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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.'"
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."
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.
... 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.
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.
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.