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Making computers more friendly, one post at a time… *heh*
Interesting lil app posted at TechRepublic
Vista Drive Icon is a free utility that will transform the drive icons in Windows XP’s My Computer into drive icons that resemble those in Vista’s Computer. Once installed, Vista Drive Icon will display a blue, glass-like bar underneath the drive icon. If the drive is close to getting full, the color changes to red.
Now, that lil piece of eye candy might not seem like a big deal, but most of the follow-on comments from people who are IT Pros (read, “techie snobs” for the most part) sound like your common, garden variety Mac users: “Do it MY way and you don’t need this” kind of comments.
Silly.
I have found this lil utility to be useful in one significant way on my personal Win98, Win2K and WinXP machines (yes, I still run Win98 on one machine for a variety of reasons). On all my Windows machines, I make “My Computer” a popup toolbar on the lefthand side of the screen. This utility makes it easy for me to differentiate between any of several USB flash drives I might have inserted at any one time. Of course, that depends on my awareness of the capacities and contents of the drives, but still, seeing an almost-full drive depicted graphically (when I know only one of the three or so is nearly full, relative capacities and usage of drives, etc.–which I pretty much always do know) enables me to quickly sort out which drive is which of Windows’ ad hoc assignment of drive letter and position.
With the dynamic nature of flash drive letter assignment, this lil piece of eye candy has been quite useful in my idiosyncratic personal usage. As to general utility, well, no. Not for me, at least. Still, depending on user preferences, I can see its usefulness for some. And that’s one of the realy big differences between the Mac straightjacketed, “training wheels” approach to user interfaces and the rest of the PC world’s approach: there are multifarious ways to accomplish the same task in the rest of the PC world, so user preferences can come first. ‘nix users often have even more choices available than Windows users in look and feel and ways to accomplish tasks.
This is just one (limited) piece of eye candy that I have found a(n even more) limited use for, but still a use that is helpful in my idiosyncratic personal preferences/usage patterns.
Frankly, I’ve recommended this lil app to a select few users I know have a very visual approach to their computers, because I feel it would suit their preferences, and they would find even more usefulness in it than the very small usefulness I have found. But I recommended it to this very small group of folks based on an intimate knowledge of their use of computers, not to a wide array of users who’d probably find little or no use for it.
Specific security issues aside, making the computer-user interface work is all about making computers work FOR folks as much as possible in the ways THEY think, rather than just fitting people into the box of how I think they should use their computers.
Little apps like this might be just the thing to help SOME folks manage their computer use a bit better. Definitely not for everyone–or probably even for most folks–but if at all useful to some folks, then certainly nothing to bitch about.
Get the app at SourceForge.net, try it out and if you find it useful, fine. If not, just uninstall it.