Updated: October 8, 2010
Table of Contents:
Customizing the Open and Save Dialogs
When installing Adobe Creative Suite 5 under Windows 7 I was amazed to see that Adobe still uses the 10 year old-style ComDlg32 dialogs for Open and Save dialogs. This is how they currently look in Adobe CS5:
Now compare this to the 10 year old Windows 2000 Save dialog:
The interesting part about this is that the old-style dialog box used by Adobe CS5 was outdated already when Microsoft introduced Windows Vista four years ago in 2006. From Microsoft’s official developer documentation:
“Starting with Windows Vista, the Open and Save As common dialog boxes have been superseded by the Common Item Dialog. We recommended that you use the Common Item Dialog API instead of these dialog boxes from the Common Dialog Box Library.”
From Open and Save As Dialog Boxes at MSDN
This is how the dialog boxes should look like:
The main thing for me that I miss in the new Open and Save dialogs are my favorite locations (not the same as the Internet Explorer favorites). What you can do however to work around this is to customize the five places shown on the left side of the dialog. For me this resolved most of the issues I had with the dialog.
Here is a good link on how to modify the PlacesBar. This works fine in Windows Vista and Windows 7. This is how it will look once you have customized it:
