Surprisingly my dad uses his computer for work (as opposed to using it just for sending good karma presentations, funny pictures and virus warnings by email). Anyway, he mostly has to get pictures and wma files from his camera and tape recorder, sort them on the HD and burn them.
He mostly manages to do what he wants to do, but still sometimes calls me for help. At first I used to attribute his difficulties to him being old etc, but the more I sit with him I am starting to see windows explorer from his point of view - its a very confusing piece of software if you haven’t been using its variants for the last 15 years.
You have icons on the top, some more options on the side, and menus and most of the stuff there is useless to most people (‘publish this folder on the web’?).
So I am looking for something else for him. Preferably with 2 panes, and the ability to customize a single toolbar - add basic functions like delete, copy and a few bookmarks.
Two panes? SpeedCommander if your dad is using a 64-bit OS; otherwise, Total Commander or Free Commander. The last one is free (duh), the others are trialware.
UltraExplorer has a lot of options and icons, but if you set it up for him, you can turn off anything he won’t need - it also mimics the Mac Finder nicely.
tl;dr
Try DOS
Edit: that’s a reasonable request but I honestly can’t see how explorer is unintuitive since as you mentioned I’m one of those practically hard wired to use it. Anything I’d recommend would be more convulated. Sorry!
It was a bit long winded. Thanks for the recommendations.
If he’s just trying to import, organize and burn photos, why not use something like Picasa?
I use Directory Opus… since the Amiga days. I’ve tried to wean myself off of it (due to it’s price), but haven’t been able to, because nothing else “does what I want” and I can’t easily quantify that aside from my years and years of using it.
Is teaching your father to use a windows explorer replacement he’ll never see on another computer on the face of earth really a more efficient solution than just teaching him to use explorer?