Lee's Lounge
“ In my blog I will discuss how things are going with FeedGhost as well as any other musings I might have… ”
I’ve been using Vista since last November and thought I’d share my personal opinion of it with the blogosphere. I took the plunge early on with all the pain that inevitibly happens with new software, but I needed to test our new feed reader that me and a friend have been developing, testing all the glass effect code we had put in plus installation and general usability bashing under Microsofts latest OS incarnation.
Over the past months I’ve been compiling a list of the things I like and dislike about vista.
Copying files seemed to have taken a backward step in Vista, the process of copying has slowed both visually and in reality; by visually I mean the progress doesn’t seem to be as sensitive to the overall process as the old XP progress bar was. When copying the file it initially displays “calculating time remaining”, for what seems like an age before the progress bar judders forward.
In reality is was also slower, I did a few tests using Virtual PC running an installation of Vista and XP:
Microsoft must sort this out, it's probably one of the most irritating things I've found with Vista.
Under XP one of the things that annoyed me was that favorites were shared between Windows Explorer and the IE browser. I actually like to keep them separate; I achieved this by using Firefox bookmarks for my web favorites and the Explorer’s favorites for my computer and local network centric resources. With the Vista version of Explorer, Microsoft have done away with the menu and relegated the favorite links to a collapsible section above the tree.
Adding a favorite is now a painful exercise; in XP adding a folder favorite was one menu item click away, under Vista I have to:
I normally have the 'favorite links' section collapsed at the top to make as much space for the tree as possible; so in reality I have an extra step of opening the favorites up first. I know Microsoft have to cater for lots of different users but surely they could have made this a little easier! Maybe they have and I haven’t found it yet...
Initially I hated the start menu. I was used to clicking the start button and then using menus to navigate around; with Vista you have to drill into the menu folders for programs. This part I don’t like, there’s no visible history of where you came from compared with normal menus under XP, so you have to click the back button and start again if you want to go back. Then I noticed the “Start Search” box at the bottom of the menu; as you type in the search box Vista searches the computer for related programs and documents in real time. Normally within a couple of keys pressed you can find what you’re looking for. This is my favorite new feature by far! The images below show the start menu before I started typing "feed" on the left followed by the image on the right afterwards.
One of my pet hates with XP has always been the add/remove programs page via Control Panel. I’ve always found it difficult and very slow to use in XP, so it was a nice surprise to see a much improved version that actually uses a list control (instead of IE) to render the items, making usability a pleasure; also the list of programs fills out almost straight away which XP never did. My only gripe would be that I would have liked to see some sort of search similar to the start menu so I can find programs quicker.
As a software developer, I tend to have lots of applications open at once, and consequently like to switch around them quickly. I was hoping for a much improved way of doing this with Vista and to be honest I was very disappointed. Under XP there are two main ways of switching between applications, the first being the Task Bar, normally found at the bottom of your computer, and the second is Task Manager which you invoke by pressing alt-tab. Task Manager is the way I usually switch applications as it’s quick to access via the keyboard. In Vista we have an added third way of navigating around the applications which I will go into later. Here’s my current screen of standard task switching under Vista:
As the selection cycles through each application instance, the title of the application is displayed at the top middle of the screen. I find this totally useless, if I have a couple of Word documents up, the only way to know which one I’m after is to tab through each of them looking at the title. Sometimes I overshoot and have to cycle all the way around or press control down to work backwards through the list.
The third new way of navigating your open applications is with a the new 3D interface:
So does this look cool? Well I have to say for me it’s a gimmick, great for selling Vista in PC World, but in the end a waste of time. I can’t make out what the window is just by looking at it in small view as it whizzes around, it takes too much time and just doesn’t work for me.
Instead I use a third party tool called TaskSwitchXP which is brilliant, it shows me the application captions in a vertical list that I can read quickly and navigate to without the risk of over shooting; also as an added extra I get the screen thumbnail as well. I can also use the mouse to select an item...This is one of my favorite third party tools that I use; It’s a shame Microsoft couldn’t have added something like this to Vista. Currently TaskSwitchXP doesn’t install on Vista so you have to go through a few hoops to install it, all of which is explained on the application’s web site.
Vista automatically makes shadow copies of changes to your documents, folder and files, allowing you recover files you've have accidentally deleted or overwritten. Accessing previous versions is as simple as clicking on the properties of the folder or file of interest and selecting the “Previous Versions” tab.
If your graphics card is up to it then you get some nice graphical touches to windows like transparency around certain areas. Vista lets you change the tint of the glass windows, but annoyingly, they always have a blue edge to them -- so unless you choose a blue tint, they're always going to look odd.
Aero is all very nice but for me it’s just garnish; I like it but if it were gone I wouldn’t particularly miss it.
One big change in Vista is that by default you run in a limited account mode, meaning that you can’t do anything Microsoft considers dangerous without first being asked to confirm the action. This should mean that malicious programs trying to gain a foothold into your system should be brought to your attention first (assuming your antivirus program doesn’t stop it beforehand). The way Vista does this is quite striking in that the whole screen goes dark and you get a dialog confirmation asking your permission to continue. It would've been nice if the transition to dark was a little less dramatic, maybe the dark fading in, rather than the almost epileptic inducing switch that it does currently. When I first heard about this feature I thought I’d be annoyed by it to the point of disabling it, but I haven’t so that can only be good thing!
I would have thought Microsoft could have done more with the clock in the system tray. When the mouse is hovered over the time, the current date is displayed with a fuzzy image of what looks like a calendar month next to it. I would have much preferred a proper calendar control instead. I know there's the calendar on the sidebar but I don’t usually have that visible.
After coming out of sleep mode Vista connects to my wireless network much faster than XP ever did, I don’t know if this is just a driver improvement or something in the OS that’s changed, but it’s welcome none the less.
With XP, Microsoft released plus packs that you could optionally download and sometimes pay for; with the advent of Vista the only way of getting access to the extras is buying the Ultimate version of Vista. I can see that Microsoft needs to add value to the Ultimate addition but they could have at least allowed other users of Vista to buy the extras.
If you’re lucky enough to have the Ultimate addition of Vista then you get access to the exclusive extras area, where you can download extra programs to the OS. Currently you can download Windows Bitlocker Drive Preparation tool, Hold’Em Poker, Windows DreamScene (tm), Secure Online Backup...
The extra that interested me most was Windows DreamScene (tm); it's just a preview which I guess means the' re still working on it but it certainly looks promising. It allows you to play videos as wallpaper, unfortunately the examples that come with it are rather boring and ill fitting; however I found a really cool site that has some nice videos called DreamsceneVideo. Currently this extra is a bit too flaky for my liking, it's crashed a number of times and the deal breaker for me is it eats up too much CPU. Still it's only a preview so hopefully Microsoft can fix these issues.
For me it’s not worth the pain of upgrading, there’s just too little to prise me away from XP let alone the cost associated with it; if however I was buying a new computer with it preinstalled, then I would use it. If my views are indicative of most other users then I think it’s going to be a while before Vista is all-pervasive around the world.
