Flow|state, a user interface design blog, recently ragged on the Windows Vista file copy dialog for obscuring important information about the files it’s copying. Specifically, Vista warns about files with the same name, and asks you what you want to do with them:

Can you see the disaster in progress? Most users can’t either.

This dialog has buried the lede. It focuses the user’s attention on the fact that there is another file with the same name in the destination folder. It fails to point out a much, much more interesting condition: The user is about to overwrite a newer file with an older file.

So he suggests the dialog read “There is a newer file with the same name in this location,” increasing the number of recognizable file attributes from one, the file name, to two. What other kind of file attributes are there? I can list a few:

• Path (implied)
• Name (explicit)
• Date created / modified / accessed (suggested)
• Size
• Type
• State
• Permissions
• Ownership
• File System
• Mount

I think these are all equally important attributes. By flow|state’s logic, the dialog should really read “There is a newer, substantially larger file with the same name in this location. The current file is a video, but your new file is music owned by a different user, your mom.” This is obviously ridiculous.

The best way to do this is what linux does–just move the file. If you want to get clever, use a command pattern to make it reversible.