Insider Power Techniques for Microsoft® Windows® XP

Working with Digital Media Files

Previous versions of Windows treated all documents more or less the same. Yes, we’ve seen innovations such as the "thumbnails" view for images and the "Web" view for folders that showed a preview of some file types in the margin, but the Windows XP designers and programmers went beyond these simple tweaks. They realized that different document types require different user actions. An image, for example, may need to be copied to a CD, set as the desktop background, e-mailed, or published to the Web. They also realized that many of today’s users—especially home users—do a lot of work with digital media files: images captured from a digital camera or scanner; music files copied from an audio CD or downloaded from ...