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A Mac Fan's Take On Vista
jcatcw writes "Ken Mingis has been running Vista on a MacBook Pro for a couple of weeks. Highlights from his review: 'Apple's UI is called Aqua. Microsoft calls its interface Aero. Hmmmm... Gadgets and widgets. What's that line about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery?... The UAC implementation in Vista is heavy-handed and intrusive — it halts what you're doing, even if you want to do something as simple as change your clock. My sense here is that Microsoft has been criticized so often for security vulnerabilities that it decided to club users over the head with its new operating system-in-lockdown-mode... I'm more enamored of Vista's Flip 3D feature, which basically takes all of the open windows on your desktop, stands them up on end and stacks them in a way that you can cycle through to the one you want to use. It's similar to what Apple's Expose does... Vista's method wins on aesthetics.'"
I think it is horribly stupid and ugly, I much perfer zooming out on loaded applications then zooming back in.
Overall I feel that the Vista UI is way to dark. Either black stained glass on higher end systems, or black borders as a default for users who cannot fully run Aero. The entire black motif might have been cool if this was 1999.
Yes I know that the glass color can be changed, but no matter what it is still dark and depressing.
The sheer number of icons that surround the UI also makes everything feel very crowded, which is rather sad considering the work that MS has put in to try and unclutter the UI. Moving everything out of the menus and onto icons that then surround explorer windows is not really decluttering though.
Disclaimer: I haven't played with anything after beta2, if anybody wants to report that the newer releases have cleaned up the UI (and gotten rid of that horrible black theme... which I doubt!) then please feel free to correct me!
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Ken, are you freaking kidding? Expose simply looks and behaves so much more efficiently and aesthetically. Try Flip3D when you have 20 windows open, and you'll get an obscured stack of windows that you have to travel through one by one, including the desktop (weirdly, Flip3D puts the desktop in there as a window too). In addition, there's no need to "cycle" through the windows in Expose, because it displays all windows at once. Flip3D is essentially a completely useless tech demo that's not that impressive. Flip3D doesn't win on anything.
"Sufferin' succotash."
An article written in May suggested that OpenSUSE 10.1 combined with Xgl will perform better with lesser hardware requirements and wins on several other fronts too. Plus, you can probably run it on your MacBook.
Here's a Google Video featuring audio from a Microsoft presentation of Vista's new features over video from OS X Tiger, showing that pretty much everything that was touted as new in Vista is already in Tiger. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-413444611 2378047444
...that the major differences between XP and Vista are graphical. On my computer, I can't tell the difference in speed between XP (SP2) and Vista, but Vista sure looks prettier.
(Note: I only had it on my computer for about a day before switching to Ubuntu, which can actually use my sound card. Vista doesn't let you use any unsigned drivers, and Creative's 64-bit Vista drivers are beta and -- guess what? -- not yet signed.)
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
"I'm more enamored of Vista's Flip 3D feature, which basically takes all of the open windows on your desktop, stands them up on end and stacks them in a way that you can cycle through to the one you want to use. " ...geez, then we wonder why we gotta have a top-of-the-line PC with 1G of ram....just to run the OS smoothly. What happened to my good ole alt-tab and shift-alt-tab ? I dont recall having any kind of problem with that.
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
huh?
The home directory structre has existed in OS's long before OS X even existed. Not sure about the rest of your points as they seem really, really, really miniscule to base your entire OS views on. If you want to really see vista shine quite using the old stuff and try the new stuff. Computer Management - right click on Computer, Click Manage and give that a shot.
There are some new tools in seperate betas that really simplify management even more than what this does but i'm not sure if they will be in vista or a related download afterwards or part of the longhorn server release.
Not so sure on this. I've finally done the switch (though from Linux, not windos) with the new MacBook Pro. Intel was a reason, because I still keep a windos partition for Games until the Wii launches. I might not have switched if Mac had stayed with PPC.
Here's how I see it: Let people buy the new Macs because they can run Windos. Once they've seen the two in a direct comparison (running on the same machine), they'll appreciate OSX. Then they'll love it. Then they'll start to worship it. Then they'll wipe the windos partition in a night of frenzy and drunken fanatism just before they realize that they should've petitioned the makers of their favourite software before doing that...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
... But can it look and act like Win2K?
,set in my ways, and loving it.
I am a windows user (yes, I know I will be shuned for addmitting this), and my preffered OS is Win2K (it works for what I want it to, and that is primarily games).
Up untill recently I just ignore anytihng about windows that is not Win2K (I admit I have to use XP at work, but I have done everytihng I can to make it look and act like 2K). However, with more and more mention of games that will be "vista exclusives" I am starting to wory that I will eventualy actualy HAVE to switch (I stuck with DOS untill I had to use windows for games, then with 3.11 till I had to "upgrade" to 95 for games).
So for those that have been ussing Vista, Can you strip out all this silly extra garbage and make Vista look and act like 2K?
Can I make all the gadgets/widgets/whatever they are called quickly disapear and not waste CPU cycles?
Can I turn off all the bubbles and colouring and effects?
Can I make everything flat? (I like sharp edges, one of my largest dislikes about OSX/XP/others is this urge to make defaults rounded and pretty looking)
Can I make the colour scheames nice and simple? (a solid blue title bar?)
yup
(btw, a quick link to all this info that I have probably missed would be highely apreciated).
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
I quite like using OS X, but I have been very disappointed with its performance, even on relatively fast machines like my mum's G5 iMac, dual-processor G5 PowerMacs and Core Duo Minis (although my Mini is memory constrained with only 512MB). On my 1Ghz/768MB iBook, it's frustratingly slow to use more than one app at a time (and even the one can get chunky).
Not enough memory.
Just like Aero, Aqua is a huge memory hog. I'm happy to pay for additional memory as part of the "OS X premium," but the frustrating part is when older machines can't physically accept enough memory. I realize that those of you who created a VR world on your 16k calculator watch will keel over dead at the ugliness of these memory requirements, but I really don't care.
On a PowerPC machine, the sweet spot for everyday use with 3-6 apps open at once is around 1.25GB. On an Intel machine, memory requirements are higher. For OS X use without any virtualization, at least 1.5GB is needed; if you want to run Parallels and do anything useful (i.e. at least 512MB on the Windows side) you need 2GB. If, like on your Mini, you have integrated graphics, you pretty much want 2GB no matter what.
If you have enough memory, the CPU performance of the machine is far less important. A 400MHz PowerMac G4 with the max 2 gigs of RAM doesn't feel snappy (menus draw a little slowly, etc.) but it launches apps quickly, swaps between them quickly, and has no problem with all the eye candy. It would be less frustrating to use than a Core Duo Mini with 512MB RAM, and certainly better than a 600MHz P3 trying to run Aero.
That's not true. What I heard more than anything else from the people using XP when it was new was that it wasn't crashing all the time and didn't need rebooting so often. (Of course, all that is true of 2000 as well, but these people were upgrading from 98.) Looks came in about third; stability was what experienced Windows people talked about the most. Believe me, I remember it well, as I was considering upgrading from 98 then myself as I was sick of its instability and everyone encouraged me to, but then I upgraded to 2000 -- after which, my response was, meh, cutesy interface, so what.
Nevertheless, we wound up getting XP early this year because there are a few high-powered games that require XP that my husband just had to have *rolleyes*. (I mainly use the computer for graphics & picture editing; imagine my surprise when I found that some of my favorite apps work better with 2000 than XP, even though those apps came out after XP!) But that brings up another point in the anti-Vista argument -- look how long it was after XP came out that there were XP-only games from game companies besides MS itself. People say only Vista will have DX10, but any game company would have to be out of their minds to trade the XP user base for the new Vista user base. And frankly, posts you see on every forum show how little interest there is in Vista; it's not justI dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
I'd argue that yes -- yes it does. But perhaps not for quite the reasons some might expect.
Microsoft has long been about doing things ever so slightly differently in order to maintain a firm grip on platform lock-in as much as possible. They have done a lot of work over the years to try to mould user expectations in order to make it harder for them to move from Widows to another platform. And for many, many users, where to find their files and how to organize them is a HUGE part of this lock-in.
This seems to be falling to the wayside somewhat with Vista, however, and IMO that's a good thing for users (and for the record, I haven't used Vista at all, and am not a Windows user at all, so I'm going on what I've heard both here on /. and elsewhere). If Microsoft aligns Vista closer and closer to the way OS X does things, it will make it easier for Windows users to make the jump from one platform to another (from a usability standpoint). Someone trained on one system can use the other.
I wonder how long it will take before a user-friendly Linux distro decides to switch from "/home" to "/Users" to align with OS X and Vista (although obviously the entire "/Users" tree is a direct derivative of the way Unix and Linux have been doing things for ages, for many people naming consistency is very important. Far too many people out there don't have the memory capacity for naming that most of us in the industry have).
Yaz.
And the "evidence" cited to prove that MS copied Apple is so minor and trivial. I mean things like "Apple's UI is called Aqua. Microsoft calls its interface Aero. Hmmmm." What, does Apple have a trademark on four letter words beginning with 'A' now? And it's not like the user gives a damn what the UI is called anyway. The other things this guy cites are that close/resize buttons glow when the mouse hovers over them and Aero has photorealistic icons that scale nicely, etc. Oh really? Well, whoop-de-doo!! I guess any OS that incorporates good looking icons is stepping on Apple's toes, right? *yawn*
And what's all this talk that Aero copies from Aqua anyway? I've been using OSX since 10.0, and I've seen Aero. Regardless of whetehr a few things are similar, the overall look and feel are not alike at all.
And this is where this guy's arrogance really kicks in: Huh? Why, just because and Jobs says so? Give me a break.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
I wouldn't say that widgets are an intentional return to Desktop Accessories.
Desktop Accessories were a hack to get around that fact that pre-System 7, Mac OS was a single-tasking system. With OS 7, Mac OS because a true multi-tasking system (albeit, cooperatively), so they could do away with Desktop Accessories.
That being said, DOS had TSRs (terminate and stay resident) programs that acted like accessories. One could argue that Desktop Accessories were merely the GUI version of TSRs (I don't know which came first).
Anyway, Deskop Accessories and TSRs are so long ago, that who cares? In the modern era, Startdock and Konfabulator had desktop widgets long before Apple did. Hell, Win9x had them with Active desktop (dynamic HTML gadgets that ran on the desktop; there was a pretty popular one that provided realtime news, weather, and stock quotes, but I forget the name of it).
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Yep. And I've already been told by one of the Mac faithful about this great new feature that will be in Leopard called "spaces", where you'll be able to have multiple virtual desktops, not knowing that Linux has had such functionality for years.
Why is this? Because software is bloated and layered beyond reason.
To re-iterate the point I tried to make: current hardware is blistering fast, it's the software that's crap.
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