Cloudy Vista

28 July 2005

A quick note before I start: I haven’t used Vista beta 1 yet, so all this info is gleaned from various sources off the net.

If you haven’t bothered finding out about what’s new in Windows Vista, I’d recommend having a flick through Paul Thurrott’s review of beta 1 (note, this guy is a notorious windows lover; there’s no way he won’t gush over whatever the final product Microsoft releases is, so this is going to be the most positive spin on a beta you’ll likely see. However, it does go though the new features pretty well.) and also having a watch of the interview with Chris Jones, Vp of the Vista build team (on Channel 9 via Scoble ).

I am actually really surprised at how bad Vista is at this stage – Microsoft is a pretty large company (ahem, this maybe a slight understatement), and I thought they would manage to do something interesting; at least one new feature that makes me go “ohh, I want that!”.

But sadly – for Microsoft – Vista doesn’t have any innovative features.

It’s been a running joke for years that Microsoft just copies whatever Apple is doing (“Apple is Microsoft’s R&D department” – laughs all round), and I thought that with Vista they wouldn’t be quite do blatant. What we’ve got in vista (at this stage at least) can be summed up quite neatly in this simple equation:

Windows XP + Mac OS X 10.4 + lots of time = Windows Vista

If you take a peak at the video, the three major features picked out are search, the new windows compositing layer (Avalon) and “Security”. Now, on this side of the fence we got search in the form of Spotlight in 10.4 but it’s the details that get me – how they’ve got virtual folders which are “really smart” (10.4 has… wait for it… Smart Folders!) and how they’ve put search at the corner stone of Vista, and that they really want developers to build there new search functionality into their apps. Even the implementation details sound the same (in the video Chris Jones mentions how they want developers to write plugins for their search indexer so it can read their custom formats and utilise the metadata in them – this is identical to how 10.4 and Spotlight works, and exactly the same stuff Apple was telling developers over a year ago at WWDC ‘04).

Now, Avalon was initially sounding interesting to a point, when it was first discussed a few years ago. Now obviously it’s vitally needed for windows, but with Core Image and Quartz in Mac OS X it’s really only bringing feature parity – I’ve read around on the net that technically speaking Avalon is supposed to more advanced then Quartz on the mac as it offloads all the drawing onto the graphics card, but we almost have that right now in the form of Quartz 2d Extreme (great name there, Apple…) but it’s currently disabled by default (and also doesn’t appear to bring much of a speed boast anyway, but this could be down to incomplete implementation).

However, the windows UI team (possibly the worst in the world, judging by their track record) seems to have found out that they can now do transparency, and used it everywhere. That’s really great for things like readability and usability guys (I can just envisage them in a meeting: “Do you thing we could make text transparent as well? That’d be really cool!”) – all though I hear the interface could well change before the final release, anyway (probably cause it’s so bad at the moment). It’s funny, as I always thought that the Windows UI team can’t of had any graphic designers in it, as the the whole OS looked like “programmer art” – now they’ve gone too far the other way! Still doesn’t look like they’ve fixed the appalling text rendering windows has, though.

Now, with regards to security, I just don’t believe anything Microsoft says about it anymore. They are apparently switching to a similar security system that Mac OS X uses (surprise!), where users have limited privileges and have to authenticate to get more. This is a system that works well on the mac, but according to Paul Thurrott’s review Vista puts up way more authentication dialogues then OS X does, which I can see would get old very, very quickly. However, it is a least a step in the right direction.

Now there are a myriad of other features in Vista, most (if not all, I can’t think of any that aren’t) of which are direct rip-offs from various sources. For example, IE 7 (Firefox + Safari RSS – decent UI design) looks again like a step in the right direction, but it again has no innovative features (and I dread to see what it’s css implementation is, fingers crossed it’s not too bad); they’ve also reworked the file/directory structure, which now mirrors Mac OS X’s home folders containing documents, music and pictures folders; in addition, they’ve nicked the preview pane from OS X column view, although they’ve placed at the bottom of the window by default, as opposed to on the right like OS X, to make it less obvious.

I feel really quite sorry for the Windows team at Microsoft; they’ve left it too long between releases and hence have some major catching up to do, and they have a seriously bad foundation to work on, so who can blame them if they spend their time trying to sort out the mess they’re in as opposed to working on innovative features.

Of course, Vista ripping off OS X is a good thing in many ways: with 90% of the world thinking that Microsoft invented integrated search, advanced graphics compositing, browser tabs and rss Apple will have to do some really cool stuff in 10.5 to show just how innovative they are.

(Oh and the name: how bland and boring can you get? It could be a car, or a washing machine.)

From: Articles

28 July 2005