(no subject)

[ellarien]

Still tired -- and hot -- but noting something that occurred to me at the weekend re: computers.

My instinct when deciding where to save files is to keep things pertaining to a particular interest -- work, writing, photography -- together, subdivided by project. The software manufacturers seem to want to keep all the files generated by a particular program in one place, hence 'My Pictures', 'My ebooks', 'My publications'. The collision of these two paradigms creates a mess, frankly. What I really want in my top-level Documents directory is two folders labeled 'home' and 'work' and whatever random unimportant files happen to land there. What I have is all that, plus a bunch of 'My whatever' folders dumped there by various programs, most of which don't contain anything I actually want to open from the folder and which I would much rather have tucked away out of sight.

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

One of the things I detest about Microsoft is its determination to make you do things its way, rather than giving you flexibility.

[ellarien]

Exactly -- though a lot of the offending folders in this case belong to third-party apps that haven't quite caught up with Vista's slightly different way of organizing things. It does annoy me when PowerPoint always wants to look in 'My Pictures' for images to put in presentations, whereas it makes sense to me to put the image files I need in the folder with the presentation (which is, in a folder for the year, under 'work/meetings')

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

At least all the MS Office apps allow one to reset the default directories for saving/looking for things.

You do have to delve into the Tools/Options tabs, but Word on my maching defaults to D: (which is the data partition) and I can then simply choose the Teaching, Personal, Writing folder as appropriate.

Like you I organise files by project, so within Writing there's a folder for every story, in which will go the Word files, the spreasheet for tracking progress, the mindmaps etc. It would be a nightmare if they weren't together. I'd never find anything.

As I always tell my students on the ECDL course, if you don't use your computer for much more than surfing the web and writing emails, then the My Whatever folders are OK, but the moment you get serious about writing, study, photography etc then you need a better filing system.

[ellarien]

Come to think of it, I could point that at the 'work' directory, at least. What I really want is an option to set to look first in the directory where the main file is, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

No, I don't think there is.

And of course different applications aren't standard because PhotoShop Elements (amongst other apps) remembers where you saved things last time and looks there first, which may or may not be helpful.

[ellarien]

It's not evens standard between different Office applications, as I discovered yesterday. Word can change where it looks for pictures, but PowerPoint can't!

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

But the annoying thing is that Apple picked up on the Applications folder, Documents folder paradigm. AAAARGH.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I'm using to giving each App its own folder and keeping all that App's documents in that folder, sometimes organised in subfolders. With the exception of a few things like Fiction, images, my own photography, and specific projects.

What I hate most is apps that will only install in the Applications folder on my system disk and that insist on defaulting to system disk/user folder/documents. *I do not save documents on my system disk*. It has the system and scratch space... and all the stuff that doesn't play nicely. <hates>

[ellarien]

One of my systems has so little space on the system partition that I don't keep anything on there that can possibly go on the data partition, which has been one reason why I don't really feel like 'My Documents' is the right place for my personal stuff.

(Also, using default pathnames with spaces? Is not the best idea for some older applications, particularly given a user with an attachment to the command line. One of the few nice things about Vista is that they moved away from that ... just as all the third-party apps took it up with great enthusiasm.)

[del-c.livejournal.com]

The other rubbish thing about the patronizing "My Whatever" nonsense, that I think M$ eventually caught a clue from their users about, was that all the folders were sorted alphabetically under "M" for "My", and keyboard shortcuts by initial letter didn't work, because they all began with "M".

Mmm

[ellarien]

Good point. And yes, patronizing is exactly right. When I first hit that system in Win95, I actually tried to tweak it, but that caused more problems than it solved, because of the way those folders lie about their names and locations.