Today was a far more interesting experience with Windows Vista. I wasn't installing the operating system anymore, so I actually got to sit down and play with the system. The first thing I did was explore around and find things that were new. There are a couple of new games, but I've never really enjoyed the built-in Windows games anyway, so that's mostly irrelevant. I toyed with Media Center (I installed Vista Ultimate) for the first time. It looks virtually identical (and probably
is identical) to its Windows XP Media Center Edition counterpart. Lots of flash and bells and whistles. yay.
So I started exploring around the operating system itself. I found the fact that everywhere I explore, a checkbox appears next to every item that I hover over
HIGHLY annoying. I spent the next two hours trying to figure out how to disable that colossal pain in the a##. I also noticed that every time I attempted to change any setting in the system, unless that setting was trivial like a color scheme change, I got prompted that User Account Control is doing me a favor by being so secure that it won't allow anything to take place on my computer without a confirmation dialog. Granted, I am still in the "set up" stage, but I swear I spend more time in Vista clicking that bloody confirmation dialog than I do anything else. I'm a pretty computer literate guy (at least I like to think so), and fancy myself a power user of most operating systems. If this confirmation dialog irritates me to no end and makes me clench my coffee mug with gritted teeth - I can only imagine what it will do to ordinary users of commodity features: your average user who gets a PC to keep in touch with friends via e-mail, play with photos, music, DVDs, etc.
So when I'm not twitching spasmodically in response to the neverending assault of confirmation dialogs, I get to play around with the actual OS. The new look is very "pretty", as is everything else in the operating system. However, I keep getting the feeling that I have seen this somewhere before... The mini-previews of active programs above the task bar, the same previews in the alt-tab menu...the sidebar with widgets..er...gadgets... Its all so deja-vu.. That's right:
- The sidebar is so much like the Yahoo Widget Engine its scary
- The taskbar previews are very OS X-ish
- The popping, bouncing, and shaking windows is very OSX
- The translucent window "glass" reminds me of something I saw in a fancy skinning application for Windows XP once
In short, I found very little originality in this breakthrough, revolutionary, heart-stopping new user interface. In fact, I find very little actual functionality in Vista that I plan on using. For me, my interest in Vista is very myopic:
Windows Presentation Foundation and WinFX. I want people to buy and install Vista because I want to be able to create mind-blowing apps in XAML. The other thing that I was really excited about within Windows Vista was the presence of WinFS, a schema-unifying central API for data sharing, indexing, searching, and aggregating among multiple applications. This is some seriously attractive stuff to a programmer. However, it's not in Vista at the moment, its still a preview-like downloadable add-on.
Pfft.
The sad part is that Vista really is an extremely powerful, revolutionary new operating system. The kernel has something like 1,000 new features in it, and it does a
LOT of things faster, bigger, and better than before. I just think they should absolutely, unequivocally FIRE the design guy. Seriously. I found a 1.0MB document with like 7,000 individual features and enhancements that details all of the things that Vista does that XP doesn't, and sometimes
can't, do, even with custom coding or add-ons. The problem isn't that the guys doing the "under the hood" stuff failed. The problem is that, as it stands right now in Beta 2, there is
absolutely nothing in the look-and-feel of the operating system that positively screams "bigger, better, faster". Right now, it screams "kinda mac-ish, but with a little dirt thrown on it to make it look more gritty and PC-like".
I got WinFX, Visual Studio 2005, and the "Orcas" extensions installed without a hitch and have been able to create a couple test XAML-based apps to make sure it's all working. This is great, and I'm tremendously satisfied with the environment as it stands for a WPF development machine that I can also use as my tablet. I am, however, worried that given the fact that Vista has been in development since the dawn of time, and has been getting delayed for the past
two years , and given the fact that nothing in the operating system's GUI smacks of originally, creativity, original thought, or insight - Vista needs some serious help in the "average user" department. And since most of us developers end up writing applications that we want "average user"s to use, then the current state of Vista should have us all concerned.
I could have it wrong - maybe the consumers will see the pretty new Mac-like OS and think "wow, this is the most fantastic thing we've ever seen." However, myself and all of my geek friends think otherwise.
tags: vista gui tablet beta review mac
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