Library sucks

[ToastGodSupreme]

I am still leery of virtual views of my data so I just try to name files and folders something meaningful. Most people know to think that way intuitively. Power users are the ones who know to "tag" things with meta data, I suppose in another 10 years everyone will be more aware of this and start thinking in terms of tags, then perhaps databases for OS's might help things.

Why would I want to or need to tag anything though?

I know where all my music is, they're neatly organized the way I want it to be.

I know where all my pictures are, they're neatly organized the way I want it to be.

I know where all my documents are, they're neatly organized the way I want it to be.

Outside of my dev work which involves hundreds of xml and java files, I can find anything on my computer in a few seconds. I know where it all is because I took the time to organize it. And that's what we need to encourage users to do.

So I see absolutely no use for libraries. It only encourages users to be lazy and even more disorganized than they already are. Not only that, but trying to do content searches within libraries FAILS hard. Took me a while to figure this out when I was searching through a ton of xml data and it wouldn't return certain results that I expected it to return.

Basically I'm annoyed so much with libraries because I see it as another way MS is dumbing down the OS instead of trying to teach people good computing habits. But the fact that they're broken in so many ways and forced upon us also has a lot to do with my dislike for them.

[Panda X]

They're the exact same thing. Except one has defaults. You can easily change it.

[Hani]

Why would I want to or need to tag anything though?

I know where all my music is, they're neatly organized the way I want it to be.

I know where all my pictures are, they're neatly organized the way I want it to be.

I know where all my documents are, they're neatly organized the way I want it to be.

Outside of my dev work which involves hundreds of xml and java files, I can find anything on my computer in a few seconds. I know where it all is because I took the time to organize it. And that's what we need to encourage users to do.

So I see absolutely no use for libraries. It only encourages users to be lazy and even more disorganized than they already are. Not only that, but trying to do content searches within libraries FAILS hard. Took me a while to figure this out when I was searching through a ton of xml data and it wouldn't return certain results that I expected it to return.

Basically I'm annoyed so much with libraries because I see it as another way MS is dumbing down the OS instead of trying to teach people good computing habits. But the fact that they're broken in so many ways and forced upon us also has a lot to do with my dislike for them.

rep for you! Totally agreed.

[iron2000]

Well, I dislike how libraries automatically get added into WMP12.

[SyntaxError]

Libraries should be removed completely from all future Windows releases, and I had no idea you could save searches. Yet another pointless "feature." I tried Libraries and found it caused me a lot more work to get to the same files and folders that I access via windows explorer or quicklaunch.

I'm so sick of Microsoft thinking they have to teach people to organize their crap the "Microsoft way." The fact is the average user couldn't find his ass with both hands, let alone with a saved search and Libraries.

I learned good file/folder management working in ms-dos and I maintain such organizational skills today.

There's no reason others can't learn as well. And in fact, they eventually would if Microsoft would quit trying to hold everyone's hands.

[freak180]

switch over to mac if you dont like how its done on windows :whistle:

[SyntaxError]

switch over to mac if you dont like how its done on windows :whistle:

Yeah so we can all be n00bs all over again and catch attitude from the fanboys, just like in the linux community. Yeah great solution there.

BTW, I used a Mac years ago. In fact it was the first Mac. What a heap of crap that was. Haven't touched one since.

[zhangm Supervisor]

Why would I want to or need to tag anything though?

I know where all my music is, they're neatly organized the way I want it to be.

I know where all my pictures are, they're neatly organized the way I want it to be.

I know where all my documents are, they're neatly organized the way I want it to be.

Outside of my dev work which involves hundreds of xml and java files, I can find anything on my computer in a few seconds. I know where it all is because I took the time to organize it. And that's what we need to encourage users to do.

So I see absolutely no use for libraries. It only encourages users to be lazy and even more disorganized than they already are. Not only that, but trying to do content searches within libraries FAILS hard. Took me a while to figure this out when I was searching through a ton of xml data and it wouldn't return certain results that I expected it to return.

Basically I'm annoyed so much with libraries because I see it as another way MS is dumbing down the OS instead of trying to teach people good computing habits. But the fact that they're broken in so many ways and forced upon us also has a lot to do with my dislike for them.

I disagree with the concept that the user MUST organize things on a computer. It is a limited philosophy, and underneath the notion that organization is superiority lies a fundamentally flawed idea; that things on a computer are exactly like things in the real world - that is, they have a meaningful location upon which you must impart order.

You wake up in the morning, silence the alarm clock on your dresser, take out a shirt from the top drawer, pants from the middle drawer, and socks from the bottom drawer, then go to the bathroom and brush your teeth, then go to your closet to grab a pair of shoes and a tie. That's how we've learned to handle objects with a meaningful physical location; objects are spatially grouped together, so that we can easily find them. This has been translated to how people work on computers. We've named organizational attributes in a suggestive fashion: paths, addresses, folders, files, but these things are really meaningless abstract concepts that don't reflect what our data actually is. The ones and zeros on your spinning hard drive don't have these properties. We've created them because they allow us to interact with a computer in a manner that we are familiar with.

How about the following scenario: you wake up in the morning, silence the alarm clock on your dresser. You reach out and grab a shirt from thin-air. Then in the same manner, you grab a pair of pants, and socks. The room around you disappears and is replaced by the bathroom. Once you're done, you grab a pair of shoes and a tie from the air in front of you, and your bathroom is replaced with your workplace. This is all absurd and physically impossible in the real world, but in the abstract computer world of user interfaces, it makes no less sense than the concept of files and folders. In fact, it might actually be easier to work with. Remember that preceding each decision to get something in the real world is a thought like: "I need the dark grey silk tie with light gray stripes today, and it is in my closet to the left of the skeleton." In the real world, all knowledge in that sentence is needed for you to get your tie. In ComputerLand, there is no reason why you couldn't get your tie knowing just the first half.

In physical terms, you dump all of your files onto your hard drive anyway. There is no organization in physical reality. The entire organizational structure of files and folders lives inside your head. While this is nice and familiar, it is also hideously inefficient. You need to know what the file, and "where" it is in order to access it, and quite surprisingly, it is extremely hard to make people understand that "where" is extraneous information on a computer. We've been so utterly busy telling computers "where" things are and we've only now started to realize that the right way to do things is to tell them what things are. In one great twist of irony, we've been unconsciously trying to go that direction for years. Look at the path names on your computer: My Documents, My Pictures, Porn, Music. Those are locations, but their names describe what they contain. We just need to take one more step and start looking AT "Documents" as opposed to looking IN a folder called Documents.

There is nothing holy about the path of a file. It was one of the best decisions that computer programmers made at the time of developing computer/user interfaces, and today, it is one of the worst decisions ever made. We're only now starting to realize that the content of files is of true importance, and all this absurdity over giving a location to a file and then forcing ourselves to memorize that location for future reference makes as much sense as going out and burning witches.

I can accept that I am without organization, when organization doesn't have any meaning.

[pezzonovante]

I NEVER EVER "organize" files on my computer. I have indexed my entire hard drive and added documents, music, video and pictures to the library. All I ever do is type anything I remember about a particular file in the start menu search box and within a fraction of a second the desired result appears. It's way more productive than navigating through the Explorer. Library and Search are the best features of Windows 7.

[Tamilboy86]

I like libraries and I use it alot, its nice... its sad that you can't add network folders to it :/ but I found out that I can add network folders to the libraries from Media Center..

[Matthew S.]

^ you can add network folders :s

[.Neo]

BTW, I used a Mac years ago. In fact it was the first Mac. What a heap of crap that was. Haven't touched one since.

Of course Macs and Mac OS haven't change since 1984...

[Hot]

To each his own. Personally, I view libraries as the one Windows 7 feature I wish I had on my Mac.

[Tamilboy86]

^ you can add network folders :s

I doesn't work for me, since its not indexed, but I cant add it to indexing :s

[SakuraKira]

Sort by file extensions .. mp3, wav etc ( Saved search only)

- so for "music library" search specific folders and in search bar type *mp3, *.flac, *.aac etc

So even from your download folder where you have videos, text files, etc etc ... now you just have a "folder" that contains only you music

This feature is also available in Windows vista.

I actually dislike your suggestion, and doubt it would work for me.

Here is an example of how I use Libraries: I play World of Warcraft, and am also into using various addons, sometimes I even edit addons themselves. I have a World of Warcraft Library. In it is the main WoW folder, the Addons folder, and a folder that I use to unzip and move things around before I'm ready to load them into the game. Having all of those in one Library is extremely convenient and saves me several mouse clicks.

As far as your example of music goes, I have my music folder arranged very specifically. "Artist (Album Name)" for single albums, "Artist" w/folders named for each album, sorted by release year for multiple albums or discs. I let my music software (iTunes) worry about genre and all of that. Having a Saved Search would basically force me to look at the Details View to determine albums and such, and frankly it seems like a lot more work than arranging folders and forgetting about them.

Glad you found something that works for you as an alternative to Libraries, but it doesn't mean that they "suck."

[backdrifter]

I disagree with the concept that the user MUST organize things on a computer. It is a limited philosophy, and underneath the notion that organization is superiority lies a fundamentally flawed idea; that things on a computer are exactly like things in the real world - that is, they have a meaningful location upon which you must impart order.

You wake up in the morning, silence the alarm clock on your dresser, take out a shirt from the top drawer, pants from the middle drawer, and socks from the bottom drawer, then go to the bathroom and brush your teeth, then go to your closet to grab a pair of shoes and a tie. That's how we've learned to handle objects with a meaningful physical location; objects are spatially grouped together, so that we can easily find them. This has been translated to how people work on computers. We've named organizational attributes in a suggestive fashion: paths, addresses, folders, files, but these things are really meaningless abstract concepts that don't reflect what our data actually is. The ones and zeros on your spinning hard drive don't have these properties. We've created them because they allow us to interact with a computer in a manner that we are familiar with.

How about the following scenario: you wake up in the morning, silence the alarm clock on your dresser. You reach out and grab a shirt from thin-air. Then in the same manner, you grab a pair of pants, and socks. The room around you disappears and is replaced by the bathroom. Once you're done, you grab a pair of shoes and a tie from the air in front of you, and your bathroom is replaced with your workplace. This is all absurd and physically impossible in the real world, but in the abstract computer world of user interfaces, it makes no less sense than the concept of files and folders. In fact, it might actually be easier to work with. Remember that preceding each decision to get something in the real world is a thought like: "I need the dark grey silk tie with light gray stripes today, and it is in my closet to the left of the skeleton." In the real world, all knowledge in that sentence is needed for you to get your tie. In ComputerLand, there is no reason why you couldn't get your tie knowing just the first half.

In physical terms, you dump all of your files onto your hard drive anyway. There is no organization in physical reality. The entire organizational structure of files and folders lives inside your head. While this is nice and familiar, it is also hideously inefficient. You need to know what the file, and "where" it is in order to access it, and quite surprisingly, it is extremely hard to make people understand that "where" is extraneous information on a computer. We've been so utterly busy telling computers "where" things are and we've only now started to realize that the right way to do things is to tell them what things are. In one great twist of irony, we've been unconsciously trying to go that direction for years. Look at the path names on your computer: My Documents, My Pictures, Porn, Music. Those are locations, but their names describe what they contain. We just need to take one more step and start looking AT "Documents" as opposed to looking IN a folder called Documents.

There is nothing holy about the path of a file. It was one of the best decisions that computer programmers made at the time of developing computer/user interfaces, and today, it is one of the worst decisions ever made. We're only now starting to realize that the content of files is of true importance, and all this absurdity over giving a location to a file and then forcing ourselves to memorize that location for future reference makes as much sense as going out and burning witches.

I can accept that I am without organization, when organization doesn't have any meaning.

That is an excellent definition of how old and antiquated our digital metaphors are. Couldn't have said it better myself.

[SakuraKira]

I NEVER EVER "organize" files on my computer. I have indexed my entire hard drive and added documents, music, video and pictures to the library. All I ever do is type anything I remember about a particular file in the start menu search box and within a fraction of a second the desired result appears. It's way more productive than navigating through the Explorer. Library and Search are the best features of Windows 7.

Thank you. I believe yours is the exact reason that Libraries and Saved Searches were created!

Also, I can turn that back around on you and say that it's pretty stupid to put pictures of your music artists in the Music folder, and that fault lies with you, not with Windows.

He is using that drive for the general category of "Music," not as a designation of the file types that it contains. Everything music related goes on that drive. It makes perfect sense to me. If he actually has that much music and that much music related content, I think it would get confusing to have all of the files associated with a particular artist in different locations just because they aren't music files. For example, if he has Metallica's S&M album ripped onto his computer, scanned the CD booklet, and has an .avi of the S&M concert, those things should be together, IMO.

During all of this discussion keep in mind that different organizational methods work for different people. And as quoted above, Microsoft has made it so you don't have to organize your files. Although they use the same areas of the brain, they're just computer files. You sit at your desk and access them with a few mouse clicks, or key strokes. It's not the same as orgnizing your pantry so you can find flour, or your spice rack so you can find cinnamon for your apple pie.

Btw, this is one of the nerdiest discussions I have ever seen on Neowin. :D :heart:

I disagree with the concept that the user MUST organize things on a computer. It is a limited philosophy, and underneath the notion that organization is superiority lies a fundamentally flawed idea; that things on a computer are exactly like things in the real world - that is, they have a meaningful location upon which you must impart order.

...

GREAT post. However, while I agree with your overall idea about organization, and it being useless on a computer, the OS creators have designed their UIs in such a way that encourages people to keep things organized in specific folders, even if those folders have no actual meaning in computer language. Folders and structure are also needed for programs, not only for users to keep their personal files. Let's say we have two programs, and all of their files have different names, except they both have files named README.txt. Those two readmes have different information, but the same name. They cannot exist in the same folder with the same name and still be individually accessed by the programs.

Look at any of the popular Operating System UIs. OSX, Windows, Ubuntu (standing in for all of Linux, it's what I have personal experience with) ALL have a UI, images and icons that represent files (system files and your personal files), and "folders" for those files to go in. Since these Operating Systems have been designed this way for us to look at them and interact with them, we really have no alternative than to use the system in front of us.

If all of my personal files were suddenly in one folder with no organization whatsoever, I think I might actually have a breakdown. It would look chaotic. It does not matter if the code on the HDD is chaotic or not, it's what we see on the screen, and within the OS UI that matters.

Also, I find that having organizational folders keeps me from having to remember things. I just look at a folder structure and it tells me what I need to know. I have done the work before hand to save myself frustration later on.