Posts Tagged User Experience

Map Drives in Vista… WTF?

This one is blog worthy: I’m in Windows Explorer in Vista. I need to map the current folder to a drive. In Windows XP there used to be a "Map Drive" button up on the toolbar. I can’t seem to see anything like that in Vista:

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On a quick google search, I follow this post that explains how to get to the "map drive" feature. Essentially, what we have to do is to hit Alt, which causes the classic menu to show up:

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…and then we can find the "Map Network Drive…" option under Tools:

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that is… hmmmm… what can I say without hurt somebody else’s feeling really bad… Ouch!

How the heck is a regular user supposed to find out about something like that?? Granted, a regular user probably wouldn’t be looking for such option, but they are likely to look for things like Edit-Copy and things like that…

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Can’t decide which one is worse: the “classic” progress bar, or the new fancy “Marquee” bar

Up to Vista we were all used to the Progress Bar control; the thing used to mean "hey, I’m still doing something, and this is how much I still have left to do.". Of course, that didn’t work out that well. I mean, how many times have you seen an operation where the progress goes from 0% to 95% in a few seconds, and then the last 5% takes forever to finish?

Well, now in Vista we have the fancy "marquee" progress control, which looks good, but it is pretty much useless. The thing indicates it is doing something, but we still have absolutely no idea of how much it’s been accomplished and how much is left.

I’m receiving a 5Mb file through MSN Messenger, and after the file is done downloading, I got this message from OneCare (it always seems like this thing is "downloading and updating" its components):

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It took 10 minutes until the thing finished its job and I was finally able to open the files. It was enough time for me to type this post, go grab some water, sit back, and watch the fancy green bar going from left to right on the marquee progress control. Argh…

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