Vista Diaries — Category

One of the recent things I’ve been doing in Vista is playing around with stacks. A new view in Windows Explorer in Vista is to stack your files into groups by attribute. In reality, it is a bunch of searches for specific files with pretty icons. To stack folders, you can click on the arrow next to the heading you want to stack (say, Name) and selecting “Stack by Name”. You’ll then get lots of icons with files holding a certain name.

This can be helpful in certain situations. One of the things I like to keep organised is my music. In XP, I would’ve had to create a folder to each artist, then another for each album. In Vista, I can do half that work automatically.

I just type “kind:music” in the search box, then go Artist → Stack by Artist, and all my music is magically put into virtual folders. (We first type kind:music because of the folder images that can add unnecessary cruft).

Now I can double-click on an artist and get all the music by that artist.

But, what if I want to get a certain album? Well, this is why I said “half that work automatically.” It cannot remember stacks within stacks, but you can still do so. Just go Album → Stack by Album. The music is then stacked by album.

You can navigate the stacks just like any folder from the folder tree as well.

Now you may think this all useless because you can’t access this in Open dialogs. You are mistaken. Click on the Save Search button in Explorer to save it to your Saved Searches folder (or anywhere else for that matter). Then, open up an Open dialog box somewhere, goto Saved Searches and double-click your new search. Tah-da!

I finish off this post with a tip that not even US PC World knew. If you are finding the icons too large or too small, you can quickly resize them by holding down Ctrl and rolling the mouse wheel - roll up to make them bigger, roll down to make them smaller. The thing PC World didn’t mention in the article above was that this applies to the desktop as well. Just go to your desktop then Ctrl+Mouse Wheel. And yes, if you make the icons 32×32 (the old size), the shortcut icon will overlap a quarter of the icon. Just scroll down one more and it won’t.

If you are using Vista, these two tips that I posted late last year might help you out with two open source problems:

• Using The GIMP with Windows Vista
• Getting Windows Media Player and Firefox to play nicely in Windows Vista

Now that I’m in Vista full time I’ll be updating my blog with any tips and tricks I find with problems lurking about (such as the Creative Live! card one below).

I finally got my copy of Windows Vista (Business) and installed it last night. The “wow” lasted for about five seconds until I had to grapple with Creative’s lack of Live! 5.1 drivers. Unfortunately, they will never ever be produced. So I’ll have to upgrade my sound card.

I tried the kX drivers at first, but the version downloadable from the site didn’t work correctly with Vista (it sort of does, just the Mixer didn’t work). I then tried the modded drivers and they didn’t work at all. I then took out the sound card and tried the onboard sound. No luck with any of the drivers I downloaded (from Gigabyte, Intel or Realtek). I then found newer kX drivers on the forums (Version M), so I put back in my sound card and tried those. It works, not perfectly (full Vista support will be in 3539, not 3538), but it’ll do.

I think I might just upgrade to an Audigy card, as my current card is getting on and I’m hearing pops and clicks every so often.

So now starts my Vista.

Microsoft was the first that came to the scene with “integrated” search. Involving a massive search index to make finding stuff a lot faster. It was touted as being a WinFS feature, and of course we all know how WinFS is these days. Soon after the announcement (a couple of years back now), Google released Google Desktop Search, and Apple did a similar thing in the next version of OS X. Suddenly, everyone was on the indexed search bandwagon.

Funny thing is, Windows XP always had search indexing, it just wasn’t very good. If you go to Start > Search, and look through the options, you’ll find the option of searching through the index. For some reason, it was terrible though and hardly worked. Microsoft tidied it up for Vista though, and put it everywhere. In fact, why have a search box on your taskbar, since it is embedded in almost every app that comes with Vista?

You’ll find a search box in the Start menu, Windows Explorer, Mail, Internet Explorer, Calendar, Windows Media Player, Photo Gallery and countless other places. But would you use it?

Well, maybe, yes. Of all the features in Vista, when I boot into XP I miss this one. And GDS and Live Desktop Search all suck. You are kind of forced into it with the Start menu, as they have modified the way the All Programs menu works - it is no longer a menu. It is a series of point and click operations, which can be tedious, that it is easier to type a couple of characters. The benefit of the Start menu search is that not only does it search the Start menu (that is its priority), but it also doubles as a command line, so you can launch anything from anywhere, including your e-mail.

Windows Explorer search is much improved too. At any time, you can start typing a few letters in the search box and it will instantly filter the file list. It even looks through program and file metadata so that if you come across a whole barrage of setup programs, typing in the program that you want will most likely yield your result.

Case in point. I use the Firefox extension Scrapbook to keep together some of the more amusing internet pages at my disposal. I even keep some important ones in there, like my timetable. One day I had to find my timetable, but I didn’t know where it was because I hadn’t installed Firefox at the time. I looked through the Scrapbook folder. Each scrap is kept in a dated folder.

In XP, it would have been a pretty daunting task to find my timetable, looking through each folder. In Vista however, a couple of key presses and I’ve narrowed my search.

They aren’t even named “timetable.”

Despite the demise of WinFS, I think Microsoft were quick in providing almost all the features that it was going to provide. As said before, it is one of those features that I miss, and it is really helpful. No more trawling through folders, spending minutes at a time looking for the program to open some conspicuous file needs.

Well I decided a couple of days ago after checking out the pre-RC1 build that I might talk about the little things in Vista that are both good and bad. You always hear about the collective reviews that just lump it in the good or bad category. I’m not sure how often I’ll post to this, but I’ll see when I can.