Cool features that longhorn should have, but probably wont.

One thing that I've thought about for years, but have yet to see is an OS that allows you to select regions of unconsective text.  For example, hilight a region of text, and then hold down control to hilight another line maybe a few pages away, and then copy and paste it into notepad, yeilding the 2 regions pasted with perhaps an empty line between them.  This also really helps when dealing with rich text.  For example, say you have an article in which you want (for some reason) the first letter of each sentence to be bold, or some other task that would normally require you to hilight, bold, hilight, bold, etc.  You'd simply be able to do it all at once.  Professionally editing text would also be easier, as you could simply hold down control and double click on all the words you need to have changed and then underline or format them accordingly. 

But by far, the biggest advantage here is when trying to select text in Internet explorer where the exact 'flow' of your selection isn't known.  You start selecting text, not knowing if the text in the sidebar comes first or last, or what about the overlapping text, the text flying around, or the text thats scrolling in the marquee?  With Ctrl+Click you'd just be able to hilight exactly what text you'd need without having to switch apps more than once.  Or what about tasks where you only get one chance, like "Print selection" in IE?  Are you going to print each excerpt on a different page as a seperate print job simply because the document is hundreds of pages long and you don't need the whole thing? 


I'd like to see this feature in longhorn.  I'd also like to see the ability to create custom notifyicons bound to folders that pop up a balloon when the contents changes (kinda like when you install new programs in the start menu).  This would probably be exposed through a "Notify me when contents change" option in the folder's property pages.


Other feature's i'd like to see are:

- A "refresh" menu option for the context menu of the Quick Launch (i hate it when i start up, and all my drives aren't mounted yet and I have to kill explorer and restart it just to get the proper icons)


- A sort option to perhaps sort for example "The Offspring - Intermission.mp3" as "Offspring, The - Intermission.mp3" or the such to avoid 700 identical results under "A" or "The" when sorting by name.  I call this "phonebook syndrome".


-  Options to lock or monitor the /Software/Microsoft/CurrentVersion/Run keys of HKLM and HKCU


- Options to notify the user when a new service has been installed as 'automatic'.


- An "advanced users" mode that turns off newbie features like hiding file extensions, hiding invisible icons, enabling wizards like file sharing wizards by default, and hiding contents of root directory/windows directory/systemroot directory/programs directory.


- A cute house icon on the "home" folders (by default)

- An easier to use path to home folders than "Documents and Settings" (by default)

olene wrote:

One thing that I've thought about for years, but have yet to see is an OS that allows you to select regions of unconsective text.  For example, hilight a region of text, and then hold down control to hilight another line maybe a few pages away, and then copy and paste it into notepad, yeilding the 2 regions pasted with perhaps an empty line between them.  This also really helps when dealing with rich text.  For example, say you have an article in which you want (for some reason) the first letter of each sentence to be bold, or some other task that would normally require you to hilight, bold, hilight, bold, etc.  You'd simply be able to do it all at once.  Professionally editing text would also be easier, as you could simply hold down control and double click on all the words you need to have changed and then underline or format them accordingly. 

olene wrote:

I'd like to see this feature in longhorn.  I'd also like to see the ability to create custom notifyicons bound to folders that pop up a balloon when the contents changes (kinda like when you install new programs in the start menu).  This would probably be exposed through a "Notify me when contents change" option in the folder's property pages.

olene wrote:

-  Options to lock or monitor the /Software/Microsoft/CurrentVersion/Run keys of HKLM and HKCU


- Options to notify the user when a new service has been installed as 'automatic'.

olene wrote:

- An easier to use path to home folders than "Documents and Settings" (by default)

"... allows you to select regions of unconsective text."

It isn't OS wide but MS Word let's you do that. They even use the Ctrl key.

"- An easier to use path to home folders than "Documents and Settings" (by default)"

Windows Vista calls it "Users" now.

Your other ideas are interesting. Many of them could be implemented, if they aren't already, by 3rd parties using existing APIs.

Edit: I knew I should have posted faster!

olene wrote:

- An easier to use path to home folders than "Documents and Settings" (by default)

And another feature I just thought of ...


Not sure whether the technical ability is already there and it just needs to be implemented in the forum or not, or whether theres no DHTML interface for it.. but...

The ability to hilight the portion of the post you want to quote, and then click the "quote" link, rather than having it put the entire post into a \[quote\].

Maurits wrote:

olene wrote: - An easier to use path to home folders than "Documents and Settings" (by default)

windows2unix.bat:
set ~=%userprofile%
echo %~%

LOL guilty of step 7
>ls C:\custom-path
alias.bat
cat.bat
cp.bat
ls.bat
mv.bat
rm.bat

I don't understand why there has to be a "Microsoft Antispyware" in the first place.  The OS and/or IE should have enough functionality to notify you when suspicious activities are occuring.  And as for virii, they shouldn't be possible either.  When most programs switch to .NET to take advantage of the security (whatever it was called), and windows starts defaulting to limited accounts and pops up password prompts for admin tasks (i hear this is going in longhorn), then virii will be almost nonexistant.  Mac/*nix is doing something right.

I mean come on, companies like Symantec make millions each year living off of all the little exploits in windows, and the uneducated windows users. 

olene wrote:

I'd like to see this feature in longhorn.  I'd also like to see the ability to create custom notifyicons bound to folders that pop up a balloon when the contents changes (kinda like when you install new programs in the start menu).  This would probably be exposed through a "Notify me when contents change" option in the folder's property pages.

-  Options to lock or monitor the /Software/Microsoft/CurrentVersion/Run keys of HKLM and HKCU

- Options to notify the user when a new service has been installed as 'automatic'.

Slow down guys! Microsoft's team hasn't even added CTRL-A (select all) to 90% of the text boxes within Longhorn yet and that should have been done in Windows 95.

For example

Start Menu -> Run -> CTRL-A
Computer -> Address Bar -> CTRL-A

etc

-- I recently made the suggestion, that whenever you have a set of any documents grouped together in a taskbar button, you could right click, and select 'Group by Tabs' (or if they're not in a group at the moment, 'Group Like Documents by Tabs'), and it would put them in a single window with a tabstrip, handled as per the application allows. So that tabs would be a global feature of the OS, and not something limited to the browser. Then the tab strip would have a menu option 'Ungroup into Windows'. There could also be a 'Pin Together' feature that would group all the document windows together, without organizing them in a tabbed interface, instead just opening and closing them all at once with the click of the taskbar button. I also have a few other suggestions on how the general interface can be improved, I'm planning to put something up on the web soon with mockups.

-- I also think it would be very nice if Windows worked so that file paths can be typed either by the standard way you can now, or in a manner in which spaces are replaced by underscores, characters like commas replaced by dashes, and everything lowercase. This would make it easier to read with different modes of addressing like you have in an internet browser. then second, that you can assign a folder to be treated as a drive, so say assign 'c:/Document Settings/Brian Shapiro/My Documents/' with the drive name 'documents:/", or assign "../My Documents/My Pictures/" with the drive name 'images:/" (I like images better than pictures... so instead of  something like 'c:/Documents and Settings/Brian Shapiro/My Documents/My Proposals for Vista.htm' you could type 'documents:/my_proposals_for_vista.htm' in a browser (which would then i guess be 'file:\\documents:\my_proposals_for_vista.htm' ).

-- There are a lot of small applets that I think should be built into Windows. For instance, replacing the Windows Character Map application with something like that in Office; so that across all applications on your computer you can enter ctrl-e-' and get the character 'é'. I believe this is already standard on Mac. There are some free applications that give this functionality but not as good or extensible as whats in office, and its something that I think should be shipped in Windows. There are some other applet suggestiosn I can't think of at the moment.

I think someone should start a WindowsFeatureRequests wiki like the one for Internet Explorer. Even though there are a few suggestions on the WindowsFeedback wiki, its not as organized as it is for IE feedback.

brian.shapiro wrote:

then second, that you can assign a folder to be treated as a drive, so say assign 'c:/Document Settings/Brian Shapiro/My Documents/' with the drive name 'documents:/". so instead of  something like 'c:/Documents and Settings/Brian Shapiro/My Documents/My Proposals for Vista.htm' you could type 'documents:/my_proposals_for_vista.htm' in a browser (which would then i guess be 'file:\\documents:\my_proposals_for_vista.htm' ).

brian.shapiro wrote:

-- There are a lot of small applets that I think should be built into Windows. For instance, replacing the Windows Character Map application with something like that in Office; so that across all applications on your computer you can enter ctrl-e-' and get the character 'é'. I believe this is already standard on Mac. There are some free applications that give this functionality but not as good or extensible as whats in office, and its something that I think should be shipped in Windows. There are some other applet suggestiosn I can't think of at the moment.

brian.shapiro wrote:

For instance, replacing the Windows Character Map application with something like that in Office; so that across all applications on your computer you can enter ctrl-e-' and get the character 'é'. I believe this is already standard on Mac.

olene wrote:

brian.shapiro wrote: For instance, replacing the Windows Character Map application with something like that in Office; so that across all applications on your computer you can enter ctrl-e-' and get the character 'é'. I believe this is already standard on Mac.

 
Well mac has an "option" key on the keyboard with much easier to remember key combinations then the windows Alt+xxxx equivilents, for example, to get an 'é' on a mac, it's option+e for the `, followed by the character to put under it, or option+2 for the (TM), or option+R for (R), or option+shift+k for an apple logo

Maurits wrote:

Sven Groot wrote: Again, what's wrong with dead keys? I can just type ' followed by e to get é. Or ` followed by e to get è. Or ' followed by c to get ç. Or ^ followed by o to get ô. Not much to improve, and this has been in Windows at least since Windows 98.

That works in Word, but not in Notepad.  It's an Office feature, but not a Windows feature.

Personally I think the Alt key has more value as an "option" key on mac does, or the alt key on a WebTV does where you use it to type alternate characters (gee.. wow.. the name would actually make sense), then it does to use menus with the keyboard.

You could just do something like "Alt+Backspace" to move keyboard focus to the menu and show mnemonics on all the controls, and then you'd have the entire range of the keyboard free for special characters.

I'd also like to see the cursor turn into a grabbing hand when you hold down Alt so you can grab the entire screen and rotate it around like a lazy susan to get more screen space for windows.  It would be really cool if instead of you having a square (screen-sized) desktop with windows on top of it, you were actually looking in a 3d space where the desktop is really the very back of the "room", and you can rotate windows along an axis... 

like this:


and maybe have like a little "radar" enablable in the taskbar to show where windows are located. 

You'd be able to see the transparent backs of windows in the background if there are any on the opposite side of the carousel. 

This should be easy to do in avalon. 

And also possibly make it so that i don't have to hover over the notify icons to get them to disappear if their parent application crashed or exited without removing them.