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.