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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."
I hope they have a nice animation for when the machine is infected with a virus, like clippy catching fire and then running around in circles screaming. At least then the users will be prepared for what will happen to him/her when they bring their laptop in to have me work on it and I find out they have been surfing porn sites with their virus scanner disabled.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
We sure as hell don't want GNOME or KDE to be innovative or anything.
Somebody wake me up when these two projects stop playing perpetual 2nd place, and start trying out new GUI ideas.
Not to troll, and its nice that Windows users are getting these features, but how come no one ever calls MS out on the fact that Vista is basically still playing catch up to OS X, doesn't do it as well, and is probably going to be left in the dust when Leopard comes out?
9 339834706
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=267479179
Here's hoping MS uses the competition to better Windows. The more secure it gets and the easier it gets to use, the better for everyone, even those of us who don't use Windows.
"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."
Vista can apparently be represented in a significant way by either Mac OS X, or XP with modifications. It's mostly a vehicle for DRM, including PVP, which will require you to buy a PVP compliant digital monitor. Vista's enhancements won't even work on many powerful systems you are buying these days - if they have "Vista Capable" stickers. In an age where we should be looking for energy savings, what's the benefit of making a system more complicated than XP, and requires more horsepower than a rather darn good OS Microsoft released in 2000?
Oh You POS
Cough... yeah, right. I've lost so much faith in MS's ability to develop anything really new and interesting, I'm actually wondering if I had faith in the first place. Well, ok, maybe once in 1985.
Though I'm not looking forward to buying a Quadro FX just to minimize a window. Tad sarcastic.
-"I ate what?"
Then why are the CPU requirements for Aero so high?
When HAVN'T Microsoft tried prettying up their GUI's to make people go "Oooh, purdy windows! get windows!". Lets face it, it works. really all thats happening is that they're just cranking up the "lets make it purdyer!" factor. The sad thing is, it works O_O
I know it doesn't make sense, but the Object Management Group should extend the API just so we'd have the OMGWPFAPI.
In January of this year, maybe a little later, our contracted supplier of PC's will probably start the push towards shipping new PC's with Vista, instead of XP Profesional. In my environment, a major medical center/school, I don't think the GUI will be immediately useful, in fact, it might hurt productivity initially, since our users will need to learn how to navigate Vista to accomplish everyday tasks like file copying, etc. Games are not big in a medical center, or most large enviroments, for that matter.
Unless Vista's underlying GUI can better render high-resolution images of cells, and most imaging in the research labs is done on Macs, it probably will not have a tremendous impact on corporate buying decisions.
The OS choice will be determined when our PC supplier starts to charge more for a PC with XP Professional than the same system with Vista. Research dollars are hard to come by, and unless Vista totally breaks standard Office suite PC/applications, it's just a matter of time before it will replace XP.
"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
...is vector-based uber-scaling. I want a desktop that looks basically the same when I switch resolutions, with icons and fonts scaled appropriately. Vista has the necessary scaling and vector capabilities in place, but I'm guessing it doesn't support this. Or does it?
There's the Windows Internet Explorer UI, the Windows Media Player UI, the Windows Mail UI... they're all different.
Enough said.
What the heck? I'd love to understand look and feel better, but it would seem to be a more effective review if the pictures were in color.
just after they'd changed the name from the awful "Avalon" to the much more memorable "Windows Presentation Foundation," I saw a demo of this stuff from a MS evangelist. The demo application was awful. Gratuitous use of 3D, buttons that were unrecognizable as such and which would flip up into the 'air' playing a movie when you pressed them.
I understand that it was just a demo and these things weren't really 'gratuitous' because they existed simply to show off the capabilities. But the bottom line is that it's so super-easy to make these awful UI abortions that we're gonna see metric asstons of it coming down the pipe from programmers and their bosses who are unable to resist cramming every last widget behavior into their software. Feh.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
The author seems rather confused about what "GUI" means. The GUI is the graphical user interface - what the user sees and interacts with. The article mentioned almost nothing about the actual user interface of Vista - only the developer-targeted APIs. Nearly all of the apps that ship with Vista do not use WPF and therefore the actual GUI will not be like what the author describes.
And the author is simply wrong when he says that "With WPF, everything is drawn with vectors, so you can scale windows and icons as big (or as small) as you want, and the objects will display with no loss in quality." In fact, icons in Vista are generally 256x256 bitmap images. Artists normally prefer bitmaps because it gives them more control over the artwork.
Paul McFedries, author of Windows Vista Unveiled, thinks that an operating system should be thought of as more than just its user interface
Correct. Why can't Microsoft understand this? They spend so much time with the user interface, that the actually OS stuff (stable runtime environment, security, "revolutionary file system" gets put on the backburner. I think it would be in MS's best interest to focus 100% on the core internals of the OS and leave the shell to either open source or some third party. Heck, even a totally seperate division of microsoft. This whole "API for everything" and having so much interface stuff integrated with the internal running of the system is just a recipe for disaster, as can be seen on every other windows release before vista.
I got nothin'
Maybe I'm just cantankerous today, but the idea of having a GUI do more happy bouncy shit to pander to the least educated user really bugs me. Perhaps it's just me, but I hate little "helpful" pop-up tips and goofy animations asking if they can assist me in writing a letter. No user interface, other than the nipple if you're a mammal, is intuative and no amount of pop-uppery will fix that. Simplification and consistancy is probably the best way to make sure that all the rules of the interface can fit inside people's head, which is maybe what they're groping toward by copying OSX. (Which is by no means the Best Interface Ever, as some people content. Me? I like the command line.)
Blegh. Why has this pissed me off so much? I've not used a Microsoft product in years, and I'm far more likely to do this[*] before touching Vista. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but does this piss anyone else off?
[*] DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK (unless you're familiar with modblog, aren't squemish and aren't at work).
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
This guy is smoking some serious crack in a couple of places, he talks about how difficult it is to do transparency? Hello I wrote a little piece of code to make transparent windows back with turbo pascal on a 386.. If my 386 could do it i'm sure you don't need a GPU... Just because transparency wasn't in the basic GDI (which is even older) doesn't mean it was hard or even that slow.
Figures 3.8 through 3.11 prove the best reason to upgrade. Clippy has been upgraded: now he's a dog!
You know what bothers me about this? They've taken nearly every proposed feature out of Vista that we wanted or that was going to useful...or even new...leaving us forced to debate whether or not there's actually anything new in the only really new thing about it, Avalon.
And when we do have people talking about it they don't have any idea what they're talking about, discussing cutesy shit you can do with their uber-advanced API and not improvements that Microsoft has made to the ACTUAL GUI that will help me complete complex tasks easier, find that which I need faster, and just make my user experience more pleasant and efficient overall.
Features, you say? They're not features, they're bugs. Much in the way that spam is email, these bullshit "improvements" are actually just annoying eye-candy and a stop-gap measure to one-up the actually useful features that exist in other operating systems such as OSX and Linux. And no, I'm actually not a *nix fanboy despite my heavy use of it; I've been a Windows admin for a few years now. And I've been a user long enough to know that dancing icons and spinning buttons do nothing more than impress grandma for a few seconds and piss advanced users off.
Where's the real innovation? Where's the Microsoft that made Windows 3.11 and Windows 2000 (which, despite it's faults, was one hell of an OS)?
Dead, I say, choked by the left hand of greed and the right hand of stupidity.
If all my base are belong to you and I attempt to retrieve my base, does that mean I'm freebasing?
It really baffles me why they haven't added virtual desktop support yet. This is something that X has had since swm, which Mr. LaStrange released in 1990!
Even the Sun workstation I used in the mid-1990s, running Solaris 2.5 and CDE, offered virtual desktops. For the love of fuck, Microsoft needs to add virtual desktop support.
And many users with sensitive mouse wheels, such as myself, say fuck that. A key combination is much more effective for switching to a different workspace.
"We invented personal computing." - Bill Gates
WindowsRG ? (ReallyGood Edition)
I like microcars
> Developers can do 2-D, 3-D, animation, imaging,
> video, audio, special effects and text rendering
> using a single API.
And when exactly they will learn that UI design it is not about what YOU CAN DO? It is what YOU CAN'T DO. You can take any program and DO WITH IT WHATEVER, give it nice animations, nice 3D effects, symphonic sounds, add to it few agents, fifteen toolbars, make it do your coffee etc.
It is not what you CAN do. It so about how to make it the most simple as you can. KISS - for Keep It Simple.
Reffered in the article OSX is a quite complicated operating system but still it manages to deliver a platform on which (at least in my opinion, and I am not biased since my main workstation is running Linux) you can make SIMPLE and USEFULL applications.
My point is that the platform should allow users to get consistant and simple interface. Not that what Windows is offering - now you get it even more complex - you get all Windows Legacy stuff working (dating back to 95) and also a BRAND NEW SHINY 2D 3D WHATEVER interface. So it is in fact worse not better. Since it includes more ways to screw the applications to become UNNEEDLY COMPLEX.
The person who said that was Scott McNealy. IIRC he said it at some Sun conference before the commercial came out. The commercial was for Sun Microsystems. Sun is now in bed with Microsoft.
I think that pretty much says it all.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yeah well, every Linux geek always has a huge flock of Windoze sheep to take care of. That is why we honestly wish that MS would really improve Windoze, so that we don't have to deal with so much crap.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Commercial UNIXes were unable to compete with Windows on a price perspective and Microsoft capitalised, very well I might add, on that price difference and on a sales pitch that basically said any tool needing to be configured, run and managed from the command line would always be more complex than one administered from within a GUI environment. (Playing "devil's advocate here, I don't personally believe that, I'm looking at it from their perspective).
However, a tactical mistake they made was not to keep the GUI separate from the core OS from the outset - I guess greed played a big part in that because making the GUI much heavier and inseperable from the core kernel forced MS customers into hardware upgrades, which in turn meant more Windows sales.
Had Linux and the BSDs not come on the scene, Microsoft would be in the same situation with security and bugs that they are today but with less dissatisfaction from their customer base because there would be nothing to compare Windows to.
However, I'm sure that any intelligent Windows user now would have to agree that when it comes to tailoring a server for very specific uses, nothing beats the modularity and configurability of a UNIX-like OS.
The problem Microsoft are now faced with is that to change Windows such that the GUI became a modular, selectable part of the OS would be so vast a change that it would render a huge proportion of existing applications incompatible and take away one of the major reasons stopping a lot of their customer base putting in Linux or BSD servers in certain parts of the corporate enterprise. Add to that the fact that migration plans in enterprises are phased over lengthy periods of time, and MS have to maintain compatibility layers to give time for older applications to catch up - this adds to the bloat and the requirement for more raw processing power.
I wouldn't say that Linux or BSD have the power (or intention) of fully displacing Windows, but I do believe they have unintentionally forced Microsoft down a single track of having to make their OSes bigger and bloatier with each release, and this will get to the point where their OSes become unmanageable from a security and patching perspective.
I think it's inevitable that at some point in the near future, if MS stay in the OS game, then they will need to modularize Windows a lot more to make it manageable - that will have to lead to a lot of applications breaking, customers getting more angry and, perhaps, Linux and BSD becoming real viable alternatives in core enterprises where the likes of Exchange and MSSQL currently dominate.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
- UAC: Vista can raise (and presumably lower) program permissions while running. This is seriously a good thing; aside from running sans-admin priveleges for the most part (and the abiliy to gain admin privs in things like Defender without needing to re-start the program from the menu via RunAs) the IE7 Protected Mode sandbox is, quite literally, the way all browsers should run. Super-low permissions, until it need to do something like load an outside pogram or save a file to disc. Then it asks for permission. Explorer works fairly similarly, elevating permsissions only when doing things that require admin privs (modifying Windows files or other users' directories, for example). Neither OS X nor XP (nor Linux) are this good at permissions control.
- Address Space Layout Randomization: together with the no-execute (NX) protection provided by essentially all modern OSes, this provides excellent protection against buffer overflow exploits. (NX is completely ineffective against overwriting the return address to some linked library, for example, the classic return-to-libc exploit.)Neither XP nor OS X support ASLR natively. I think it's part of SELinux, which is included with a few distros.
- DirectX 10. I don't think this is going to be backported, and if MS is even 25% correct in their claims of increased performance (up to 70% improvement), it will make a big splash in the gaming world. OpenGL is awesome, but it doesn't have this level of performance. Oh, and anybody who says OpenGL is unsupported in Vista is ignorant/full of it; I've run OpenGL apps without any problem at all.
- Volume Shadow Copies: SO useful! I've used it for everything from reverting files I'd thought overwritten and gone to restoring damaged system files (via System Restore, which in Vista makes XP's version look like a joke). It's in Server 2003, but not (really) in XP (only for system folders, and not well impemented). Leopard's "Time Machine" may be the same capability (with excessive eye candy) but I'm dubious of their implementation too... daily screenshots? Not based on major modifications? I hope they at least don't store the VSCs in some easily located portion of the filesystem; I realize there's very little malware for Macs, but most XP malware goes after the system restore copies as soon as it can. In any case, Leopard isn't out yet and won't be for a while yet.
- BitLocker Drive Encryption: NTFS encrypting filesystem is nice, and there are of course 3rd-party software solutions, but using a dedicated hardware chip to do the encryption on your entire drive just makes all kinds of sense. I wish my system had one... I'd move GRUB out of the MBR and chainload it instead; then even dual-booting with BitLocker would work (yes, it does).
- Resizing hard disk partitions, including the system volume, while they are mounted. I didn't even know this was possible! As somebody who does a lot of messing with partitions, doesn't want to shell out for Partition Magic (I get MS software for free via my school) and doesn't entirely trust QtParted and NTFSresize (I have about a 75% success rate, which isn't high enough for those kinds of operations. No major data loss... yet... but still not good enough).
There's so much more... but I'm tired of repeating this post for the quadrillionth time. Oh, and as for power savings, I get much better battery life in Vista (due to various things including dynamic processor scaling that allow me to set my clock rate as low as 5% of its normal speed while the CPU is idle) than I do in XP. Linux is similarly good, but ACPI support in Linux is still lagging. I don't have OS X installed on my laptop.There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The current GUI in XP is more than valid and works well doing everything you would expect it to do. The GUI in Vista is all that is has to offer. Well, some exceptione, are the DRM infection, the restrictive EULA, and the built-in spyware.
What troubles me is that somehow so many industry pundits are pushing this thing as something special and worthy of the billions spent to develop it. Most of these must be looking at a picture of increased sales of hardware, more magazine articles (thus advertisers), etc. I personally think alot of these guys have been paid off by Microsoft.
Just looking at the OS for a few days can clearly demonstrate that alot of what is being said just isn't true. One guy I read that got alot of press professed massive hardware support while my experience with it has been very common and found little hardware support overall. One would not expect neglect of IDE drivers, modems, etc., but would would expect that great effort to make wireless as trouble free as possible is much a minimum.
Microsoft touts their sleep mode features, but in reality their implementations of these features have been severely lacking and extremely problemmatic over the years with little to instill any sense of confidence in me toward that feature and thus Microsoft. I think if the average person was going to save $50-$75 a year we should all jump up in the air and wave our hands in joy. Frankly we'd save more money if we'd just turn the buggers off at night.
Guess what? We all thrashed Microsoft in the area of Genuine Advantage Notification and yet they have implemented this feature in spades under Vista. Anyone buying it will have to accept that up front. That means they are going to be spying on you and your use of Windows. Not only that they seem to think they are entitled to this. They seem to think they can interfere with the use of our computers.
I have 15+ legit copies of XP and I have good solid hardware that runs it. My small business does just fine. What exactly is Vista going to give me? Anyone using XP currently has to ask that one question and be serious about it. I know many will find reasons to upgrade but from a productivity stand point, from a usage stand point, from a feature stand point, there's really nothing that complells anyone to upgrade. You like the latest greatest then fine do it for that but not because Vista is giving you anything special because it isn't. One must also ask themselves if it is worth giving up your privacy to the spying the Microsoft will be implementing. Not only that are you willing to give that up to a monopoly that has been convicted of crimes? Are you going to give that up to the company that stole the technology to do on-line activation of Windows and Office? Are you willing to give that up to a company that then used gorilla tactics in court to bury the court and the plaintiff in paper work in an effort to hide the evidence proving the plantinff's case?
Microsoft has alot of power to influence and they get more free marketing than any other company on the planet, now and throughout history. But to be honest with you it only takes a concerted effort by people such as you and I to tell others how what has been happening and what they are doing with Vista to bring things back to reality.
Why does Microsoft think they are the only ones that can produce a spying program that can disable even legitimate licenses? Who is Microsoft to tell us that after we pay upwards of $400.00 that we are not entitled to install this on any given machine we so choose? Do they not think that the average person who purchased Windows Vista is going to put up with "sorry, you have to buy a new Vista because your motherboard went out and you need it replaced"? What do you think will happen to system upgrades?
That sort of license restriction caters to the likes of the big companies selling computers such as HP, Dell, etc. It doesn't help the average guy who is trying to make computers cheaper and better than HP or Dell.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Project Looking Glass was 'way ahead of the Vista 3D presentation, and still offers some cool effects that aren't available on Vista yet. I predict that soon after Vista comes out the OS community revives Looking Glass, couples it with Croquet and humiliates Micrososft by doing it on half the power at a fraction of the development cost.
http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/
http://www.opencroquet.org/
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Ok, I agree, the Linux people are major ripoff artists. That being said, when most things _are_ ripped off (which, being great artists, happens rather fast), new features do appear. The window manager Beryl (which is a fork of Compiz) has gone above and beyond in imitating the new graphical bling of Vista. And a lot of the bling from OSX too. I dare say that a lot of this bling comes at a smaller price (hardware wise) than what you get from Vista.
When I first saw screenshots of Vista I was impressed. Impressed with what could be done. Sadly, I haven't really seen them move any further with the bling since the first screenshot was released, and now that I have Beryl up and running I really couldn't care less.
If you look at the forum for Beryl you'll see a LOT of input from users, requesting (granted, a lot of stuff seen elsewhere, but also) new and innovative features and bling, that might actually prove useful when working (and naturally a lot that's pure bling).
What I'm basically looking for is what makes Vista stand out from something like Beryl, except for the fact that you can actually run (some) windows programs on it. Why are people getting so excited over this, when you can have Beryl running on your computer today? Or Compiz? Or Metacity?
------- I fumbled my registration and I now must suffer
Yep, icons are raster. So are bitmap files. So are rendered jpegs, in most programs. So are sprites in most programs. The point you're missing is that Vista ships these bitmaps off to the GPU to be rendered using vectors (not sure if the raster->vector conversion happens in software or hardware or both, but what comes out is vectors) so you get the advantages of vectors on the display end (they are fast to render using hardware acceleration, too) and the advantages of bitmaps when manipulating your images. Some benchmarks I saw on a machine with a good graphics card had 3x-5x render speed improvements in programs like Photoshop due to the hardware accel.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
When dear Lord will MS finally understand that we don't want to operate our computers. We want them to operate themselves. I want fewer controls, fewer buttons. I want the software to figure out what's the right way to do something, the right app to start, the right place to put an object. I don't want to be an AUDITOR for my system anymore. I'm sick of it. I don't really care about this years trendy glassy stylistic trend which will be as old as dirt in about 3 years anyway. I don't want rearranged controls that map out everything I could possibly do. I want all of that transparent to my use. I want for instance to be able to simply start typing on the desktop and have it popup the last 4 choices of applications, have me quickly pick one, and load what I just typed into the appropriate area. And if the input is unique enough, I want the software to know what the application is supposed to be and take appropriate action. I want a blank canvas. I don't want to start Adobe to read a PDF. I want a window to open up with the PDF and keep the application absolutely in the background. I don't care what it is. And I don't want to hear about codecs, plugins or patches. Just make it work or let me know how long it will be before you, the system is ready to do that. I want you remember all the little tweaky settings. Print still means print even if the last time I printed it went to email instead, just do that unless and until I tell you otherwise.
Then I want it run faster and quieter with fewer interruptions to update, fix and patch. The system can do that but it has to be completely quiet and unobtrusive about it. I want virtual reboots that allow me to keep working even when the system has to be restarted. I don't want to do storage management, that's your job.
I don't want to hear from firewalls, spyware blockers, AV or malware tools. Please do have them but if they are worth anything at all they will do 99% of their job with ZERO human intervention or notification of any kind.
And then what I want you to do is precreate a large array of batch scheduled housekeeping procs to run off hours, again, w/o me knowing about them to do the little things they need to do: update, defrag, clean off garbage, memory cleanup, patches etc etc etc etc. Take a few hours if you like, take more, do it at night or whichever schedule I give you and bring the system back to WHATEVER state or condition it was in before including all open applications and objects.
Guh~, I only saw this post after I replied in this thread. Stupid stupid stupid, mod parent up!! Beryl owns OSX and Vista so hard it's not even funny. And it's still is very beta.
"Build a man a fire warm him for a day, set a man on fire and warm him for the rest of his life."
or me, who likes to alt+tab to winamp or MPC etc, then just use the scroll wheel (well, scroll bit of the pad) for changing the volume, then alt+tab back... all quickly without even having to wait for any visual feedback (like you would do if it involved moving the mouse).
Plus when it comes to virtual desktop/console type things, I don't like free spin... prefer something like alt+f1-f4 to switch, so you can jump straight to where you know your stuff is without waiting for visual feedback.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
I could write more, but you get the picture. Just use OS X, which has been around for almost six years now. Then use Vista. The similarities are immediately obvious, and they will be written about in the side-by-side comparison reviews next year.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Meesa tinkin youssum invitin da veeeery bad jokes...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Isn't it interesting that the #1 software developer in the world gets away with being six years behind and playing catch-up by trying to adopt the competition's look-and-feel?
My lasting impression of Vista is that it looks like what XP's Luna looked like when I first saw it. Hideous, garish, and an obvious response to what Apple was doing. Vista essentially is Microsoft's plastic version of Aqua. Except that there are five different menu styles (no, seriously), multiple styles of dialog boxes (Install Font is still using the Windows 3.1 dialog), multiple styles of toolbars, multiple styles of windows, and more.
It's a huge fucking mess. A true disaster of an interface from who is supposed to be, as I said, the #1 software developer in the world. I'm really going to be interested in Vista's sales figures. Microsoft will likely do what they did with XP, which was to withhold sales figures and instead cite OEM license numbers, which are meaningless for determining actual sales. XP was, in fact, disappointing sales-wise, and I suspect Vista will be too because there is very little buzz for this thing. At least XP had the NT kernel as a selling point.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Actually, many of the Xerox employees went to work at Apple and helped create the Macintosh, and it's been written by one of the former employees that Apple's interface was in development before the visit to Xerox, and that Apple created the idea of pulldown menus, the overlapping windows, icons, the trash can, and so forth.
It's a look-and-feel that originated at Apple. When you use Windows, that essential paradigm is coming directly from the 1984 MacOS.
"Sufferin' succotash."
And yet they still scream bloody murder when you suggest that they just learn a different interface (e.g. OpenOffice, [GNOME|KDE|OS X], etc.) instead, even though it would be the same (or indeed, less) effort.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The new UI requires a DirectX 9-capable card and takes advantage of all the features made possible through DX9. I'm not aware of any internals in Vista that utilize DX10, since it's more orientated at allowing games to run better. Some details about DX10.
"We invented personal computing." - Bill Gates
I've some questions, not direcly AT you, nor ripping you. These just came to mind, inspired by your and other's comments... So please understand I am trying to find my way to reasonable/insightful (and maybe even inciteful) questions (I don't have vista, and surely will not plunk down my OWN money for exhorbitant vista "features" KDE and Gnome give me right now):
Can vista users stretch the desktop icons and folder icons? Do they scale well?
Can vista users with bad dexterity or shaking hands left-alt-right-mouse-drag a dialog box or window to resize it? Can a vist user double-click the title bar and scroll up, shade-up or resize a window besides just maximize/plunk-back-to-previous size?
Can a vista user left-alt-left-mouse to drag an in-the-way window out to the side?
Can a vista user bring to focus on mouse-over any window the user wants? Without a hassle? With user-selected responsiveness?
Can a vista user switch to different desktops as efficiently as KDE and Gnome users can? Can vista users roll the scroll wheel over the taskbar or Kicker-wannabe and switch different virtual desktops AND to a select application? Does the vista desktop icon update in realtime like KDE's Kasbar thumbnails reflect the desktop contents?
Can a vista user split a virtual desktop's apps off from the Main Taskbar/kicker to an auxiliary task bar for more refined self-organization?
Can a vista user use glassy effects on a GPU or graphics card that is sufficient for KDE and Gnome?
Does vista have a wealth of Superkaramba-like widgets that are USEFUL and not dullard ripoffs of OSX or ripoffs of lesser KDE/Gnome widgets reinterpreded from OSX?
Most of the things I am asking about existed in KDE or Gnome for YEARS. Hell, ms couldn't even slipstream this stuff into incremental updates to windows. Despite all those huge FUCKING patches they slog down on everybody.
Or, is vista just a hugely-rewritten PATCH to XP in disguise? Put these responses on a wall chart, too. So we can post them on the Tux poster for the cubicles.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
You state all of those things as if they've already been proven with rock-solid stability.
Remember that to this day, MS does not have a consumer-level OS that can defrag itself in the background, or index its filesystem for quick searches. Priviledge escalation, proper stand-by management, and security are but a distant dream on billions of user desktops.
If there's one thing I've learned about MS is that they overpromise and underdeliver. So I'd hold the judgement on drive encryption, and HD repartitioning until we see how reliable they are a few years from now.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
UAC: This doesn't work that well. I found it to be the second most annoying thing in Vista, beaten only by the terrible Aero theme. It's a very nice idea, it's been available on any UNIX based system for many years, and MS still didn't make it work right. The video mode switching alone is just silly to no end.
Address space rand: Increasing security is always good.
DX10: If it isn't getting backported then it isn't very useful. Besides, of course it's going to seem fast, you have to upgrade your CPU and video card to use Vista properly. I personally so absolutely no speed improvement in graphics out of Vista/DX10. I did see my system run slower, though.
Shadow copies: This is LVM. I've had this for a decade. If you want a better version than VSC in Vista, go buy a Net.App.
Bitlocker: I do not want any partition/file system/disc encrypted at home, and I certainly don't want it at work. People forget passwords, systems need repairing, etc, etc. It has a niche use, though.
Resizing: I don't resize my system partitions, and very few other people do. Most people don't even know what a partition is. It's nifty, and ties right in with LVM.
Power management: Just as everyone else said, you can't get the gains that you claim. You can't slow the CPU down under its base clock. That means 600-800MHz on most Intel chips. Throw battery gains out the window if you're using the GPU hungry Aero theme... I only get slightly better battery from my Pentium-M system under Ubuntu than I do under WinXP, and that's mostly because there are fewer things trying to run in the background.
You might repeat your post over and over, but that doesn't make anything you mention earth shattering. Nearly all of these "huge improvements" in Vista are either incremental over XP or have been available on other platforms for years, and then there is the pile of mis-features that nobody actually wants.
Anyone that does some research on Vista would know that this is the first NT based OS that Microsoft shipped that offered no real user improvements. It doesn't even put into place that last piece of Cairo, which would have been WinFS. All of the features that people were excited about, MS has ripped out. However, as the GP pointed out, MS sure had enough devs and time to throw in all of the total bullshit DRM that none of their customers actually wants to pay for.
Hell, the MS DRM, especially mandatory driver signing, means that I *can't* even use Vista. I have too many pieces of software and too many devices that I would have to purchase a new product, retest, redeploy, and retrain to get away from what already works with XP. For all these wonderful "features" that Vista offers, it gives us three that range from simply useless to outright malicious to the end user.
UAC: Vista can raise (and presumably lower) program permissions while running.
This isn't such a good thing. From what I've read UAC asks for permission quite often. If we take a look at history, people will end up automatically clicking on allow, just to not have to think about it. A well-designed system takes into account the human factor so that it does not ask to change permissions (roadblock-style security, which leads to automatic response by the human user), but instead allows to user to change permissions levels by explicitly requesting it (fork in the road security, which requires the user to explicitly leave the main road).
Firefox never asks for permissions, because it was designed in such a way as to inform you of how you can give additional permissions to the sites that need it, and generally operates just fine without elevated permissions. OS X rarely has to ask for permissions, because when you want to change a system-wide setting you first have to explicitly unlock the system preferences dialog.
I agree that UAC will reduce the amount of malware. But I haven't read anything about it that made me think it was any better (or even the equal of) OS X's security mechanisms when it comes to actual daily use.
>>we use Windows as a platform to run software for r
which is exactly why Vista will be a major annoyance for anyone trying to do serious work on it. I'm completely in agreeance with the parent - the flying in windows and transparency this, blar blar that are all fine and dandy for the first 5 seconds you are using Vista - it DOES look 'new-ish' and psuedo-fancy...but then try to actually get anything serious done on the OS - the way that windows 'fade' into each other is really counter-productive. When a window pops up that is an actual user-prompt, you don't want it to fade in gently so that you won't notice it (and believe me there will be many a time when you don't notice when a window has changed because of this), you want the window to pop up and say 'hey there - mr computer here, i need your input on something'
the way Vista is currently is very counter-productive to the whole production side of using a computer, period.
i'm fairly near-sighted, but with XP i can click through and navigate through most of the standard windows prompts literally without reading what they are actually saying - because the fact that i can tell when a window has changed and a dialog has popped up. with Vista, you have to focus - not only on the window that you might be working on at that particular moment, but on the entire screen at all times because you never know when another window or prompt might 'slide up' into view without you knowing...
it's a serious issue that i think is going to cause alot more eyestrain and general confusion overall.
as it stands now, basic computer users barely notice when a dialog pops up for them to do something - with vista, things won't pop at all, suddenly you'll find a window locked up because some sneaky dialog prompt has come up and stolen the focus from you. particularly for modal windows, this will be very annoying, very fast.
another major annoyance with vista are the 'security popups' - they pop up randomly but don't seem to have much point at all. how hard would it be for virus writers to spawn random mouse clicks to bypass these things? i've seen driver installers from large-scale hardware companies (yes Brother I'm looking at you) that have automated mouse-clicking in their driver installations that bypass the 'unsigned driver' prompt in XP - a major no no as far as i'm concerned...having a virus or whatever doing the same thing for these security popups won't be too hard either i'm sure.
Gekido's Lair
Hey, it it means I'll finally get my vector desktop, so I can just turn the DPI up or down for big happy controls or tiny intricate controls, I'll be happy. Nearly everything's still bitmap-based; it's so 1990s. And whatever happened to dynamic themes for GTK?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Wrong, OS X's translucent window borders were hardware accelerated through the Quartz Compositor using OpenGL. Apple no longer uses translucent window borders because the effect becomes very tiring. XGL has nothing at all to do with this, especially since Apple was doing this back in 2002 with the introduction of OS X 10.2 Jaguar.
"Thinking about the idea for some time" doesn't count. Quartz was first unveiled years earlier in the OS X betas.
Wrong, Quartz has always been resolution-independent, which is why an NSView can send the contents of its view to a printer, which has a higher resolution than the screen. In other words, the same drawing commands used to draw to the screen are used to draw to the printer. Quartz does not use a "pseudo-vector graphics way" of drawing windows, whatever that means. In OS X Tiger, a scaling factor was added for developers to test against, and Leopard will expose this value to the user for modification.
It's obviously a response to it.
5% isn't "measly" and neither is their 15% worldwide install base of 18 million OS X users or their presence in creative professional and academic markets. Regardless, your response barely addresses my point. UAC doesn't even ask for a password, and people will get into the habit very quickly of just clicking "Continue" whenever the annoying box pops up. OS X requires you to pay attention and enter your password, which is more logical and more secure.
No, it's not "quite different;" it's exactly the same but in inversed monochrome. It's the same sideways speaker icon with three soundwaves that increase and decrease depending on volume level. Before Vista, the speaker looked different and didn't behave that way, and it wasn't monochrome. OS X had this same icon and behavior for half a decade.
Most everything in Windows is some inverse of the original MacOS. Vista's taskbar completes this by become black in inverse to the white system menu of MacOS. The clock is still on the right side as are the system tray indicators (did you not notice that the task bar is essentially the Mac OS system menu moved to the bottom of the screen?). And now the system tray icons themselves are inverses of the MacOS versions.
OS X has used a signature round, spinning busy indicator for half a decade, and you're actually arguing that there is no similarity when Microsoft suddenly adopts a round, spinning indicator after years of using the hourglass?
When OS X boots, it has its standard spinning radial progress indicator (animated segments arranged in a ring
"Sufferin' succotash."