[Infowarrior] - Vista: ultimate confusing mess edition

[Richard Forno]

Vista: ultimate confusing mess edition

    * 10 August 2006
    * James Bannan
http://www.apcstart.com/site/jbannan/2006/08/971/vista-ultimate-confusing-me
ss-edition

Vista¹s tag-based file browsing looks great when you use the Microsoft
sample files supplied with Vista. But put your own motley files in there and
the whole system falls down.

So much for getting a Œclearer view¹ of your files.

Vista¹s approach to file management is far less interested in what¹s in your
files than what sort of files they are and what metadata tags you have
applied to them.

Windows Explorer has new buttons and filters which let you change views,
organise files, stack them according to smell and group them according to
atomic weight ­ but you need to tell it all this stuff about your files
first; it doesn¹t deduce much for itself.

If you add tags to a group of pictures taken on holiday, stating when you
took them, what model camera you used, what colour underwear you were
wearing and how much you drank the night before, Vista will sort them,
shuffle them and turn them into a slideshow.

If you just dump them into a folder called ³Holiday Pics², Vista will
grudgingly display them under ³Unspecified².

That is so useful. Not.

metadata04_small.PNG

The trouble is lots of Vista testers probably haven¹t realised this, because
Microsoft stacks the beta distribution with lots of sample pictures that
have depressingly happy and oh-so-informative tags embedded.

Oh yes, if you want to search for a specific Microsoft sample picture within
Vista it¹s an absolute breeze. The problem starts when you try to find
something in your own shabby and unworthy collection.

The point is that Microsoft seems to have missed a key learning from
computer history: end users are not the least bit interested in putting
their own metadata into files.

Pictures are pictures, MP3s are MP3s. Some people manually add ID3 tags to
their music but the very vast majority rely on automatic systems like CDDB
which are queried by CD ripping programs.

Vista really doesn¹t work around the fact that users never add their own
metadata.

Without some miraculous educational push to encourage users to tag all their
files, all of Vista¹s Œinnovations¹ amount to 10 per cent more than nothing
much.

This is a big deal, because file browsing in Vista is heavily oriented
towards specific applications like Media Player and Image Library.

Microsoft has had an opportunity to make some real advancements in
processing and recognition of files.

Take, for example, Riya.com, which allows you to identify a few examples of
each person¹s face in your photo library and have the rest of your library
automatically scanned and identified.

riya.jpg

Then you can search the library by the name of the person you¹re looking for
and see all the photos they¹re in.

Sounds high-tech, but if an online service can make a small Java application
that does it all on your garden-variety home desktop, Microsoft could surely
have done it too, and then extended that sort of thinking across the various
other types of files users typically have on their PC.

Instead, we have this ³if you tag it, we¹ll sort on those tags² approach.

Having said that, Vista does make it relatively straightforward to add tag
information to your files.

Music, videos and pictures are all treated alike ­ click on a single file
and you get a readout of what tags are currently applied.

Click on any one of them and it¹s like filling in a form. Type away and
you¹re done.

You can make multiple selections and the display changes to incorporate tags
which are common to all files ­ things like album/artist name and so on.
Really, it couldn¹t be much simpler.

metadata03_small.PNG

metadata01_small.PNG

Having content organised by metadata is useful, but only if the metadata is
actually there. Only the very best user interface design can lure people
into adding tags to their data, and it¹s obvious that Vista is far from the
Œvery best¹.

Vista¹s ³Search Folders². Metadata combined with indexing does give you the
power to find any file any time. Assuming it has tag information with which
to be found, of course. This presents a slight problem though. If you¹re
using Vista at home then searches are not going to revolutionise the way you
work and play. They¹re nice, yes, but they do rely on you doing all the leg
work to make them worthwhile.

Business users on the other hand will absolutely love searches. But if you
open the Searches folder in Vista, you¹ll see that there are already some
pre-defined ones. Searches like Recent Documents, Recent Email and Recently
Changed. These are awesomely powerful and useful searches, and +they only
rely on file time and date stamping.

metadata02_small.PNG

Files receive time and date stamp automatically, and have done since the
beginning of computing history. No user-applied tags needed.

So, Microsoft: we¹ve established that home users may or may not care about
metadata, business users won¹t go anywhere near it unless forced with whip
and chair, but we¹re all saddled with a default Explorer interface which
lives and breathes metadata.

Are we all going to be installing and using Windows Vista: ultimate
confusing mess edition for the next five years?