(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

[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.