Gail wrote:
> You may also want to disable the indexing service. It makes searching 
> faster but just about everything else slower.

I did that for backups, yes, but that didn't seem to be what was causing 
that particular problem.  Indexing seems to get out of the way pretty well 
in Vista, at least in my experience. Once the index is built, I haven't had 
a problem. I'm leaving it on until it actually causes a problem.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

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Warp wrote:
>   Only remotely related, but one thing which annoys me a lot in XP is that
> the search function of Windows Explorer just doesn't work.

It is sucky, yes.  Vista seems to have improved it. :-)

>   Maybe it just doesn't search inside files which do not have a "known
> extension" (ie. .txt, .doc, etc).

I believe that's the case, yes. There has to be a COM class to say which 
parts of a file are text and which parts aren't. (I know I can search my 
disk for approximately any four-letter word and find it in *some* image file.)

Find yourself a copy of "Agent Ransack". It's GREP with a gui.

The other annoyance is that XP Home won't even search outside the "my 
documents" directory, even if you tell it to.

>   The Windows Media Player (and I suppose they changed it to "Media Center"
> later) is the quintessential example of using eyecandy at the cost of a
> good user interface.

WMP is highly configurable. You can "skin" it back to the old look, for the 
most part. But yes, most every media player I've found, including stuff like 
WinDVD and other seemingly-straightforward players, insist on giving you a 
funky interface that makes no sense. Half the time I can't even figure out 
how to drag the controls out from in front of the video.

FWIW, Media Center is unrelated to Media Player, except that it talks to WMP 
to get listings of the libraries and to actually play the content. MC will 
record TV, play music and slideshows and videos, access online videos (at 
least the ones Microsoft links in), allows plug-ins for all sorts of stuff 
like games, caller-ID, etc., works with the IR remotes, and is generally 
meant to work more as a TiVO does than WMP does. It's closer to MythTV than 
it is to iTunes, if that makes sense.

>   No wonder the popular "Media Player Classic" is based on the UI of Media
> Player 6. It simply didn't have any crap. It was clean and simple.

Agreed. Every time a new WMP comes out that I have to use for whatever 
reason, I spend an hour figuring out where the menus got to and such.

But there are far worse out there. "Where's the menu?"  "See the thing that 
looks like a flip-down cover? Click there to flip it down, and the buttons 
behind it are the menu."  WTF? If I wanted my DVD player to look like a DVD 
player, I wouldn't be pushing the buttons with my mouse.  I even saw one 
that had a flashing 12:00 on it when you started it up.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

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"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message 
news:49396012@news.povray.org...

> If I wanted my DVD player to look like a DVD player, I wouldn't be pushing 
> the buttons with my mouse.  I even saw one that had a flashing 12:00 on it 
> when you started it up.

Creative Labs, by any chance?
One of their older DVD apps had an interface nearly identical to my parent's 
DVD player

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Gail wrote:
> Creative Labs, by any chance?

I don't remember. I think that's just about the time I threw it away and 
found a different program. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

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Gilles Tran wrote:

> "Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> a écrit dans le message de
> news:49390ecc@news.povray.org...
>>  Maybe it just doesn't search inside files which do not have a "known
>> extension" (ie. .txt, .doc, etc).
> 
> See http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=309173
> I sort of understand why they hid the feature for regular (i.e. non
> programmer) users, but hiding it so deep it that needs a KB article to fix
> is indeed annoying.

Ohh that's what PersistentHandler is for??

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> But there are far worse out there. "Where's the menu?"  "See the thing that 
> looks like a flip-down cover? Click there to flip it down, and the buttons 
> behind it are the menu."  WTF? If I wanted my DVD player to look like a DVD 
> player, I wouldn't be pushing the buttons with my mouse.  I even saw one 
> that had a flashing 12:00 on it when you started it up.

  I really can't understand why the "real-world metaphor" GUI is so
popular even though every single GUI design guide I know vehemently
speaks against using that metaphor.

  Real-world devices are limited by the physical material it's made of.
There's only so far you can go with buttons, LEDs and LCDs. Probably
millions of dollars have been spent during the past decades in order to
study how to overcome the limitations of a physical device as a user
interface.

  A GUI in a computer removes most of these limitations. You are no longer
limited to having one button fixed at a certain location. You are no longer
limited to having an LCD panel fixed at a certain location, with a fixed
resolution and color depth. You are no longer constrained by the physical
size of the device (which limits how many buttons and other controls you
can put on it).

  A GUI allows you to enhance the user interface in great lengths. You can
create menus, dialogs, easy-to-use settings screens with tabs, radio
buttons, drop-down menus... you name it. It's exactly what the manufacturers
of the real devices dream of being able to do, but can't because of the
limits of the physical device.

  Yet so many software houses creating multimedia players go to great
lengths in order to *avoid* the advantages a GUI gives you, and deliberately
impose the limits of the physical device to themselves (and their users).
It makes absolutely no sense.

  The idea behind the real-world metaphor is that, in theory, the program
should be more intuitive because it works like a real device. This idea
is completely silly for two reasons:

  Firstly, people who use the media player program are more accustomed to
using GUI programs in that system (be it Windows or anything else), and a
program which looks and behaves the same way as all the other programs
would be a hundred times more intuitive for them to use than a program
which tries to poorly emulate a real device.

  Secondly, those devices are *not* that easy and intuitive to use, precisely
because of the limitations. By imposing the same limitations to your
program, you are making it equally hard to use and unintuitive as the real
device. Something you wouldn't need to do if you made your program look and
feel like all the other programs using standard user interfaces in the
system.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
>  I really can't understand why the "real-world metaphor" GUI is so
> popular even though every single GUI design guide I know vehemently
> speaks against using that metaphor.

Have you read the Apple Human Interface Design Principles?  Its first
item is about using real-world metaphors.

>  Firstly, people who use the media player program are more accustomed to
> using GUI programs in that system (be it Windows or anything else)

Not if your target consumer is the computer-adverse user who is more
familiar with traditional meatspace hardware.  There's still more of them
than not.

-- 
Tim Cook
http://empyrean.freesitespace.net

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Warp wrote:
>   I really can't understand why the "real-world metaphor" GUI is so
> popular even though every single GUI design guide I know vehemently
> speaks against using that metaphor.

Software publishers thinks is gives you less to learn. They're wrong, mind. :-)

>   Secondly, those devices are *not* that easy and intuitive to use, precisely
> because of the limitations.

That's what I think is cool about the new digital snapshot cameras that 
automate so much (focus on faces, figure out you need fill light, etc). They 
*are* a lot easier to use, without making them any more complicated. Of 
course, it can take control away when you want a night-shot of the moon or 
something, but for 95% of the photos, it's a lot easier with no extra 
complexity. *That* is how devices should be.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

Post a reply to this message

Darren New wrote:
> That's what I think is cool about the new digital snapshot cameras that
> automate so much (focus on faces, figure out you need fill light, etc).
> They *are* a lot easier to use, without making them any more complicated.
> Of course, it can take control away when you want a night-shot of the moon
> or something, but for 95% of the photos, it's a lot easier with no extra
> complexity. *That* is how devices should be.

What I also think is cool is that, if set to the correct mode, those cameras
STILL give experts enough knobs and switches to get that other 5% right :)

I have a somewhat-old digital camera that is pretty simple to use when
point-and-shoot'ing. Yet I'm told it came with TWO manuals!

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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Warp [mailto:war### [at] tagpovrayorg]
>   Only remotely related, but one thing which annoys me a lot in XP is
> that
> the search function of Windows Explorer just doesn't work.
> 
>   There is an option to search the contents of all the files for the
> searched string. However, for whatever reason, it just doesn't work,
> period.
> If I search for a string which exists in a file in the current
> directory,
> it just doesn't find it.

This is true in Vista as well.  As near as I can determine, it only
searches the filenames, and I can't figure out how to search contents.

...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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