Windows Vista! Flashy as Fuck!

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.