Re: Windows; its way or the highway. (Was Re: RISC OS 6 - no shadow modes?)

In article <gemini.jfvs1p00adff301wk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Jeremy C B Nicoll <jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
John M Ward <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

An officer comes in to consult the file. "Ah," says the filing
clerk, "If you want the photos they're in the "image files"
cabinet, correspondence is in /that/ cabinet, and fingerprints are
over there."

But that's eminently sensible for what the polis most likely want to
do - compare some fingerprints they found somewhere with all their
previously taken dabs, or get a witness to look at a set of mugshots.

That's the relevant database in each of those -- not the case file. In
the old days they would have been copied to both locations, as were (for
example) school exam results -- I know: we helped check A-level maths
papers for an examiner for several years. The marking is done on the
exam paper, and the results are kept in the pupil's personal records,
but they are also entered into a table of all results.

The pupil's file will, though, contain all the types of data on that
person in one place -- not separated into files for the different forms
of data that are kept in cabinets with the other' data of the same type.

RO has the same problem; eg do you keep all your browsers together?
Are they in the same directory as every other internet-related
application? Or do you for example keep all R-Comp apps together? Or
all the DTP ones?

Tools are grouped by function here, and I suspect most others do the
same. At least they aren't put into company-based folders during
installation...

Do you keep data near the apps concerned? Some people no doubt keep
all their OP documents near OP itself. I don't.

Neither do I. My "Programs" top-level folder is completely separate
from "My Files", and their structures are hugely different. I designed
this, though, and very logically based also on personal experience. It
was not imposed on me, suggested to me at installation time, or in any
other way restricted or controlled. Most apps I just dragged from the
source (floppy, CD, archive) to where I wanted them and that was it.

In RO I keep apps that are likely all to be needed at the same time,
eg all the image manipulation programs, in one directory. So they
all get 'seen' by the filer at the same time, only if any are needed.

Yes, that saves too much start-up activity as well, as there is no point
filer_booting every app on the system every time. The enormous Registry
on MS-Windows cintains countless thousands of "HKEY"s and whatever else
is in there, and all of those must be initiated at every start-up,
whether or not they are going to be needed.

But I keep data files according to subject area in most cases.

Good. All of this is based around a lesson I learned long ago
(specifically about database design, but it is universal). The most
important part of a system design is the data, and everything else
should fit around that, in a user-friendly manner.

In XP I'm tending to ignore the Start Menu (unless I cannot find
anything any other way) and have sets of shortcuts kept elsewhere
that allow me to do subject-related things. For example in my VRPC
shortcuts folder there are shortcuts to start VRPC itself, open its
disk root directories, look at the manual, open the folder where I
keep installation notes, and so on.

Ah! I have merely left the auto-installed icons for VRPC and its manual
on the backdrop, and that has worked fine for me these past thirty
months. However it is a thought worth bearing in mind should I want to
elaborate on this one day. As it happens, I prefer to keep all other
materials on RISC OS anyway, rather than in the Microsoft arena, so it
hasn't been necessary for me to think beyond what I currently have.

Someone mentioned that getting a shortcut from somewhere to the
desktop was tricky. It's probably the first thing I learnt how to do
(right click on the thing you want the shortcut to reach and choose
'send to desktop').

Yes, that and the other method offered by Vince do indeed work, if being
less obvious than and not as immediate as our simple drag-and-drop
method. I've just tried both. In each case it also ends up named
"Shortcut to..." which I would then edit to take out the "shortcut"
reference.

I routinely do this - but having got them there immediately cut them
off and paste them into one or more other places where I really
wanted them to be. So the desktop is just a staging post for me.

Yup: convoluted, as I said before...

When newly installed apps put shortcuts on the desktop I either move
them to a subject-related folder or delete them. I can't stand
desktops with millions of icons spread over them.

I find it can be useful to have at least some of them there, though not
necessarily only there. The little "quick-launch tray" on the Taskbar
is a useful place to have access to a few apps and utils -- a bit like
our Apps folder, in a way.

My desktop has very few icons on it [...]

My portable is the same; but that is probably because it hardly ever
does anything apart from running VRPC and taking monthly Acronis
TrueImage backups(!)

In essence the stuff that most users have on the desktop is one
double-click away for me, in the windows-related folder, and a lot of
what is in there is segregated into topics eg

[Snipped, but I found it interesting]

It's a bit of a mess at the moment because I'm still in transition
moving apps from my old RPC onto VRPC on the laptop, and getting used
to Windows. I'm trying to be methodical about what goes where, if
only so that backups of stuff can be discriminatory.

That's a good way of thinking. I have separated datafiles from
everything else, and have them on separate "drives", so that everything
but my data (which is only a copy of what is on the Iyonix and is
therefore already backed-up anyway) can be backed-up across the Access+
network, as for all my machines. Indeed, the "data drive" on VRPC isn't
shared so is invisible to the network.

This is similar in principle to what Vince offered in his "VA tip for
the day", though I haven't gone as far as storing the two drives'
contents in different parts of the Windows file structure. I do not
intend to that either, as what is kept there is stuff like PowerPoint
files that I cannot read in RISC OS, and nothing else. I really don't
need other gubbins going in there, especially files that cannot be trad
by the Microsoft machine (which isn't helped by the VRPC naming
convention, of course).

So, overall, we seem to have thrashed out the general idea of having the
user in control, rather than "the system". Some of us like to tinker
with whichever system it is, though most do not do so in practice. A
huge number of users (such as in corporate environments) have little or
no control anyway.

The final result for that majority userbase will depend to a large
extent on the way their system is designed, and -- whatever some of us
here might do ourselves and might perhaps like to suggest makes it "all
right" -- in reality produces the situation I have reported, which is
*not* a sensible, logical or convenient way to store our data.

As most users don't want to tinker -- and most of them are very nervous
about doing so and generally call in an "expert" (e.g. someone like me
who "knows about these technical things") if they pluck up the courage
to try to do something at all. Not a good situation...

--
John Ward in Medway, Kent - using RISC OS since 1987
Now using an Iyonix, an A9home, 2 RiscPCs and Virtual-RPC!
Acorn/RISC OS web page: www.john-ward.org.uk/personal/john/computers
.

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