Windows Vista, More Than Just a Pretty Face 381
Nash writes "Ars Technica takes a look under the hood of Vista, discussing the need for a new API and comparing the graphics engine in Vista to that of Mac OS X. 'With Windows Vista it will be possible to implement Exposé properly-with live window updates and low system overhead. That said, it doesn't thus far look like Microsoft will be doing anything so useful as Exposé. Though the blurred glass effect is rather attractive, it's not exactly useful. Other visual effects include miniature window previews when the mouse cursor is hovered over taskbar buttons and an upgraded alt-tab device, and Flip3D.'"
OS X not that bad. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:OS X not that bad. (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA: "The scaled windows that Exposé shows you are not merely static screenshots of those windows; they're the actual windows themselves, just scaled down. This means that they update live, and any changes in a window are immediately apparent to the user."
How do you read that as suggesting otherwise?
I will spare you the trouble to read the article (Score:5, Informative)
Page 1: This is Part I of Ars Technica's three-part Windows Vista review coverage. In the coming weeks we will be expanding on this coverage, culminating in an official review when our testing is finished.
(... history of Windows APIs, why Vista does graphics and audio better than XP, yada yada
Concluding remarks
The new APIs and all-new graphics stack are not the only things new in Vista. There have been major improvements in Vista's approach to secure computing, and many low-level changes to improve the experience of using the OS. I'll talk about these--along with some of the much-vaunted features that didn't make the cut after all--in my next article.
Re:Can you give me one good reason to "upgrade" ? (Score:5, Informative)
I know some idiot is going post some "why don't you just use a horse and carrage" message. But, really, specifically, why on earth should I spend all that money, and go through all that trouble, for nothing?
Re:Can you give me one good reason to "upgrade" ? (Score:5, Informative)
So then I tried Kubuntu on my laptop, looking for a XP replacement with actual changes to the UI that meant something, and I found it. This environment (for me) is FAR more productive than XP or Vista could ever be. I was their target market, unsatisfied with XP and looking for an upgrade, and they let me slip through the cracks. Not that I really care, I found Linux and will probably never go back to Windows. Nice job, Microsoft.
Re:Glass Effect and Screenshots (Score:2, Informative)
I actually quite like the new UI in Vista--including the transparency effects, but that's about all I like. Beryl and XGL are actually a lot better, and they don't suck up the memory that Vista uses.
Abyssmal I/O Performance and Usability (Score:5, Informative)
I just switched back to XP sp2 for the following reasons:
I/O performance for File Copy (HD to HD) was 5x slower than the same box running XP. No kidding. I was copying about 10Gb of files from one disk to another, and it took over 45 min to complete (and this was from a 10,000rpm RAID-0 striped drive to a SATA drive)
Usability is total CRAP when UAC is turned on. This is the feature in the Apple commercial where the suit asks "Allow or Deny" at every exchange. This is NO JOKE.
Something a simple as changing the DPI of your screen fonts requires that you click "Allow" on a dialog box before you do anything else.
When you want to view processes from All Users in Task Manager, you have to do the same every single time.
Copying or into a Program Files folder or Renaming a file requires 2 confirmation dialog boxes!
Drag and Drop to some applications is disabled when it is "Run as Administrator", which you must do for some things to work correctly. This means no more double clicking on a txt file to edit it in notepad if that file is in a Program Files directory. Nope. You must launch notepad using "Run as administrator" then use the File-Open menu item to open the txt file.
I would disable this but we develop software for enterprise networks and those machines will most likely have this 'feature' permanently disabled. I switched back to XP for my main workstation and I'm running Vista in a VM for now.
Vista more than just a pretty face, it's a GIANT pain in the A$$ as well.
Re:Gnome + Beryl (Score:3, Informative)
My girlfriend bought a cheap Presario laptop for her mother (who only speaks Portuguese) and wanted me to configure it. It came with Vista. It was the first time I had used Vista and I thought it was God-awful. The fancy UI effects were enabled and ran terribly slowly, and I got constant security prompts. I turned these off, but it was still unacceptably slow. I suspect 512mb is too little memory for it.
I planned on wiping the drive and going back to XP, but I decided to see how Ubuntu Edgy would run, since I couldn't easily find a copy of windows in Portuguese. It was a night and day improvement, it ran the way it should, even with Beryl. My GF thinks her mother will do just fine with it.
Honestly my first impression of Vista is "train wreck". It was so unusable right off the bat, that I couldn't even explore what might be nice about it.
Re:Why the New API will not help for years. (Score:4, Informative)
Even that given, though; considering it isn't yet installed on most XP machines, there are already a surprisingly large number of WPF-only applications. Copying-and-pasting from here [msdn.com]:
Yahoo Messenger for Windows Vista - New IM client (SCREENCAST).
New York Times Reader - Next-generation online reading experience for the NY Times (MSI).
Microsoft Calendar Printing Assistant - Generate printed calendars from your Outlook schedule (MSI).
Microsoft Expression Blend - Designer tool for building WPF experiences (MSI).
Microsoft Expression Design - illustration and graphic design tool (MSI).
Microsoft Windows Live for TV - 3D access to Messenger contacts from Media Center or IE (MSI).
Electric Rain Standout - High-end custom presentation software (SCREENCAST).
Wikipedia Explorer - 3D exploration of related articles from Wikipedia (APPLICATION).
iBloks - Mashup application for creating 3D movies (MSI).
RikReader - RSS Reader that integrates with Internet Explorer 7 (APPLICATION).
Nostalgia - Yahoo! Flickr browser and photo manager (APPLICATION).
Cine.View - Netflix movie queue manager (APPLICATION).
Cool Text Vector Draw - A vector drawing program with 1200 fonts available via a web service (XBAP).
Forbes.com Reader - News Reader Application from Forbes.com (APPLICATION).
Actipro Wizard - A control for building wizard dialogs in WPF (XBAP).
UniveRSS - A 3D Vista RSS reader (APPLICATION).
Xceed Datagrid for WPF Live Explorer - Hands-on demo of Xceed's free new Datagrid for WPF (XBAP).
DominoKen - Artistic 3D XBAP demonstration from Microsoft Japan (XBAP).
Denounce - Stand-alone podcast listener and blog reader (APPLICATION).
British Library Turning the Pages - British Library's 'virtual viewer' for some of their most precious books (XBAP).
ITN Hub Player - Video clips and news stories from ITN (APPLICATION).
Evolution Media Center - HTPC Front-end with stunning animations and dynamic XAML-skinning (ZIP).
OTTO - Online clothing shopping (APPLICATION).
Seattle Post-Intelligencer PI Reader - News Reader Application from Seattle P.I. (APPLICATION).
Roxio Central - Windows Vista Technology Preview - CD and DVD Burning application (APPLICATION).
Metaliq - Snowboarding data visualization (ZIP).
WeatherNews - 3D Weather visualization (XBAP).
Shiseido - Make up online shopping (XBAP).
DOSV - Computer Configuration (XBAP).
Warner - Movie Previews and Showtimes (XBAP).
Notescraps - Random information manager (MSI).
Valil.Chess.WinFX - Chess game (XBAP, APPLICATION).
NetAdvantage for WPF - Infragistics NetAdvantage for WPF 2007 controls (APPLICATION).
fnac.com - French retailer shopping experience (set system to French locale to run) (APPLICATION).
DevComponents WPF Ribbon - DevComponents Office 2007 Ribbon for WPF (APPLICATION).
Daily Mail eReader - On line reading experience for UK Newspaper Daily Mail (APPLICATION).
The North Face In-Store Explorer - Retail kiosk (MUST GO TO STORE TO EXPERIENCE).
Windows Vista Magazine - Using the same viewer as the British Library app (XBAP).
TempWorks fx - Staffing industry line of business application (SCREENSHOT).
Ricciolo PaperBoy - A complete RSS Feed Aggregator (APPLICATION).
Re:Wait, I thought this OS was terrible! (Score:2, Informative)
Short answer, "Yes".
Long answer, games that use HW acceleration via DirectSound3D will see no benefit from having a dedicated soundcard anymore. However, games using OpenAL [openal.org] will be able to use the hardware-accel provided by your soundcard.
Creative Labs has a project called Alchemy [creativelabs.com] for wrapping DS3D calls to OpenAL for "legacy" games.
The Alchemy page also has a lot more info on this topic.
Vector-based UI? Where? (Score:5, Informative)
I use Vista every day at work, and I have never seen such an app. All the built-in Windows apps look just the same as they did in XP (with the notable exceptions of Minesweeper and Solitaire, which still appear blocky under the Magnifier).
Does Vista even come with any WPF applications?
And is the
Re:Glass Effect and Screenshots (Score:5, Informative)
It's still being developed, but works pretty well so far.
Re:Can you give me one good reason to "upgrade" ? (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Wind
And to a lesser extent:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_n
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_and_safety_
If I had to highlight one or two particular features, I'd say the one that I find most useful is the much quicker, Quicksilver [wikipedia.org] like way of launching applications, files etc. -- press the windows key, type a couple of letters from the application, and press enter.
Also, per-application volume control; and the much better native support for wireless networks and encryption.
Re:Abyssmal I/O Performance and Usability (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Glass Effect and Screenshots (Score:5, Informative)
It's very cool. In fact it's too cool, once you get used to it you can never go back. Fortunately you can replace window's desktop with a real window manager [sourceforge.net]. Add in Cygwin [cygwin.com] in a Terminator [jessies.org] window and it's almost tolerable.
Re:Vista==more vendor lock-in (Score:5, Informative)
Your statement with regard to PDF is factually incorrect. Adobe never refused to license it to anyone. They have an open license that applies equally to all comers and MS doesn't have to do anything fancy or sign anything to get such a license.
The quarrel with MS and Adobe was over the fact that MS was planning to break the law by illegally leveraging their Windows monopoly and Office near monopoly in order to promote their tools over Adobe's offerings. All of Adobe's complaints applied to both XPS and PDF and both of them were part of the plan and already written by the time Adobe said anything, so you can't claim MS created XPS as a response to Adobe's actions. Instead of risking the courts ruling that MS's office suite constituted monopoly power in that space, MS withdrew the features from that bundle, but they are still including the XPS features in Windows in violation of the law. Since Windows has already been declared a monopoly, this is just one more abuse and MS figures that by the time the courts take any action against them they will have already destroyed that market beyond any repair and they'll just have to shell out a few million bucks or take some pointless action that does not really help years after the fact.
I encourage you to please not continue repeating the MS FUD about PDF licensing, which is and has been open to MS and all other comers for a long time. It just doesn't mean MS can use that license in a way that violates criminal law.
Re:Glass Effect and Screenshots (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Can you give me one good reason to "upgrade" ? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes. For me the application level sound controls are a big plus. It is nice to be able to have audio alerts for chats at work, but be able to turn off sound from Web pages so they don't disturb my co-workers. This is actually nicer than Kubuntu or Mac OS X right now.
The indexed searching is a big plus too. I never thought I'd use it when it was added to OS X, but being able to quickly and globally find some string in the text of a PDF of Word file or ODF file or even photoshop image is a real life saver.
Re:OS X not that bad. (Score:3, Informative)
He tried to claim Vista could do all that stuff (cube, burning windows, Expose). Obviously, he was wrong.
Sorry, but technically he's right. Vista has all the infrastructure (3d hardware accelerated GUI) and the APIs (DWM) to do it - it's just that Vista doesn't come by default with these effects (cube, exposé) available. But it can, in theory, be easily implemented by third-party applications. In fact, case in point, a good example is the Exposé functionality: That functionality doesn't come by default on Vista, but there are already a few applications available for Vista that adds this feature to the desktop, properly using the new video infrastructure on Vista to do it just as OSX and Linux+Beryl does: with the scaled Windows updated in real-time, with negligible performance hit. It's just a matter of time or will from developers to make other fancy new effects available.
Re:OS X not that bad. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Abyssmal I/O Performance and Usability (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Biassed author (Score:3, Informative)
Jeez you are so wrong and also uneceessarily passimistic.
I'm a gaming nut, a perofiessional Software Developer, and all areound tech geek.
I built my own PC. Dont you think, after spending over $1600 just on a couple of watercooled 8800GTX GPU's that I'd at least know enough to download the latest drivers from nVidia?
>> because my games play excellent on Vista usually with the same or up to 10% better frame rate than xp.
Well your findings are completely contrary to what everyone else on the internet is saying, and also what all respected tech review websites like Tom's Hardware and Anandtech are reporting (which is the same as I'm finding... a 20%+ performance hit for running vista).
>> Also Vista takes just under 8GB for a full install of the Ultimate version which contains all of the features from all the other versions combined.
Not true. I installed the full ultimate version and the windows directory alone is over 11GB.
Re:More than a pretty face. . . (Score:5, Informative)
The offloading of graphics handling to the GPU decreases the load on the CPU and main memory. And, what do you know, 90% or more of all current PCs that you can buy have a motherboard with an integrated video solution that supports that GPU acceleration. In addition, I didn't have to shell out any bucks to get my computer to run Vista. And even if yours lacks a shiny new video chipset, don't worry, there's a non-Aero GUI for the soon to be 5% of you who don't have integrated video.
Given that... I think it's quite reasonable, given what you've said, to think that you're an idiot. What I'm worried about is that you idiots <em>do</em> seem to come in bunches.
Re:The bigger problem (Score:3, Informative)
So, do you actually use Vista?
I do. It is my daily workhorse - and I'm running as a Standard User, not as an Administrator, and things are not crashing constantly. In fact, things are working just fine. There's software that isn't working, of course - what OS upgrade doesn't cause problems - but by and large, this is a super-smooth OS.
We upgraded my wife's laptop to Vista at the same time (about 7 days ago), and she isn't seeing crashing or anything, either. Now, her world revolves around Office, so she's unlikely to encounter many problems anyway, but your comment come across as unnecessary flamebait.
If you're seeing lots of instances of Vista crashing, then what are you doing about it? As a Slashdot reader, I'm guessing that you have better-than-average computer skills; heck, you might even be writing software. So, are you contacting software authors, or getting onto support forums, and carmly detailing your problems and a step-by-step to reproduce them, or are you just ranting?