Windows 7 RC is almost here!
Fellow Windows blogger and guy-named-Brandon, Brandon LeBlanc, posted an update outlining the timeline for official availability of the Windows 7 Release Candidate. We’ve all been working very hard on this for a long, long time now. I’m really looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks!
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Brandon, I’m really enjoying the releases of Win7 (been running it in production since Beta). You and your team have done a fantastic job on a very clean feeling UI. I’ve got to say, Aero Peek and Snap have changed the way I work with multiple windows (even though I have 3 monitors). I began with a dual boot (Vista/7) install thinking I’d go back and forth, but I have booted my Vista install since January, I’m hooked!
Along other lines, I’m new to your blog and was reading about your trip to Uganda. Wonderful stuff. I have friends who are planning on moving to Uganda (northern) to serve in the mental health field doing trauma work field staff support. I hope you get to make it back again.
Cheers.
Lack of IColumnProvider still hurts very much. Please consider it “un-deprecating it”. Lots of Windows utilities are broken today and there seems to be no way to display *dynamic data* for *all file system objects* in the new property system. Without IColumnProvider, personally, I won’t migrate from Windows XP.
I use Winamp a lot on Windows. In Winamp, I’ve set the default action to Enqueue music files so instead of playing they added queued up in the list. Starting with Vista, if I select more than 15 items, I am unable to enqueue those songs in Winamp’s playlist. In Windows XP, I got a message, saying “Choosing to open xx items at once may take a long time and cause your computer to respond slowly” which was a useful warning however clicking OK would let me enqueue the songs without any performance hit. Now I can’t do the same in Vista/Windows 7 anymore. Please add the warning back and allow users to open more than 15 files if they want.
Please fix the sort order for Explorer before RTM for list view. By default, it should sort in Ascending order. Currently, even if it’s Ascending order, sorting by any criteria such as size, date modified or type makes it sort by that criteria as well as reverse the order (becomes descending) when in fact the user just expected the sort criteria to change. This is a major annoyance as all folders go to the end and files at the beginning. I request the team to fix it before RTM. There is already a Sort by Ascending/Descending menu item, why should then the sort order change by changing sort criteria? Please don’t say this behavior is by design, it’s an oversight/bug that needs to be fixed. Anyone listening?
Anonymous –
I was not able to reproduce that problem. I installed the latest version of Winamp on the Win7 RC build, changed the default action to Enqueue, and then selected 18 files. All of them were added to the current playlist, with no message box or anything at all. I even tried again with 80 files and saw no such problem.
The behavior relative to multi-select is generally up to the verb handler registered by the application. It’s possible that if you’re using an older version of Winamp, that it doesn’t properly support large selections.
Other anonymous guy –
(You know, if you guys leave an e-mail address, it won’t be displayed, but then I can actually respond to you directly in addition to commenting back)
Anyway, I believe what you describe is in fact By Design. Each property has a “preferred sort direction.” For example, Date defaults to descending, as does Size. But Name and Type default to ascending.
The reason for this should be pretty obvious. Usually when people click on Date, they want to see the newest items. When they click on Size, they usually want to see the largest items on top. In Details view you can just click on the column header again to sort in the other direction.
I updated to the latest Winamp and this particular issue went away. But for the sort order issue, I think it is important to respect the *user’s* choice because he can choose Ascending or Descending from the context menu and then use “Apply to all folders” would always prefer to “save” that view. If the preferred order is respected, it’s more of a shock to the user than convenience even for certain properties such as Size. In fact as a user, I even don’t want size or date in descending order, I just want a *consistent* order. Hopefully, this’ll be fixed by RTM/SP1 or optional in folder options. This has been a major annoyance since Vista for many ppl (including me) I’ve talked to.
Also, why is “Folder.jpg” as folder thumbnail not supported anymore? Why is there no horizontal scollbar in the left pane of Explorer nor automatic scrolling like Vista? Why is there so sort bar for any other view besides Details (a regression from Vista?), why are all items autosorted so that pasting 50+ files into another 50 files scatters all of them by the sort order, why is the security tab/setting ACLs missing for multiple items since Vista, why Alt+Enter doesn’t work in the left pane since Vista and perhaps the biggest annoyance, why is there no size and free space displayed without selection on status bar/details pane, why for 15+ items, the user has to click “Show more details” to view size? The size+free space issue has been echoed (or screamed) by several users on Technet forums (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprogeneral/thread/6f50b645-e74a-40e4-97e6-3dd9ccb92ab4)
I’m so annoyed about these issues plagueing Explorer since Vista and lots of users are. I very recently discovered Explorer++ for Vista/Windows 7. It has a few rough edges but without it I’d go back straight to XP from my free Vista/Windows 7 license (I got from the Windows Feedback Program).
The Auto arrange feature is also widely disliked than favored as evidenced by this blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2009/03/24/9502891.aspx Apparently, Raymond Chen isn’t aware of the behavior since Vista?