What's Different About Vista's GUI?

jcatcw writes "Paul McFedries, author of Windows Vista Unveiled, thinks that an operating system should be thought of as more than just its user interface, but then again that interface should work well for the user. He thinks the Vista interface rates 'pretty darned good.' The Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) results in positive changes for both developers and users. Developers can do 2-D, 3-D, animation, imaging, video, audio, special effects and text rendering using a single API. The use of vector graphics and offloading work to the GPU result in better animations, improved scaling, transparency, and smooth motion."

Comments

Looks More Like OSX

[queenb**ch]

Having recently observed the Vista interface in action, I can say that they've done a nice job of ripping off the OSX look and feel.

They have dashboard widgets.

They've pared down the start menu and it looks more like the dock on a Mac.

The way things load looks more like a Mac.

Just my 2 cents,

QueenB.

Re:QUICK! LETS IMITATE IT!!

[ZiggyM]

Micorsoft has a free virtual desktop manager which may help in what you want, its part of the powertoys and can be downloaded from http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/In stall/2/WXP/EN-US/DeskmanPowertoySetup.exe It works really well as long as you dont use the "Shared desktops" option.

So....

[still-a-geek]

...how will this benefit me? This is nothing but eye-candy. To truly achieve all of those nice features, I'll need to go out and buy a super-duper computer with a very fast GPU card. All of my computers that are more than 2 years old (maybe even 1 year old) will fail to do any of those fancy, graphical "acrobatics". People who are computer illiterate (and God knows there are a lot of them) and really want Vista but not a new computer are going to be in for a surprise: BSOD's and frozen screens. Nope. I'll stick with WinXp, Linux, and Mac O/S-X, but mostly Linux :-)