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Vista is a great operating system.
Posted January 3rd, 2007, in Windows Vista.
This was originally written on the 10th of September, 2006 as a forum post on #lemonade. I’m putting it here to build up content and also because it might be somewhat interesting to some people. Some things have been revised.
so i herd vista lieks macs now. I decided to download Windows Vista RC1 build 5600 and give it a shot, and I came out very impressed. It was running on an iMac Core Duo 2ghz, Radeon X1600 Mobile graphics, 1gb RAM.
In summary, Vista is not very buggy and glitchy at all, fixes a lot of things that needed fixing, adds a lot of neat new programs\functionality, and looks pretty good while doing it. It is clearly an important upgrade that you should all start thinking about as it really is worth installing - while I know a lot of people are gonna say “XP UNTIL I DIE!!” on its release, I get the feeling these people will convert quicker than the “98\2000 UNTIL I DIE!!” people did on XP’s release, as it really is a big leap forward.
So the main desktop and general experience
It’s quite fast, and looks pretty good. I do question some of the decisions like to use translucency heavily, but it is at least not that bothersome. System startup is really slick, you see this pretty animated glowing Windows logo, things fade into place, it’s a nice experience starting up and shutting down (though it should be noted, sometimes it took forever to shut down and had to be forced off.
But in general, it’s really slick and feels good - the way stuff fades into place might be a bit gratuitous, but it isn’t too distracting, and the glass effect is very slick. Some of the nicer visual touches include the address bar - when I went to the “Network” thing (it’s the equivalent of My Network Places) I saw the address bar slowly get bigger with this glowing green bar behind it, kinda like Safari does it. But it looks good, and there are lots of these smart little visual cues everywhere.
As for the new GPU-based graphics - everything was fast, I didn’t see any real flakiness in fading windows, but aspects of Windows shine through - the windows aren’t properly buffered so stuff still flickers when you resize it, whenever the “ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS” popups came up (they’re not annoying, don’t believe the hype) the whole screen got corrupted for a brief second, widgets looked ugly in the process of resizing and the expose-ripoff thing felt cheap and crappy. So it’s kind of a mixed bag - on the whole, it’s better, but it’s still Windows and they haven’t totally eliminated the visual glitches you are used to in your XP apps. Be warned! :|
Explorer
So they revamped Explorer, and I like it! it’s not the best file manager in the world but it feels pretty good and the address bar has been done particularly well - right click on an item and it gives you options to copy the location to clipboard, a few nice things like that.
The system has a new sort of structure, and Windows tries to reinforce it. Basically your home directory is now C:\Users\Username\, which is a directory that contains all of the above but copious amounts of hidden directories and stuff for settings and crap. There’s about 15 hidden items in the screenshot above, and that’s a fresh install. I noticed that if you type C: in the command prompt now, you get redirected to C:\Users\Username\, and you can’t write to C:\ anymore, so it’s kind of trying to enforce this organisation on the user - which is a good thing, although I don’t think they’ve done it in the best way possible. I would have preferred a “Library” folder with all the assorted crap inside it, unhidden so the user can access their settings files.. you know, like another OS. It’s not good cluttering up the Home dir.
Gadgets
The sidebar interface is novel and it’s not too bad, although it’s not well-suited to Windows as you can only see it when you have the desktop visible. Basically you drag the widge—gadgets about and if you place them on the desktop, they will get a bit bigger. They all seem to work pretty well, but as mentioned before they don’t really resize smoothly when you drag them out.
The widgets included are almost a mirror image of what’s available for OS X’s dashboard, and they copy the designs of Apple’s widgets in a way I don’t consider that obvious. This is one of the features most clearly lifted from OS X, although it was announced earlier than Tiger [the original concept was a lot different](http://winsupersite.com/images/showcase/longhorn_4051_118.jpg). As for the usefulness? I’m pretty tired of widgets. They’re not that great and way overhyped. I expect the only useful things to put there will be weather, system performance app, currency converter and maybe a world clock or two - kinda like my Dashboard is.
Windows Media Player 11
In my opinion it feels a bit off. It’s just.. there’s no borders to the sidebar, and there’s all these conflicting metaphors of what to do and where to go.. I dunno. My thoughts are similarly mixed about Media Centre (which you get for free if you enter in the right CD key). It’s very slick and I would say more pretty than Front Row, but true to Microsoft fashion it does too much and overwhelms you when you start it up and start looking around. It reminded me of a PSP. I did enjoy the fact playing a song in media centre, minimising it, and opening Windows Media Player showed me the same song inside it. It’s done well, but the interfaces are just.. they don’t have a sense of direction. I cannot say I would recommend WMP11, it is just too disjointed and confused. It is indeed more than just an iTunes ripoff, though.
System settings
They totally revamped control panel and I don’t mind it - lots of “task based” UI now, but it’s better organised. I was most impressed by the new network stuff - check out the cute tooltip in the corner! I didn’t get a picture of it, but when you pick up an access point, it has some icons for “home”, “work” and “public” and will adjust your security\sharing settings accordingly.
The volume control looks cool too, the little meter bounces with the music:
Other things like the Desktop Properties of yore have been replaced by “Personalise Desktop”, which does this sort of thing:
All of these changes modernise things that were really dated in Windows and reflect the major upgrade that Vista is supposed to be - it’s not WinXP with a new veneer, they really have improved a lot of things like this. Oh! Check out what happens when you click the time in the corner, too:
Other apps
You get a few cool new apps with Vista. One of which is Windows Mail, which I so far approve of - it’d be nice if the operating system’s mail app was heavy-duty, but with Outlook we’re not gonna see that as it’d cannibalise sales. It’s billed as the new Outlook Express and I think it should do admirably for most peoples’ email tasks - like Thunderbird, I suppose.
The photo gallery app is one of the coolest, though. It’s a wholesale ripoff of iPhoto but it does a good job, feels pretty robust and has some interesting slideshow options iPhoto lacks. I also really enjoyed the thumbnail you get as a tooltip:
Features from OS X
The Expose ripoff is really badly done. It is not very useful as you can’t totally see the window you’re selecting, there’s a really weak animation so it feels really stilted, and it’s a bit glitchy.
On the other hand - remember Time Machine from Leopard? I just discovered that Vista pretty much does the same thing, albeit with a different approach. Basically, on any file or folder there’s a “Previous Versions” tab that lets you open any restored file. The catch? It’s not instant, it seems to search the computer periodically and make backups of the old versions. But it is turned on by default, and is easy enough to use - all I did in that image was go to the properties of my Desktop, click on an older version of the Desktop in the versions thing, and I was able to open it up in explorer and see the temporarily stored files I had from the day before. Very cool. Like the search functions, while it’s probably not as good as the Mac equivalent, it’s there and it works.
As for the search functions? It’s very fast, and thorough, though the interface isn’t really quick and easy, it’s about as easy as it is to search for files in Win2k. You can do a quick search for things in the Start menu and it’ll return results from files on your computer, but it just doesn’t seem as refined or organised yet, not to say Tiger has a very good interface by itself. But they certainly caught up well enough with search, and it did a good job monitoring changes to files when I tested it.
I drew two conclusions from this whole experience:
1. Vista is great, when it comes out I recommend everyone upgrade to it. The opinion “Oh I don’t need Vista, it’s just a new skin and more bloat” is false, it does a lot of cool things and really does represent 5 years of evolution from XP. 2. Apple need to get going, because Vista is gonna make the gap so much closer now between OS X. I still think OS X is a better operating system with a more consistent, less patchy-feeling interface with lots of cute little things Vista will not provide, but Vista really is a great OS and makes it hard to think of any major things that OS X provides that Windows does not, certainly not the case today. If Leopard’s secret features aren’t revolutionary (totally revamped UI should be one of them), MacOS will no longer have that much appeal to the average Joe because Vista really is a “good enough” equivalent to OS X now.
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