Windows Vista Build 5231 Review

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has just released a new build for Windows Vista and it looks like Microsoft has made quite a few graphical changes. "This is possibly the only application with more anticipation surrounding it than Internet Explorer 7, if not Vista itself. We wonder if Microsoft would bundle Windows Media Player 11 with Vista exclusively or would it be available for download separately for Windows XP as well. It most certainly will end up looking a lot better (graphically) than most music players out there, iTunes included. Although it appears to look pretty straightforward, the interface has changed drastically, which makes it far more attractive than Windows Media Player 10 as well as competing applications."

Comments

But....

[silverkniveshotmail.]

How much do you need your media player to do beyond playing media?
If i wouldn't have gotten a mac I don't know if I would have ever gone past winamp 2.x

Re:But....

[bigman2003]

I need it to burn CD's.

I need it to sync with my portable player.

I need it to do a good job of scanning my computer for media.

Despite everyone's best guess...I do not need it to be a portal for purchasing anything...

Re:But....

[LiquidCoooled]

Why not use a CD writing application for this?

People like to connect the dots. "i go *here* to play my media, why can't i burn my playlists from here as well?"

I'd rather just be able to drag & drop files I wanted to use on the player onto the player's icon under My Computer, rather than having to use a media player to manage it.

two words: Custom playlists. Instead of having to reselect an entire range of files stored in seperate subfolders (from the original albums) I can simply transfer the playlist in one go (see above burning as well).

Why not store all your media in a single location? That's a much simpler solution.

Because "My Music" is not your music, and shared music is not everything on my machine, and I don't always want everything together, and because whichever p2p software by default stores it in one place, and something else stores it in another, and my mp3 player comes up in a different drive, and instead of being a jack of all trades and needing to tell people how to configure every single piece of media software on the planet (to look for media in one place) I would just like to scan my machine and find it all for me.

I understand you like operating using single individual steps, but not everyone is as savvy as yourself and just wants a simple life, your steps may be simple, and once configured it might be easy to manage, but its getting started thats the problem.

People already have the option to do all the things you suggest, and most who do similar to yourself won't like this new media player, but for the rest of the population, the suggested features don't seem out of step at all.

Re:But....

[MobyDisk]

People like to connect the dots. "i go *here* to play my media, why can't i burn my playlists from here as well?"

That is an excellent point. It is also a perfect example of how people still don't understand the desktop. You don't go to Windows Media Player to play your media. You go to "My Music" or wherever. People still use the old DOS way of doing stuff: Run the application, then click open, then browse to the location. That's backwards. If they went to the location first, then they could do all of the things the GP post is talking about right from there (copy, rename, delete, organize, burn, play, ...) and you won't need the application to then have al lthe same features as Explorer.

You point out the issues with sharing, and applications creating multiple folders, etc. So you do make a good point: Users won't ever "get" the desktop analogy until the software uses it properly. Until 95% of apps start using these folders properly, it won't be useful.

Re:But....

[ultranova]

That is an excellent point. It is also a perfect example of how people still don't understand the desktop. You don't go to Windows Media Player to play your media. You go to "My Music" or wherever. People still use the old DOS way of doing stuff: Run the application, then click open, then browse to the location.

That's because the current systems are still designed around the old DOS way of doing things, instead of being truly object-oriented - they just try to look like it. Click on a document in a folder. What happens ? A program starts up, reads the file and presumably shows you the results. This is, behind the scenes, exactly what happens in DOS. Furthermore, the program cannot be easily reused by other programs, unless it was specifically designed that way. Modern GUIs simply generate the command line automatically; but the actual operating paradigm is unchanged.

This system is very inefficient. Imagine you have several documents open at once. For each of these, there is at least a single thread (and associated stack and other system resources) that does nothing but sits around waiting for events most of the time.

The system is also very fragile. The desktop system (as well as almost all other systems, like web and database servers) depends heavily on communication between different programs. However, when heavy communication meets the combination of direct memory access programming paradigm with no bound checking of any kind of C and the difficulty of checking for and defending against every possible kind of malformed communication, buffer overflows are an unavoidable result. The situation is not helped by the nonexistent security paradigms of Unix (try to make it impossible for a program to write anywhere except in a subdirectory of your home directory without having root privileges on Linux) or Windows.

So, what is needed is an operating system designed from grounds up.

Make the system completely object-based. An application is not a program; it is a class that implements the Application interface. It doesn't get started, it gets instantiated. When you click on a file on a file manager, the a thread calls the appropriate even-handler method on the manager; that method most likely creates a new thread and has it instantiate the file viewer object; when the viewer's initialization method has been completed, the thread returns and, since there's no more methods on the stack, it exits (of course the initialization method is free to run as long as neccessary, or spawn a thousand other threads if needed). When the viewer needs to be told of a keypress or mouseclick or needs to be redrawn (or simply when some timer set by the initialization method expires) a new thread gets created for the purpose. No threads are wasted on waiting in the event loops of a hundred viewers, no more single thread managing 10 different windows (which means that if it crashes, they all close, and if any is engaged in a long-running operation, they all block).

Such objects are inherently reusable. Currently, if you want code to be reused, you need to put it to a library. This requires extra effort from the programmers point of view, and so programs and libraries tend to be strictly separated; if you want to reuse the functionality of another program (like burn CD's), you'd better hope that the code is in a library or that the other program was designed to be remotely controlled. With programs made by combining objects, however, the chances are that the burning code is in a class of its own, and can be easily reused.

So, basically, desktop paradigm is not understood by many because it is not implemented by any operating system that I know of. Windows and Gnome just make a show of supporting it; under the hood, everything still works just like it ever did, which means that you get a lot less grief by using the system in a program-centric fashion, for that is how it really operates, deep down.

Re:But....

[damiam]

Most music listeners keep their media players constantly loaded. If I want to open iTunes, all it takes is a click on the taskbar and it pops right up. It's certainly no slower than opening a terminal window. And once iTunes is up, all I have to do is type "Stormb" in the search box (or however much of the name it takes to uniquely determine the album). Click the first song, and iTunes will play the whole album in sequence. Total time: 3 seconds. It's much faster than fiddling with a command line (it takes more than one second to type 123 mp3/Di[tab]/St[tab]/*; I'm a fairly fast typer and it took me five). Now on the other end, when I get a new CD, I just stick it in, click "import", and I'm done. If I otherwise acquire MP3 files, I just drag them into iTunes and it automatically copies them to my library folder, sorts them into a directory structure, and copies them to my iPod on next sync. Meanwhile, you're manually managing the directory structure and renaming all your new music to fit your naming conventions, which takes a lot more time for really no benefits. What do you do if you want to shuffle-play a certain album, or your entire library? I'm sure it's possibly with some elaborate perl wizardry, but you can't seriously tell me it's easier than clicking the "shuffle" button.

Too much Player!

[Jjeff1]

Windows media player and Realmagic player both suffer from the same dilusional management. Someone believes the player is more important than the media. If I want to watch a DVD or listen to an MP3 all I want is an easy way to find my media, and then to see/view the media itself.

This obsession with skins and enormous toolbars and wasted screen real estate drives me nuts. Winamp was good because there was virtually nothing wasted in the display. iTunes also realizes the media is more important than the player. When will Microsoft and Real catch up?

seriously

[nuggetman]

what's with all the dead space around toolbars, blocks of text, etc?

A plague on all media players

[dpbsmith]

"It most certainly will end up looking a lot better (graphically) than most music players out there, iTunes included." In an ideal world, that would be a sensible comment. Gee, I think I'll dump iTunes and install Windows Media Player instead, because I just like its looks better.

iTunes, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer: the truth is, they're all badly behaved applications, and they are a pain. They're all getting bloated, they all suffer from featuritis.

And not one of them seems to more than about 10% devoted to serving actual user needs. They are 90% devoted to pushing someone's agenda--sometimes blatantly, sometimes insidiously.

I install security patches to Windows and Mac OS fairly routinely, but frankly I'm loathe to update any media player, and terrified to install a new one.

The percentage of times that installing a new version of a media player will break something that used to work is higher than the mortality rate from playing Russian roulette.

And they all seem to grow invasivelyinto your operating system like rootlets into a sewer.

When they are clean and functional and do what I want them to do instead of what someone else wants them to do, then I will be very interested in how they look.

Re:Cotton candy interfaces suck

[CyricZ]

Indeed! I find these new attempts at GUI creation to be terrible.

I mean, look at this screenshot:
http://www.winsupersite.com/images/showcase/vista5 231_2_cpl.jpg

Look at all the text there! That's not a very good interface for finding the icon you want quickly and efficiently. There's too much textual distraction.

There there is something like: http://www.winsupersite.com/images/showcase/vista5 231_wmp11.jpg

It takes forever to find out what it is you can click on, since buttons and other components are not well defined. I mean, is each album entry something I can click on? What will happen if I do click on them?

I hope that the Linux desktop community does not fall victim to the same shenanigans. GUIs are best when they consist of well-designed components, each with a clear and well-understood function. Microsoft's new fascination with random text/image mixtures is often counterintuitive and leads to applications which are difficult to use.

Re:Mmmm Fresh....

[jcr]

Vista is going to flop,

That depends on your definition of "flop". MS is going to arm-twist the Dells and HPs of the world to include it with all new machines whenever it ships, so there will be many millions of copies of it inflicted on the public in any case. Sometime four or five years from now, it will be 30% or more of their installed base.

Somehow, Apple manages to get their users to take up each new version of OS X at a pretty good clip.

-jcr

Summary

[geeber]

Why not ....

Here, let me summarize the parent post in one concise sentence:

"Why not do things the way I do them?"

Answer : Not everyone wants to do things the way you do them.