Vista in Use - Day Two’ish

If I am honest I have had trouble writing this second part. Not because of time or computer issues, or even that near myth-worthy sentiment that Vista is unstable. To be honest this should be Vista in Use - Day Eight. The reason I think I have had trouble writing this second part is that for the most part I have been able to get on with things much as I have become accustomed to in Windows since Windows 2000 and then XP.

This may sound like code for, “It hasn’t changed much so why bother?” It isn’t. It’s more to do with being busy most of the week and to this point, Vista has not hindered me despite being a rather different beast. That is a very good thing.

So what have I noticed that is really a great improvement over Windows XP?

As I hinted last week, the biggest changes that I immediately picked up on have been with the Windows Explorer. This is the equivalent of the Mac’s Finder, Gnome’s Nautilus and KDE’s Konqueror/Dolphin. Generally speaking every time you interact with the file system to manage files it’s Windows Explorer.

Inline search is very useful

The Start Menu has really grown on me, it makes much more sense and is much neater. As the week went by with using XP at work I noticed myself getting more frustrated that on XP I had to search for the application in a long All Programs list. Even more aggravating is file search which has always been Windows’ Achilles heel. Now I just click the Start Orb and start tapping in the filename or some keywords. Beautifully simple.

Tagging in Windows Explorer

I have also really appreciated the excellent tagging capabilities in Windows Vista. Simply select a file (or files) and click the tags field and enter them in or select them from a drop down list of previously entered phases. This works much better than in Mac OS X’s Finder where in Tiger at least to enter this useful metadata you have to right click and click Get Info and enter the metadata in a separate property sheet. It’s just not quite as quick. There is also the ability to rate media files such as audio, photos and videos which is a nice touch.

 
Network and Sharing Centre - Friendly and much improved

One area of Windows that has always driven me nuts was its networking capabilities. I’ll freely admit I am still working my way around the system but one thing I have noticed is that it detects peer to peer Workgroups robustly. I cannot recall how many Windows XP reboots have been attributed to the Network Places window either inexplicably freezing up or just flat out not picking up the workgroups on a network. This seems to be much better now! It always made me wonder what on earth Microsoft were doing if Samba (As used in OS X and Linux etc.) could pick up workgroups more reliably.

Better backgrounds

Like Mac OS X Windows Vista has ditched pretty much all the old Windows cruft which included some spectacularly crap background images, some of which had been wafting around since Windows 3.1. Likewise many of the very awful colour schemes have been consigned to history although curiously the Windows 98 style Windows Standard colour scheme remains along with the Windows Classic scheme (of Win 2000/ME/XP/2003 heritage.)

User Account Control is something new to Windows users. Put short, this is a way of where an application wants to do something that will change your system’s settings, it asks you - “are you sure?” OS X, BSD, Unix, Linux etc. users are used to this but for Windows users this is all new. Much has been made of how annoying it is but I can’t say it has been at all. It certainly hasn’t popped up any more than OS X does and unlike the aforementioned systems no password is required. In my book this is a positive change though my one bugbear is that my setup appears to flicker to black and then the UAC prompt — not at all a usability issue but aesthetically not the nicest.

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Windows Vista ships with some useful software like Photo Gallery, Media Player, DVD Maker, Movie Maker etc. One should note that iLife these aren’t, but they are fairly good, particularly Photo Gallery. DVD Maker and Movie Maker are however compared to Apple’s iLife lacking.

Windows Movie Maker

This remains one area where if you want to edit home movies, make DVDs, manage your photos or make music, a new Mac with the latest iLife software is still unsurpassed.

This still leaves much of the surface untouched, Windows Media Centre is included in Home Premium and Ultimate editions and is an excellent way of turning your PC into a home entertainment theatre with TV, recording, music, photos, computer video etc. It’s very slick and I need to explore it more for the next part.

Wrapping Up

Think about how much Microsoft did between Windows 2000 and the release of Windows XP. They’re very similar (NT 5.0 and 5.1 respectively) and now consider that Vista was in development for 5 years (I know the project was ‘restarted) — you can see that this is a massive release with so much in it. That is why now I feel like I am still scratching the surface with what is new.

But, in that lies the truth I exposed at the start. Yes it’s new. It looks great and different, Explorer has changed and so have many of the things we know and love from XP. However, even as a new user to Vista (with only cursory experiences before) I have been able to get cracking and working with no fuss or hindrance. Not one jot. I will reserve proper judgement in a year to see if like past versions of Windows, if Vista ‘craps out’ after a year of being installed, necessitating a reboot. But I have found working with it a joy. I’ve not sat down with Mac OS X Leopard enough yet, but I have used it a bit and I am very familiar with OS X releases back to 10.1, and System 6-9 before that. And I can say that Vista for me is better and more fluid to use than OS X.

Why? It doesn’t have that stupid Dock. The Dock and the fixed menu bar have in this modern age become a hindrance. Managing windows is a nightmare, and whilst Exposé makes things tolerable, I find I can work much quicker in Windows, particularly Vista. The basic principles of flipping between workspaces and windows just somehow seems to work better in Linux and Windows.

So far my experiences have been rock solid and enjoyable. The system flies along and I have yet to have any point where I felt hurry up!

None of this is to say that OS X is objectively bad. Subjectively however I know what I prefer just as others do who prefer OS X.

I will probably come back on this in a week’s time for a ‘third and final’ part, and then I think we will let the system run with feedback as a year passes by.