Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

This eWeek article made me shake my head this afternoon. The article compares a non-shipping OS (Windows Vista) to a shipping OS (Tiger), but first prefaces everything by pointing out that the real comparison will be made later between two non-shipipng operating systems, one of which is currently a beta (Vista), and the other of which nobody knows anything about (Leopard).

One of Vista’s advantages, according to the article, comes in the form of icons that are snapshots of the file’s contents.

Vista does, however, have some nice touches that Tiger doesn’t. Vista places previews of documents right on file icons. These are more sophisticated than the thumbnails that Photoshop creates, as they update as the file is changed. Tiger can display previews of graphic files, but not text-based files.

I’m here to tell you that file contents as icons isn’t the least bit helpful. The obvious exception is, of course, files that are images and graphics because they are, by their very nature, something to look at. But what about files that are used just as often, such as Word documents, XML files, CSS files, and PDFs? I archive each Mac Daily Journal I receive. How would this file-contents-as-icons preview help me determine which MDJ I want to read?

How do these icons tell me which PDF is about the recent OS X 10.4.2 update? Icons of files that are exclusively text would be even more pointless, if that’s possible. I don’t see contents-as-icons as a particular advantage. When I’m attempting to determine the contents of a file, there are a limited number of cases where having an icon preview is helpful. Having a filename (if you actually care enough to accurately name your files) and a good metadata index is far more helpful than an icon preview. Tiger has a great metadata search now, not at the end of 2006.

There are a number of other points in the article that are, well, pointless. Windows deals better with Windows networking than Tiger. Windows deals better with Windows security issues than Tiger. The premise of the article is extremely weak. Comparing two different platforms’ and judging one by its’ ability to deal with the the issues of the other, and additionally comparing something that is in use now versus something scheduled for future release seems like some weird masturbatory exercise. The message of the article seems to be that current Tiger isn’t a good future Windows, but they can’t compare it to Leopard. Tiger isn’t supposed to be Windows. It’s all very stupid.