Vista Resource Manager Features Analysis (1)

Windows Vista has added a lot of new features, while some old components have also been enhanced, resource manager is one of them. To be honest, the old version of Windows's own resource manager is not easy to use, whether it is the display, search or positioning of the file is not convenient, so that there are a lot of enhanced file management software on the market, such as Total Commander, but Vista The resource manager in the game has changed radically.

The main improvements in Explorer in Vista are as follows:

● File icons can be larger and can be dynamically resized;

● Icons for files or folders It is no longer static content, but can be dynamically changed according to the contents of the file;

● A check box has been added to the icon, and the mouse can be selected continuously or intermittently with one hand;

● A new reading panel that displays the contents of the current file. You can know the contents of the file without opening the file.

● Powerful file filters and filters.

Large icon smooth scaling

In older versions of Windows, icons can reach up to 32× 32 pixels, although Windows XP can support up to 48× 48 pixel icons, and icon color number Up to 32-bit (24-bit image plus 8-bit alpha channel), Windows XP's icons are richer in color, smoother at the edges, and more transparent, but today the standard is not high enough. Because of the increasing popularity of large-screen high-resolution displays, for example, some high-end notebooks have achieved 1600× 1200 or higher resolution on 15-inch screens. On such a screen, traditionally sized icons and text are too small to be identifiable. In order to solve this problem, the icon size in Vista has been enhanced to a maximum of 256 & times; 256 pixels.

In addition to being able to support larger icons, the size of the icon can be scaled smoothly. For example, we can open Vista's Explorer and click on the “Views” button to switch between Windows XP in different ways of tiling, icons, thumbnails, etc., in Vista. These different views can be smoothly switched between. You can switch between different views by dragging the view slider up and down (of course, you can directly switch between different views by clicking the Views button directly), and With the drag of the slider, the icon displayed in the window can also be smoothly scaled. Figure 1 shows the view slider, and at the same time adjusted, the icon displayed in the window is already the largest 256 & times; 256 pixels, are these icons very shocking?

In fact, this function is not very meaningful for most CRT and LCD monitors. After all, these monitors can only reach 96dpi (Dot Per Inch, dots per inch. Simple understanding is that each inch can be displayed. The number of pixels, the higher the number, the finer the content, so the 256× 256 resolution icons look a bit large, and two or three icons can occupy almost the entire area of ​​the screen. However, this design is very useful after the future display technology is improved. These icons will look finer and more beautiful.

Folder Icons

Windows uses icons to represent files (folders), which is an amazing breakthrough compared to file names and extensions displayed in text format under DOS. However, the icon used in the old version of Windows is not enough, that is, the file or folder content cannot be directly judged according to the icon of the file. Although this situation has improved in Windows XP, it still needs to be strengthened. In Vista, this feature has been improved.

For some files (such as graphics or video files), the icon content of the file is a thumbnail of the file itself. This is different from the thumbnail mode under Windows XP. In Windows XP, only when we switch the view to thumbnail mode, the file will be displayed as the thumbnail content; however, in Vista, no matter what view is used, The icon content of the graphic file is a thumbnail of the file, except that the size of the thumbnail is different in different view modes.

For folders, Vista will display the contents of certain files (graphic files, video files, DOC documents, etc.) in the folder, and the content will be stretched at a certain angle, just like real The same file is in the folder (Figure 2). This is somewhat similar to a beta version of Microsoft's previous development of the album tool codenamed Max.

File checkbox file checkbox

Everyone may have this experience: In older versions of Windows, if you want to batch select a batch of files, if These files are contiguous, you can drag out a selection box directly with the mouse, include it all, or select the first and last of the batch of files while pressing the Shift key; For files, you can only click to select each file while pressing the Ctrl key. This requires two hands to operate, very inefficient. An improvement in Vista allows us to liberate one hand. All files in Vista can display a checkbox, just click on the checkbox to select the corresponding file. However, this feature is not turned on by default and needs to be enabled under the View tab of the folder options.

When this feature is enabled, not all icons or folders will display a checkbox immediately on the icon, which is too ugly. The checkbox is only displayed when we move the mouse pointer over an item (Figure 3).