Top 10 Windows 7 Features #4: A worthwhile Windows Explorer

Content View If you're a Windows user, there's a good chance your cell phone has a better and more interesting way of organizing your media files than does your current version of Windows Explorer. Windows 7 addresses this little discrepancy with the addition of a new option called Content View.

For your MP3 file collection, Windows 7 automatically (and this will be a controversial feature for some, I know it) search the Web for album art associated with each file. It will then store album art thumbnails as hidden JPEG files alongside your MP3s in their native directories. That's a lot of album art, quite frankly; and we were surprised to find that Microsoft appears to have gone to great lengths to find even some very obscure album covers, including these from some old movie soundtrack albums from the 33 RPM era.

Seeing media files this way, however, makes more sense than Tiles view when you're hunting down something, especially a piece of music. A lot of us are more visual than verbal when remembering music; when you think of "The Sounds of Silence," for instance, your mind sees two fellows in black turtleneck sweaters in black-and-white. You can't input that as criteria into Windows Search; yet it might escape you that the name of the album you'd be looking for is "Bookends."

Simplified sharing In an optimum home networking situation, you would want to avoid having to organize your media files in folders based on what you want to share and what you don't. Almost like setting up a firewall for a business, you'd rather exclude items from being shared with other family members by default, and then include exceptions to that rule at will. But Windows has never made sharing files easy for everyday folks; right-clicking on files and going to the Security tab and referring to security groups and their permissions, is the sort of thing dads don't want to be doing when they've finally located and downloaded the music files needed for their daughters' recitals next week.

The addition of Homegroup networking has led to the subsequent addition to Windows 7 Explorer of a one-click action Share with. Preferably, its best use is with homegroups (where more than one computer runs Win7), in which case you can take a non-shared directory, choose the files you do want to share, select Share with -> Homegroup, and find them enrolled in everyone's libraries.

In cases where you don't have a homegroup going just yet, it's still simpler: The same logic that Vista used in making sharing printers simpler on a home network, is applied to finding users to share files with. When you choose files and select Share with -> Specific people, you'll get a dialog box that brings up the names of users (security principals) who share this computer or who have been located in the network's workgroup. Now, right at first, there will probably be problems within networks shared by Win7 and Vista computers, where the latter group hasn't upgraded yet. But we do at least see the possibility of this being rectified in the field over time.

For most everyday users, Windows Explorer is their homebase of computer operations -- their administrative console. With Vista, we saw some glimpses of hope as it appeared the company was addressing the topic of how real-world users would expect this program to work. But maybe for the first time ever, we're seeing in Windows 7 Explorer some evidence that Microsoft engineers actually looked to other programs for inspiration.