Vista has been written about for so long, it’s hard to believe it’s not already released and out in the wild. I have many conflicted emotions about Vista. It’s good to finally see a genuinely new Windows that’s not just an edition of XP or 2003, and I’m told it’s the best Windows ever, but then again, that’s not saying much. What’s new then?
New user interface: Looks
Good. It is reasonably aesthetically pleasing. Most people will tire of their desktop pictures showing through, and the “everything in XP looks like the Teletubbies/Care Bears/Fisher-Price Corporation shat it out! I still use Windows 2000/the classic look! I wish this thing had EGA graphics! damn kids! get off my lawn! random cane-waving!” crowd won’t be amused by some of the glitz.New user interface: Works
Bad. Vista adopted the grab bag discipline of icons and text and popup menus and actual menus that Office 2003 was a poster child for. Anything definitely goes now.New fonts
Except for naming (all start with C, all made up to sound spanish or italian), definitely good. OpenType fonts, heavily hinted and not looking half bad. You’d think Apple would comission some new fonts for Mac OS X soon enough too.New graphics layer
Welcome to Mac OS X v10.2. That’s code for “good”.Networking: IPv6 and rewritten stacks
Good.Networking: Dropped protocols
Mostly good. Who in their right mind would use Vista on the same network as a machine where AppleTalk or IPX is the only option? However, dropping WebDAV support is both bad and ugly.Explorer (the file thing, not IE)
I have not had a chance to try it for a longer period of time, but it’s not looking up. More complex and confusing than XP’s Explorer, and without even needing to drag out a useless “task bar”.Explorer: Searching and metadata
Not a minute too soon. I should say that XP had great metadata capabilities but a buggy implementation which could erase some fields of which it wasn’t aware.Explorer: Grab bag
Alt+Up arrow for “up one level”: Great. One of two things I constantly miss from Mac OS X. (The other is a “New folder” shortcut.) Breadcrumbs bar: Yum.IE7
A good step in the right direction. My big beef is not that the features that made it are bad (tabs and phishing protection) but that they should have spent way more time on bringing the layout engine up to speed. Right now, they have fixed the worst CSS glitches, added some CSS selectors and took out the useful IE6 matching selectors (* html X) but didn’t really improve the rest as much. Plus for XMLHTTPRequest moved into the native Javascript environment. Now you can turn off ActiveX.Software UpdateStandalone Windows Update control panel applet
I repeat, now you can turn off ActiveX. Late and incompliant as they may have been to the race, Microsoft has never had any trouble abusing web pages. Now what quacks like a duck and acts like a duck really is a duck, to the bemusement and applause of network administrators worldwide.Gadgets
Gadgets are a good idea.Sideshow
Sideshow - bits and pieces showing up, gadget-like, on an external LED on your laptop lid - is also a good idea.Windows Mail
Lipstick on a pig.Windows Calendar
Sorely needed.Windows Photo Gallery
See “Windows Calendar”.Windows DVD Maker
See “Windows Calendar”.Windows Meeting Space
See “Windows Calendar”.Previous Versions
Everyone loves backup. Why is the Backup feature different and suffering from a bad case of the suck, and why is this not the Backup feature?No native OpenGL
Bite me. Hard.User Account Control
About as timely as long filenames were.Start your photocopiers
Let’s be blunt: every OS has stolen from at least one other OS. That may not be true, but it’s closer to truth than its opposite. I have no beef with Windows catching up to other OSes, or adding things that truly are new for other OSes to steal. What I do have a problem with is claiming you invented everything. Luckily, Vista goes mostly scot-free here.Standards and interoperability
No WebDAV anymore. No native OpenGL anymore. New formats everywhere. No .doc support in WordPad. Many improvements in lots of small places, I’m sure, but the main takeaway is that Microsoft still doesn’t want to play nice.SMB2
Fix what is broken.High system requirements
It won’t run on your toaster or your Pentium II, and that’s okay. It won’t run on your two-year old mid-range computer (for some values of computer and mid-range), and that’s not okay.Bundled virus protection
Necessary evil.DRM
God damn it.Seven versions
Confuse our customers, upsell everyone and rake in big bucks. Also, act like major assholes towards the third world. Don’t worry, only Gates actually cares, and he’s doing his part to make up for it.The takeaway
In a nut: I’m using Mac OS X and I’m not persuaded. On the other hand, it’s a solid upgrade, if not as solid as it could have been if they had been implementing everything instead of telling everyone how great it’d be when everything they’d be implementing was implemented. On the gripping hand, it’s still from Microsoft, and we all know by now exactly what to expect.