Sup’s Sporadic Spewage of Syllables

You know what they are. That thing Microsoft introduced with Windows XP or so. How any folder with at least one image (or audio or video file. You can apply this generalization to all the following times I use this term) is immediatly classified as an “image folder” and gets attached all those useless tasks, special view options and what not.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand that if people have a folder full of images, it’s probably strictly for images, and they might find a thumbnail-view handy, as well as all the extra picture info like size, camera type and what not. But not everything that has an image is an image folder.

I like to keep a simple clean standard view. A Details view with columns for the common info like Name, Type, Size and Date Modified, all sized to make full use of my large resolution. It’s all I need and I like it. I might customize the view for other folders if I need, by myself. But Windows won’t let me have that. It’ll turn any folder into an image folder without my consent, resetting my standard settings and causing me havoc since whenever I open the folder, I have to get used to a completely different view.

To add to that, as handy as extra file info is, it only slows down Windows more as it queries all the extra info just to display the folder’s contents, since Windows only caches thumbnails. Plus, all these folder types are linked. If I try to change the view settings myself in one of these folders, chances are it’ll affect several other completely unrelated folders. Even bigger chances are it’ll quickly forget about them and re-apply it’s default view for “image folders”. Worse even, these view settings now also apply to the smaller Open/Save dialogs in which they mostly don’t even fit in.

This leads to a Little Annoyance. A Little Annoyance is, by my view, worse than a Large Annoyance, because you avoid the latter the minute you run into it. With a Little Annoyance, you cope with it, live with it, slowly dragging you down until it eventually grows into a Large Annoyance anyways and you avoid it completely. Navigating a file system is vital to any user, and the more this is clogged, the worse. I cannot avoid such a vital task without having to resort to something like typing the whole file path myself, and if I wanted to do that I’d switch to Linux.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 21st, 2007 at 1:07 am and is filed under Computers and their Contraptions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.