I've been reading a lot about Windows Vista over the past week. Whether you intend to use it or not, it has a lot of really neat features that warrant some mentioning and the best exhibition of these features is definitely James Senior's series of Vista screencasts.
Reliability Monitor
Using the new .NET 3.0 Framework for next-gen apps
ReadyDrive, which apparently has a non-hybrid-drive variant called ReadyBoost
Handwriting recognition
The return of the Windows Sidebar (now with hell of Gadgets)
Speech recognition has been greatly improved since the infamous demo in Redmond. Chris Henley did his own screencast demonstration of the reworked feature and it's actually very good for a system that doesn't require the "training" that other voice recognition software does.
Apart from minor and arguably coincidental UI similarities between Vista and OS X, the interface does look quite slick (a throwback Grandpa word). You can do the ol' Alt+Tabbing around or you can pretend you're in The Matrix and do Window+Space (I think) to sort all the windows in a 3D stack while they're all running their content in real-time. These ridiculous graphics features might not matter to everyone, but when you have a bad ass computer and really don't play any video games you want your OS to be flashy as fuck. At least I do.
I figured now would be an appropriate time to mention all this because today Vista RTM was announced, which means the final code has been released to manufacturers. You won't be able to buy Windows Vista until January 30, 2007 unless your company has some kind of volume license deal with Microsoft, but the fact that the code has been released means we'll probably be able to get our hands on the RTM version well before then. I think that is hot.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
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4 comments:
I've been testing windows vista since beta 5219 up to the most recent beta 2 5744. You will find that cosmetically it really isn't all that different from XP aside from some changes to control panel navigation. Pretty much all the things they're hyping about vista is stuff you can already get as third party apps for XP. The sidebar thing is something i guarantee you will disable after the first minute and a half of playing with it onwards. Vista pretty much hogs a lot of ram (in the betas anyway, we'll see how the final product looks), from over 500MB with no frontend applications running directly after bootup, to like 460MB after closing down all the peripheral apps like the sidebar.
The really exciting thing about vista as far as I'm concerned is the way they've written their security. Finally we're getting some *nix level security so no more scanning for spyware every 2 days, and no more slews of windows updates every month to fix vulnerabilities in apps we don't even use.
Also it is pretty, but more importantly facilitates for UI skinning techniques much broader than XP could.
Also, it's pretty cool that i can run XP apps that i haven't even installed in vista right from their parent directories on my XP partition.
I know Aero doesn't have much that couldn't be achieved on XP with software like Window FX and WindowBlinds from Object Desktop, and the same with the Gadgets by using Kapsules and such in XP. The reason I'm happy about the graphics features is because their inclusion is an indication that people don't want to see ugly UIs anymore. We're past the horriffic default Windows XP skin and the designer in me is thrilled.
I have heard it's a RAM hog (which makes sense considering all the realtime video thumbnails and general unnecessary nuttiness), but I'm glad you mentioned that Vista will run applications out of a separate XP partition. That makes me a lot more willing to make a new partition and try it out.
Thanks for commenting.
If you want to try vista RC2, I have an image and an activation key sitting on my harddrive. You can actually install vista right from a virtual drive (I used daemon tools) off an image. It copies the files (and any it'll need for 3rd party raid or scsi drivers) to the partition you're going to install to and then installs from there at reboot. You're going to want to set aside 20 gigs or so just for the installation. Using your existing XP partition for storage of all the files you would normally access in XP (music/movies/wtf ever else) is definitely a viable solution.
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