Vista: it’s not so bad
First it should be stated that I have disliked using Windows for some time now. Many of my friends have been the audience to half-hour rants regarding one problem or another with this most ubiquitous of operating systems, but recently I was hired by an IT firm that specializes in MS products. They handed me a laptop, and as luck would have it Vista Ultimate was installed. Over the first couple weeks of use my gag reflex has been extremely calm, but mind you I won’t be comparing this to any other OS. Vista retains many of the problems and quirks (explorer usability, registry) that Redmond’s previous operating systems had while adding some new ones (UAC, driver problems, Hardware reqs etc…), but there is a silver lining.
- Gadgets: There was little doubt the Microsoft would add some sort of widget framework to their newest operating system and it has many of the features of similar implementations on other OSs, namely OS X. They don’t necessarily do it better than the other guy, but at least the functionality is represented. Furthermore, as a developer I’ve had some good fun making gadgets like a custom RSS feed for my companies Sharepoint announcements. They are very easy to put together with a little web design experience and the project template I found here. This also represents another trend that I would like to see more of from MS: smoothing out that development learning curve. The easier it is to build apps, or in this case gadgets, for an operating system, the more people you will have making great software for your platform.
- Eye candy: This is shameless. Aero has ridiculous system requirements but I like eye-candy. On the usability end, it’s obvious that it makes it more difficult to distinguish UI elements (see below), but like I said: I like eye-candy. You can even customize your glass color, I went with a very light limo tint. To go right along with my shaded glass is the black Taskbar, which is a big move in the right direction from the eye searing blue, silver, and _olive_ that we’ve been used to. Did/does anyone use olive?
- Keyboard Application Launching: I hit my Windows key and start typing what I want and hit enter. And just like that my app is running. It’s not and end all be all launcher, and it lacks much of the functionality of something as comprehensive as Quicksilver, but for a person who loves to use the keyboard its a great way to get access to indexed files.
- Search: Everything, like that aforementioned application launcher, is searchable. Another perfect example of this is when you open up the control panel. Just enter a word or two into the top right searchbox and your presented with the best candidates for where those settings might be. For power users who know where their settings are this may be useless, but it could potentially save a lot of time when grandpa calls up asking why something isn’t working right.
- Installation: Short and sweet. I wanted to clean up my laptop and I was not looking forward to sitting in front of my computer answering a lot of questions before I got to use it. MS has done a good job of making this process a lot less painful for most home users.
So far that’s what I’ve noticed. I’ve also had some problems but for the most part it isn’t getting in the way. I run the OS on 2ghz Pentium D with 1.5 gb of ram, and I have a resolution of 1920×1200, which makes for plenty of sidebar and gadget room. I think that last spec is extremely important because the UI elements are not nearly as nice at lower resolutions (which I’ve tried). They take up too much space, and serve little purpose. More to come on my Vista experience, and hopefully I’ll be able to find an Opensource project that runs natively in Windows or has some sort of port in the works (Amarok anyone?).
