shahine.com/omar/

Funny, Raymond Chen linked to my post on "My" Documents from earlier this year.

I'm still pissed about this, especially at Adobe cause it still insists on placing it's temporary Updater downloads in My Documents folder. The programmer who did that should be sent to Programmer Jail™.

Anyway, the world is a bit better on Vista. Actually I really like how the whole Documents things works.

My Moniker

First of all the "My" moniker  has been dropped. Yay! However, old applications still don't know this yet and still litter your folder with the My namespace. Luckily it's easy to spot the offenders now.

Pictures, Videos, Music

Second, all the "My Pictures", "My Videos", "My Music" folders now live in your User folder, not your Documents folder. Great.

User folder

There is a new User folder that you can get to from your Start menu (the topmost item in the start menu). It's named after your user name.

When you select Omar you get the following items:

• Contacts (\Users\Omar\Contacts)
• Documents (\Users\Omar\Documents)
• Favorites (\Users\Omar\Favorites)
• Music (\Users\Omar\Music )
• Saved Games (\Users\Omar\Saved Games)
• Desktop (\Users\Omar\Desktop)
• Downloads (\Users\Omar\Downloads)
• Links (\Users\Omar\Links)
• Pictures (\Users\Omar\Pictures)
• Searches (\Users\Omar\Searches)
• Videos (\Users\Omar\Videos)

as well as some hidden folders like

• AppData
• a few others.

This is great as now there is a user friendly place to get to stuff that's not "Documents" but stuff you want access to. This also greatly improves backing up the Documents folder as you won't accidentally include multi gigabyte folders like Saved Games, Pictures and Music (you can back those up using separate schedules and schemes).

Another side benefit to the Users folder is that what used to be in:

\Documents and Settings\<username>

is now in:

\Users\<username>

this is much shorter for command line users, and lacks a space so you don't need to place it in quotes.

BTW - I'm pretty sure this is all modeled after Unix, and now Mac OS X.

Also nice is that all application data now lives in AppData and from there you can find the Local and Roaming folders that are clear on their intent and use. In XP you had \Local Settings\Application data and \Application Data and I always forgot which one was which and when to use one vs the other.

Public

Finally, the last great improvement is that there is a notion of "Public" now which replaces "Shared Documents", "Shared Videos" etc. For multi user computers, this is great as you have a real user to place all your stuff in. This is also true for shortcuts and settings that were previously mapped to the "Documents and Settings\All Users".

There is also another great feature for the multi user PC that existed in Windows XP but was not made available in the GUI, and that's Junction Points.

Junction Points, or how to share files on your family PC

Why should you care about Junction Points? Well let me illustrate something.

Say you are sharing your computer with your spouse. You have your pictures, music and documents that you share. This may include an iTunes library etc. You don't want each user to have their own Pictures and Music because this is a "family pc". Well, in XP you had the good old Shared folders, but if you didn't know to use them then they never got used. To make matters worse, Photo and Music programs still insisted on defaulting to the individual user folders. This meant that now you had photos and music in two places. Not good.

Well, in Vista, there is a really easy way to say "Point folder x at folder y permanently".

So for example:

\Users\omar\Pictures and \Users\lora\Pictures can point to \Uses\Public\Pictures.

This means that files can no longer be stored in the individual folders for each user, but instead all file system access to those folders is automatically redirected to the Public folder.

How do you do this?

Simple:

1. Right click on any folder (try the Pictures folder)
2. Select Properties
3. Click the Location tab.
4. Click the Move button
5. Select the new location (try \Users\Public\Pictures)
6. Vista will ask you if you want to move the current contents of your folder to the new location. Say yes or no depending on what you want to do.

Now go to any application and click the Pictures shortcut. Cool eh?

Now repeat this process for each user on your machine.

Another sweet Vista feature.

Hopefully Application Developers will take advantage of this new organization.