Vista Love
I've been running Vista betas since May and I've finally upgraded to the RTM version. Do you need to upgrade today? Probably not. Should you get it if you buy a new computer? Definitely. Here are a few of my favorite features:
- Search search search. I'm a big fan of keyboard shortcuts and Vista has great features for people like me. Press the Windows key to bring up the start menu and just start typing. You can search for emails, websites, programs on your computer, and items in your start menu. It's super fast and very convenient. It's painful going back to XP without this one feature.
- Vista comes with a program called Sidebar. It lets you add "gadgets" to your desktop. This idea has been around forever, but this is the first time I've used it. Right now I have gadgets that show me Seattle traffic, weather at all the local ski areas, cpu and memory utilization, my favorite stocks, and a calendar. Expect more cool gadgets as the development community gets their hands on the toolkit.
- Gone are the days of the Print Screen button when you want to email or save a picture from your screen. There is a great new app called the Snipping Tool. You drag a rectangle around the area you want to copy and voila, it's done. No more Print Screen and then cropping with a photo editing program. From the Snipping Tool, you can draw on the image, send it via email, or save it to a file. Simple, but brilliant.
- The user interface is shiny and new. The borders of windows are transparent, all the text is vector based so you can scale to your heart's content, and the new WindowsKey+Tab 3D task switching has a big "wow" factor associated with it. I'm not overly concerned with UI updates, but without them the public won't see any reason to upgrade. And if you do put them in, the geek community says it's just new clothes on the same old beast.
- Security. There will still be viruses for Vista, but the developers have plugged a lot of holes. The biggest single improvement is that you no longer run as administrator on your machine. This means that even if some virus does get into your system, it won't be able to do anything overly terrible. When it tries to do something beyond normal user access, a dialog box pops up and asks you to enter your administrator username and password. If you don't know what you did to prompt that box to come up, don't enter your admin password.
- I think we're going to see a lot of great gadgets based on Vista SideShow. "Windows Vista SideShow technology enables laptop manufacturers to include a secondary or auxiliary display in future laptop designs. This display can be used to easily view the critical information you need, whether the laptop is on, off, or in sleep mode. The convenience provided by these auxiliary displays will save time and battery life by allowing you to quickly view meeting schedules, phone numbers, addresses, and recent e-mail messages without having to start up your laptop." There's already a remote on the way, but what I really want is a little picture frame device that will sit in my living room and show me my email, rss feeds, etc.
Like any new OS, you'll bump your head a few times as you look around for things. But luckily it's fairly intuitive, and after a while it just feels like second nature. Try using Vista for a couple weeks and then go back to XP. That's when you realize how much you like the new system.