solved via third-party, but a stupid oversight by Microsoft.[/li][li]Ability to root an Explorer window. There’s now no way to get rid of all of the extraneous crap in the left pane’s heirarchical browser. I manage a hell of a lot of files, and I’ve always appreciated that I could “Explore from Here” on any folder and have that folder be the root node. I’ve not found a solution for this.[/li][li]Clean up the “Documents” folder. All of the crap that lives in there aren’t my documents. I want to manage my documents myself. Admittedly, I’d like a solution for this on Mac OS, too. I deal with it now on XP, 7, and Mac OS by having my own _Documents folder in the Documents folder.[/li][/ul]
Other than that, I’m mostly happy with Windows 7, although obviously my first choice is always Mac OS.
First and foremost: get rid of MDI. Take its rotting carcass out back and KILL IT once and for all. Make every document open in a new separate window. Make it so that there is no longer any application that will not let you open document1 and document2 and put them on opposite sides of the screen with a NotePad document containing instructions sitting smack dab in between them.
I mostly use Windows XP and have only used Windows 7 for a while, so it’s possible that they corrected some of these things.
If I’m copying a folder or series of files, please don’t abort the entire copy process if a single file is unavailable. Instead, finish the copy process and report any issues. Also, make something like Synctoy more robust and integrate it into the OS. Also, make it easy to identify the big files in a folder or on my system.
Also, if I’m installing a printer in Windows, why does the system need to prompt me to insert the stupid driver disc? Almost every computer I touch is connected to the Internet, so why can’t it go out to Microsoft.com or HP.com and get the driver itself, automatically?
Multiple desktops. I know that you can get 3rd party programs that does it, but it just seem so obvious to me that any OS should provide this feature in itself.
OpenGL is supported on Windows (Vista has OpenGL 1.5 support as standard, upgrading your graphics card drivers will take you all the way up to OpenGL 4.1 support, if your card has those features). In fact, it’s better supported on Windows than it is on the Mac, which still can’t use features from OpenGL 3.0.
How about having a slightly different confirmation when deleting an empty folder versus deleting one that contains files?
I mean, I’m not expecting Windows to magically know that I’m accidentally deleting the only copy of my thesis and all the data when I was just trying to reorganize folders, but is is that hard to say “Do you want to delete this empty folder?” versus “This folder contains 1.39 megabytes in 164 files; do you really mean to delete it?”
(if there’s any easy third-party fix for that on XP, great, I’m all ears. Won’t help me at work of course, but at least I could install it at home.)
Allow me to customize the GUI. Maybe a series of XML files that define the UI sizings, fonts, colours and the like. Allow unsigned drivers to be run without needing to enter test mode or specify it while booting.
That’s up to the individual software developer not Microsoft(except for in the software MS themselves make of course). And in my experience the vast majority of software doesn’t use the typical MDI anymore.
It’s absurd that I have to rely on a given application to provide volume controls and a mute option, and I’m just out of luck if they don’t do so. There are only a small handful of applications that I want to make sound on my computer.
While we’re at it, Mac should do the same, and I’d like to see browsers incorporate per-tab volume controls. I do not enjoy hunting down the rogue music-playing tab.
You can see that the individual colored pixels are tall and skinny, and that is why ClearType triples apparent horizontal resolution. They use the individual single-color pixels separately, while twiddling brightness to avoid having weird color artifacts.
Of course, they could use it to triple vertical resolution while in portrait mode, but I’m not sure how good that would look.
ETA: It looks like there might be hope—from that same page: “Note that the vertical subpixels could be split in half vertically to double the vertical resolution as well : the current LCD panels already typically use two color LEDs (aligned vertically and displaying the same lightness, see the zoomed images below) to illuminate each vertical subpixel.”
A search facility that, when asked to look inside files, does so. Dunno if this works better in Vista/7, but in XP, it just doesn’t work properly (I use PRGrep instead, which does work)
My wish is for a new filesystem extension that supports metadata in a way that is totally portable and transparent. File tags that travel with the files, regardless of where they go.
In other words, imagine a way that the ID3 tags embedded in MP3 files could be attached outside the file, without touching the content. And imagine that tags like that could be attached to any file whatsoever.
By doing this, you could send a file to a friend via email, copy the file to a network share, put it on a thumb drive, or wherever, and have the annotations go along for the ride. And if someone uses MS Word to edit a Word document and saves it, the original annotations (on the outside of the file “envelope” and not in the content) would still remain.
Many kinds of files do allow internal metadata (pdf, Office, MP3, jpeg to name a few) but those solutions are in the file content and require modifying the file to change.
And once this universal metadata envelope is available, have Windows index it for quick searching.
These guys put together a sort of hack that accomplishes this to some degree on Mac OS X, called OpenMeta. When I copy tagged files and paste them, or otherwise manipulate them, the metadata is retained and neatly indexed by Spotlight, the Mac’s indexing service. Unfortunately, it is often criticized as not being the best way of accomplishing this.
minor7flat5, that sounds pretty much like what I wish for, though I don’t have the knowledge to articulate it in technical terms! I basically want post-it notes, maybe that show up on mouseover from a file name (I use Windows explorer a lot and I hate having to open files to confirm what they are if they have weird names).
I also want a right click>print file list in Windows Explorer (I found a way to do this online and have done it on my home and work computers, I just think it’s stupid that it doesn’t exist to begin with).
