Yes.  I am one of the few Vista Evangelists.  I love Vista and I can’t go back to XP.  I have recent cause to try out the Mac again (I’m a unix guy, so the fact that I’ve heard the newer Mac OS’s to be based on unix, I’m a little excited) but no budget so we’ll see how far I get there.

However, despite my infatuation with Vista and how many great things there are, there are a few things that just bug me.  This is the first one in a series.  I may include Windows, SharePoint, Project Server and other Microsoft products at some point, because I have plenty of things to say there, too

Columns in Search and File folders don’t help much

Yes, SEARCH IS AWESOME.  I will hail its praises once a day as I face Redmond.  THANK YOU for Search.

But why, Dear Bill, does it give me emails based on “date modified”?  Why not “date received”?

Think about it.  Email is not something you modify once you receive it.  Not really.  You might make a task from it.  You might set a reminder.  You might tag it in some way, or have it automatically colored in your inbox based on some properties, but you don’t edit email.  Yet for some reason, Vista/Outlook believe these emails to be modified on dates many days after I received it.  Maybe I moved it into a folder or something; I don’t know.

But that date is useless in a search listing!

And I’m thinking - why isn’t it listing who is in the thread?  That would help too.  So I right-click on the column headings, hoping for some kind of toggling selection and guess what.  I got one!

Wow, nice.  It actually did something I thought it should!  But it still lists Date Modified instead of Received.  That’s just so STUPID!

time passes. 

Oh wait.  I feel a sense of dread wash over me.  I’m noticing that enticing word at the bottom of the pop-up menu.

What if I… do I dare… could I, should I… click More…?

PRAISE BE TO REDMOND!

Not only can I put in Date Received, but I can also pick a hundred other fields.  Man, and here I thought I *had* them with something.  I can also put in some other very useful fields like “To names,” something very useful to add to “Authors”.

Oh man, this also reminds me of one of my other bugaboo’s about Vista and that had to do with browsing and looking at Music.  I was happy that it showed the extra tags (ID3 or whatever it used) so I could see Artist, Album, Genre and even a rating, but very unhappy that I couldn’t see a date, file size or other stuff

But armed with my new revelation, I’m guessing if I right-click on the columns, I’ll get more choices, and sure enough I do. 

Hey, that’s actually useful — seeing size, bit rate and length of song. 

Ok, well next time I promise I’ll have something real to complain about.

Still not switching.

Hooray for Celtic Woman.

I still can’t get it to work well, and my Vista machines are like a black hole where files go in and I’d be damned if I can find them again. I only have luck finding files if I go into Advanced and turn on a bunch of things. XP and before did not have that flaw: it just searched without having to turn stuff on in “advanced”

If anyone comes up with a useful search utility that uses *.*, *.??? etc, I’d love to see it.

I actually love Vista.

Please don’t throw things.

LOL

Evil Geniuss last blog post..Hells Bells!

Yay! I love it when you love Vista! Cuz I do, too, and it makes me feel closer to you! Is that sick? Maybe, but I don’t care!

sourpusss last blog post..On more movies

Avi, still not gay.

Alex, ok, maybe I’m 5% gay.

dmarks, I think it does what you want. You just want to use the “name” moniker. What of the great improvements to Vista search is the ability to use additional parameters like “name”, “fileextension” or any attribute that it can determine about the search result, like “from” for emails or anything.

So to show you how I might look for filenames that you mention, because Vista by default will look at the content of the files, not the filenames specifically… here are some examples of stuff I might find in Vista Search Hell

Hope this helps!

Evil Genius, I think I fell in love with you a little.

sourpuss, Yay! I’m glad to hear of your vista view and I’m even more glad that we share it.

Trust me. He is 90% gay. Not that there is anything wrong with it. I have lots of proof, but I am holding out to use it for extortion after he wins the lottery.

Absurdists last blog post..San Francisco Here I Come!

There’s a Vista feature that’s annoying?

martymankinss last blog post..Flashback - 1967