I just obtained a new, supercool device, a Garmin sports watch. A heart rate monitor and a GPS device in one package. I love it already. Everything's worked perfectly so far, but now I'm trying to get it to transfer data to my laptop. It's not going as it's supposed to go. I've tried a couple of things, and I'm a bit fed up already. So I open up the control panel, and it looks like this:
Yeah, I'm nearly 35, so I'm blind. I have to have cat-size icons so I can tell which item is which. Even though I manually change the view to 'Details' every time I have to open this friggin' thing. I like the 'Details' view because most of the stuff fits in and I don't have to scroll and the things are shown in neat alphabetical order so I can quickly find the item I'm looking for. But no, Windows just refuses to remember my preference, and shows me these huge, colourful blobs instead.
I mean, they're neat and all, and yes, it's nice that graphic designers have got work to do, but does anybody really focus on the icon? This is the control panel, it's pretty technical stuff and I, for one, focus on the text below the image to find the thing I'm looking for. I mean, I'm a software engineer, and I don't know what the 'iSCSI Software Initiator' does. Why the hell is it on my laptop anyway? Who the hell knows the icon to it by heart? Who the hell thinks there ought to be an icon? Icons are good, when you want to distinguish Word documents from PDF documents in a folder. But, you don't make an operating system easy to use by designing icons for complex functionalities and then forcibly wrapping them around the faces of unwilling users.
I actually feel sorry for the poor graphic designer who had to design the icon for 'Internet settings'. It's got an Earth, not unlike a dozen of the icons in this view, and a, ooh I get it, a dialog box with some check boxes. Yeah. I wouldn't have guessed without the text underneath it though, that by clicking this picture, I actually get to set the Internet settings. Is there a way to hide the text? I can't find it. But if there was, things would really get interesting.
So please, Bill Gates, the next time, remember my preference. I want to see text. Just so I can find stuff. Like this:
And another thing. In Windows 2000 the 'find in files' functionality of file system search worked. In Vista it doesn't. How the hell can this be possible?
Just try it. If you dare. If you have Vista. It even sounds like some kind of a contagious disease. Yeccch. Like this:
1) create a text file in any folder, named 'test.txt', containing e.g. the word 'ville'
2) copy the file to the same folder with a different file extension, e.g. 'test.pkb'
3) search the folder for the string 'ville'.
I claim that you can't make Windows Vista to find the file 'test.pkb'. Not by using the advanced search options, not by indexing the file, no way. It just doesn't work. In Windows 2000 it worked fine, the search functionality could find strings from binary files, no problem.
And I'm not complaining just because nerds like to do that. I really need this function in my work. It's not a rare situation that I need to find out where a certain procedure is called from, and the only way to do that is to search the file system.
Yeah, I know there are options. There are programs that can search the file system better than Windows. I just find this a horrific flaw in the basic functionality of an operating system.
Oh. And BTW, when reproducing the test case I described earlier, I just found out that now the Vista file search finds the string 'ville' in every file in the test folder.
MUTINY!
(is Mac any better?)
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