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Windows Vista, More Than Just a Pretty Face
Nash writes "Ars Technica takes a look under the hood of Vista, discussing the need for a new API and comparing the graphics engine in Vista to that of Mac OS X. 'With Windows Vista it will be possible to implement Exposé properly-with live window updates and low system overhead. That said, it doesn't thus far look like Microsoft will be doing anything so useful as Exposé. Though the blurred glass effect is rather attractive, it's not exactly useful. Other visual effects include miniature window previews when the mouse cursor is hovered over taskbar buttons and an upgraded alt-tab device, and Flip3D.'"
Vista's a whore!
It's kind of unfortunate that the Glass effect is transparent. If you take a screenshot of a single window, it will pick up whatever is behind the window.
So, say you have something you don't want to show up in your screenshot, but it's behind the Glass effect. It will show up in the screenshot.
Not normally that big of a deal, but it's kind of annoying taking a screenshot of a "single window" and picking up content from other windows.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Of course, OS X also does live updates of windows in Expose, don't know why the article suggests otherwise.
From TFA: "The scaled windows that Exposé shows you are not merely static screenshots of those windows; they're the actual windows themselves, just scaled down. This means that they update live, and any changes in a window are immediately apparent to the user."
How do you read that as suggesting otherwise?
This guy's the limit!
Talk about bait and switch! It says that is more than just a pretty face but shows nothing but the history of Windows APIs and Eye (and maybe Ear) Candy. I will summarize this 8 page long article for you (emphasis mine):
...)
Page 1: This is Part I of Ars Technica's three-part Windows Vista review coverage. In the coming weeks we will be expanding on this coverage, culminating in an official review when our testing is finished.
(... history of Windows APIs, why Vista does graphics and audio better than XP, yada yada
Concluding remarks
The new APIs and all-new graphics stack are not the only things new in Vista. There have been major improvements in Vista's approach to secure computing, and many low-level changes to improve the experience of using the OS. I'll talk about these--along with some of the much-vaunted features that didn't make the cut after all--in my next article.
There already is an Expose clone for Vista using the Desktop Windows Manager (though of course not an official Microsoft one), here (performance is apparently rather poor on that version, but there's a new version coming out soon that improves this).
:)
If you want something a bit different, there's another Vista DWM addon called Smartflip that presents the windows similarly to Apple's FrontRow.
I imagine as more and more people switch to Vista (or, more likely, get new PCs with Vista preloaded) we'll see more and more third-party addons to the DWM. Fancy-Effects-Eye-Candy war between DWM addons and Beryl, anyone?
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
And what I've found with Windows is that people take that pig and say "Well, it works well enough, and all the clothes I bought for it fit, so I don't think I should switch over to a real woman. Besides, I hear that real women are very expensive."
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Well, in fairness, if you pick a topic like, "How Vista is more than a pretty face," you'd have a hard time staying on topic too. It'd be like if I set out to write a factual article titled "The Easter Bunny's trip to Mars".
I know some idiot is going post some "why don't you just use a horse and carrage" message. But, really, specifically, why on earth should I spend all that money, and go through all that trouble, for nothing? I don't want to sound abrasive, but -- don't. No-one's forcing you to upgrade. No-one's suggesting that you specifically should upgrade. If you don't have any reason to upgrade, then don't. But that doesn't mean it's necessary to comment on every single story about any aspect of Vista "I don't see any reason for me to upgrade". I'm not going to upgrade to Photoshop CS3, but I don't go on forums, search for topics about CS3, and post "I'm not going to upgrade!", because it adds very, very little to the discussion. If there are no new features that are relevent to you, and there's no reason for you to upgrade, just -- don't upgrade. Simple as that.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
My laptop does all the effects mentioned in the article summary and more, even though the specs of it are far below what Vista requires. And I owe it all to Ubuntu, Gnome and Beryl.
There's no easy to find minimum required specs for Beryl, so I thought I'd just try it anyway and see what happens; I only really wanted it for Exposé anyway, so I wasn't too worried whether the rest of it worked. It works better than I had hoped and all effects work with no noticeable stress on my system.
Ubuntu, Gnome and Beryl, more than just a pretty face. I'm very happy with it all.
News for the amnesiac. Stuff that mattered.
I get to make this article burn in flames!!!
I just never get tired of it!!! (27th time and still going!)
I'm in the same boat though. It doesn't really seem that there are any UI improvements that would make a switch the Vista worthwhile. I was not happy with the XP interface, and I tried out Vista. It wouldn't run on my three year old laptop. Being a broke college student, I have no interest in dropping a grand so I can have some pretty new UI. But testing it on other computers, I couldn't see any real compelling reason to switch, unless I wanted to have a slightly prettier start menu and have needless, not-even-that-cool looking GUI effects. Those are not killer apps for me. WinFS, the only reason I was excited for Vista, is not there.
So then I tried Kubuntu on my laptop, looking for a XP replacement with actual changes to the UI that meant something, and I found it. This environment (for me) is FAR more productive than XP or Vista could ever be. I was their target market, unsatisfied with XP and looking for an upgrade, and they let me slip through the cracks. Not that I really care, I found Linux and will probably never go back to Windows. Nice job, Microsoft.
Are you even reading the links you post? The first one mentions "ugly" as a cultural reference, and all it says is ugly is the price. It explicitly calls Vista pretty -- that's the first goddamn entry in "The Good".
Your second link just errored. Did you really mean to cut if off at 56 there?
Your third link doesn't really address whether Vista is attractive. It mentions "eye candy" once when comparing performance to XP. It also mentions "view settings"
I'm not going to re-read the preview articles and look for mentions about visuals after that load of crap.
Take it from a Vista user -- it's pretty.
Here's what I think is not pretty: IE7 looks like crap to me. I don't know why people like it. The new Windows Explorer also looks ugly, but in its case that's partly because it is far more functional than it used to be and the ugliness is in the information overload.
Last visual thing: I hate the way the start menu doesn't fly-out anymore but instead rearranges itself over the same goddamn column. You can switch it to classic view, but then you lose the search field. WTF? Why should I have to choose between flyout menus and SEARCH?
Every other change I can think of: pretty. This is obviously subjective, but then again, you're full of shit, and subjective trumps full of shit.
I am a developer for a small software company and started using Vista on my workstation about a month ago.
I just switched back to XP sp2 for the following reasons:
I/O performance for File Copy (HD to HD) was 5x slower than the same box running XP. No kidding. I was copying about 10Gb of files from one disk to another, and it took over 45 min to complete (and this was from a 10,000rpm RAID-0 striped drive to a SATA drive)
Usability is total CRAP when UAC is turned on. This is the feature in the Apple commercial where the suit asks "Allow or Deny" at every exchange. This is NO JOKE.
Something a simple as changing the DPI of your screen fonts requires that you click "Allow" on a dialog box before you do anything else.
When you want to view processes from All Users in Task Manager, you have to do the same every single time.
Copying or into a Program Files folder or Renaming a file requires 2 confirmation dialog boxes!
Drag and Drop to some applications is disabled when it is "Run as Administrator", which you must do for some things to work correctly. This means no more double clicking on a txt file to edit it in notepad if that file is in a Program Files directory. Nope. You must launch notepad using "Run as administrator" then use the File-Open menu item to open the txt file.
I would disable this but we develop software for enterprise networks and those machines will most likely have this 'feature' permanently disabled. I switched back to XP for my main workstation and I'm running Vista in a VM for now.
Vista more than just a pretty face, it's a GIANT pain in the A$$ as well.
Even that given, though; considering it isn't yet installed on most XP machines, there are already a surprisingly large number of WPF-only applications. Copying-and-pasting from here:
Yahoo Messenger for Windows Vista - New IM client (SCREENCAST).
New York Times Reader - Next-generation online reading experience for the NY Times (MSI).
Microsoft Calendar Printing Assistant - Generate printed calendars from your Outlook schedule (MSI).
Microsoft Expression Blend - Designer tool for building WPF experiences (MSI).
Microsoft Expression Design - illustration and graphic design tool (MSI).
Microsoft Windows Live for TV - 3D access to Messenger contacts from Media Center or IE (MSI).
Electric Rain Standout - High-end custom presentation software (SCREENCAST).
Wikipedia Explorer - 3D exploration of related articles from Wikipedia (APPLICATION).
iBloks - Mashup application for creating 3D movies (MSI).
RikReader - RSS Reader that integrates with Internet Explorer 7 (APPLICATION).
Nostalgia - Yahoo! Flickr browser and photo manager (APPLICATION).
Cine.View - Netflix movie queue manager (APPLICATION).
Cool Text Vector Draw - A vector drawing program with 1200 fonts available via a web service (XBAP).
Forbes.com Reader - News Reader Application from Forbes.com (APPLICATION).
Actipro Wizard - A control for building wizard dialogs in WPF (XBAP).
UniveRSS - A 3D Vista RSS reader (APPLICATION).
Xceed Datagrid for WPF Live Explorer - Hands-on demo of Xceed's free new Datagrid for WPF (XBAP).
DominoKen - Artistic 3D XBAP demonstration from Microsoft Japan (XBAP).
Denounce - Stand-alone podcast listener and blog reader (APPLICATION).
British Library Turning the Pages - British Library's 'virtual viewer' for some of their most precious books (XBAP).
ITN Hub Player - Video clips and news stories from ITN (APPLICATION).
Evolution Media Center - HTPC Front-end with stunning animations and dynamic XAML-skinning (ZIP).
OTTO - Online clothing shopping (APPLICATION).
Seattle Post-Intelligencer PI Reader - News Reader Application from Seattle P.I. (APPLICATION).
Roxio Central - Windows Vista Technology Preview - CD and DVD Burning application (APPLICATION).
Metaliq - Snowboarding data visualization (ZIP).
WeatherNews - 3D Weather visualization (XBAP).
Shiseido - Make up online shopping (XBAP).
DOSV - Computer Configuration (XBAP).
Warner - Movie Previews and Showtimes (XBAP).
Notescraps - Random information manager (MSI).
Valil.Chess.WinFX - Chess game (XBAP, APPLICATION).
NetAdvantage for WPF - Infragistics NetAdvantage for WPF 2007 controls (APPLICATION).
fnac.com - French retailer shopping experience (set system to French locale to run) (APPLICATION).
DevComponents WPF Ribbon - DevComponents Office 2007 Ribbon for WPF (APPLICATION).
Daily Mail eReader - On line reading experience for UK Newspaper Daily Mail (APPLICATION).
The North Face In-Store Explorer - Retail kiosk (MUST GO TO STORE TO EXPERIENCE).
Windows Vista Magazine - Using the same viewer as the British Library app (XBAP).
TempWorks fx - Staffing industry line of business application (SCREENSHOT).
Ricciolo PaperBoy - A complete RSS Feed Aggregator (APPLICATION).
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Other than the pretty new theme, is there *any* new features that are relevant to anyone?
... they won't upgrade.
There are some interesting features of Vista, but none that can impress the computer illiterate folks other than: "Hey, it's pretty!". Tell computer illiterate people about UAC, SuperFetch, new IP stack, new driver model, display driver in User space, DX10 and whatnot and they'll stare at you as if you are talking some alien language. Of course once you mention they need to buy more memory (probably new PC so they see the "pretty") because their 256/512 MB laptop would crawl under Vista
But it's pretty! Then again, my mom would probably be lost with the new UI especially IE7, even if it's "pretty".
The article made a big deal about how Win32 and GDI are obsolete in Vista, and all the cool apps use WPF on the .NET Framework 3, and this makes them vector-based, so they're DPI-independent and magnify cleanly.
.NET Framework really the native API for this? Not a great way to encourage existing applications to be ported to WPF, as "managed code" does not play well with compiled languages like C++ (they can't even marshal bool properly, for heaven's sake).
I use Vista every day at work, and I have never seen such an app. All the built-in Windows apps look just the same as they did in XP (with the notable exceptions of Minesweeper and Solitaire, which still appear blocky under the Magnifier).
Does Vista even come with any WPF applications?
And is the
A Windows tech asked me if I was running Vista when he saw Beryl. He tried to claim Vista could do all that stuff (cube, burning windows, Expose). Obviously, he was wrong. He was also shocked by how low my RAM usage was.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
Your statement with regard to PDF is factually incorrect. Adobe never refused to license it to anyone. They have an open license that applies equally to all comers and MS doesn't have to do anything fancy or sign anything to get such a license.
The quarrel with MS and Adobe was over the fact that MS was planning to break the law by illegally leveraging their Windows monopoly and Office near monopoly in order to promote their tools over Adobe's offerings. All of Adobe's complaints applied to both XPS and PDF and both of them were part of the plan and already written by the time Adobe said anything, so you can't claim MS created XPS as a response to Adobe's actions. Instead of risking the courts ruling that MS's office suite constituted monopoly power in that space, MS withdrew the features from that bundle, but they are still including the XPS features in Windows in violation of the law. Since Windows has already been declared a monopoly, this is just one more abuse and MS figures that by the time the courts take any action against them they will have already destroyed that market beyond any repair and they'll just have to shell out a few million bucks or take some pointless action that does not really help years after the fact.
I encourage you to please not continue repeating the MS FUD about PDF licensing, which is and has been open to MS and all other comers for a long time. It just doesn't mean MS can use that license in a way that violates criminal law.
Well, there are the grammar checker...
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
There are plenty grammar checkers there.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
He tried to claim Vista could do all that stuff (cube, burning windows, Expose). Obviously, he was wrong.
Sorry, but technically he's right. Vista has all the infrastructure (3d hardware accelerated GUI) and the APIs (DWM) to do it - it's just that Vista doesn't come by default with these effects (cube, exposé) available. But it can, in theory, be easily implemented by third-party applications. In fact, case in point, a good example is the Exposé functionality: That functionality doesn't come by default on Vista, but there are already a few applications available for Vista that adds this feature to the desktop, properly using the new video infrastructure on Vista to do it just as OSX and Linux+Beryl does: with the scaled Windows updated in real-time, with negligible performance hit. It's just a matter of time or will from developers to make other fancy new effects available.
According to TFA it's not a public API and MS doesn't have any intentions of opening it up. I'm sure it'll be hacked, though.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
I shouldn't constantly be staring at the stupid green bar at the top of Explorer waiting for Vista to finish displaying the files in a directory. I love it when some of the photos never get thumbnails. Explorer in Xp for all of its warts is noticeably faster at displaying directories and copying data around.
You just know there is some insane DRM checker running 50,000 a second to check to make sure that your actually allowed to view you own files.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch