Thought Outflux | Anirudh Sanjeev

I’m getting rather annoyed with the explorer file manager in XP these days. It’s a very primitive file manager, with very few advanced features whatsoever. MS thought they did something great with vista by removing the menu bar, the up button, and everything else, and integrated rarely used features like rating and in program id3 tag editing, but they can go f* themselves as far as I am concerned. The only helpful addition was breadcrumbs which has been present in gnome and kde for a while, and the favorites section, or the links, that nobody knows about again. There were some suggestions I made to the konqueror dev group and so on but nobody’d listen.

5. Breadcrumbs:

Importance: Low
Usability Impact: Medium
Applies to: Developers, people working with many folders

If you’re looking for something buried deep within several folders, and you need to get a good idea where you are and change where you are soon, breadcrumbs is the best option. Breadcrumb navigation has been around as far as navigation has been around, whenever structured, heirarchial information has been around. It’s one of the best ways to get around quick.

Though it’s implemented in vista, you can get it in XP too with a cool little app, and in linux, gnome’s file manager, and kde’s next file manager, dolphin, also has them in full feature.

Explorer Breadcrumbs: Adds breadcrumb navigation to XP’s file manager.
[Screenshot]
[Link]

4. Alternative File Views

Importance: Medium
Usability Impact: Varies
Applies to: Power users

Apart from the standard icon views, various file views are essential. Windows XP and vista for that matter, make the stupid mistake assuming if a folder has four image files and 3 mp3s, I wanna see it in filmstrip mode. Maybe so, but not always. Seeing my files in text only mode, or icon only modes are just a couple of ideas I thought of now, but data can be arranged in various other ways. An example is konqueror’s filesize view, which was later available as a seperate app in macs. There are various options here which lie unexplored.

Konqueror’s filesize view:
Documentation on the various views
[Screenshot of filesize view

3. Minimalism and Aesthetics

Importance: High
Usability Impact: Surprisingly High
Applies to: Everyone

I’ve tried nearly every file manager on the market, and am not happy with a single one of them. Mainly because they want to pack in a button on the taskbar for every single option out there. I have half a mind to tell them that people don’t want buttons to encrypt their files or something like that. Adding to that, the live previews, and the usage of the standard windows library just adds to the clutter. I don’t want to name names, but most programs that supposedly increase efficiency just can annoy you more, like it had to me.

The problem is that the developers do not take usability and aesthetics into consideration, and they just want to cram in features. The tiles view of windows explorer is not given enough credit. Look at a screenshot of Konqueror in action, or any other file browser and look at the clean airy look of a tile viewed file browser. You will definitely notice a difference.

2. Assigning colors and icons to files and folders.

Importance: High
Usability Impact: High
Applies to: Everyone

I have many folders and work with many files, and need to distinguish between them quickly. The human brain is specialized in looking for colors and images and icons to distinguish what it’s looking for. If I had all my important folders green, I could just open those ones, or label one for my study work and one for my web development work. Windows XP has the ability to change the icon of a folder but it’s painfully long and not worth the trouble. I love this one feature in nautilus called icons and emblems which you can drag and drop over any folder or file to give them a special status. If I could recolor or change the icons of folders easily, that I can give them some significance, me and everyone else would see a drastic increase in productivity. Have a look at emblems and icons for nautilus here (linux.about.com)

1. Intelligent iconsizes

Importance: Very high
Usability Impact: Very high
Applies to: Everyone

This is one of my best ideas ever. Essentially your file browser sees what files you more commonly access, and accordingly put your most important files and folders at top. After a while, it can start detecting trends in usage, and the more frequently used icons come up and they look bigger. So if you open My Documents, then your current project files are at top, while your old image files are at the bottom. Imagine the amount of time saved.

Why worry about file managers?

Most people spend a lot of time working between files, and finding the right one faster, without using a slow search, as microsoft is hoping is quite important and if you don’t spend too long browsing around, you have more time to do the things you love.