Vista RC1 Options

[impala454]

Just installed this tonight, pretty sweet... the flip3d task switching is freakin tight as hell. last time I installed it was beta 1, and this version seems way more polished.

also didn't realize they have their own new document format... "xps" (similiar to pdf). don't know much about it, but they have a 300 page document full of color photos & tables and the entire document is like 12 MB

[Hartmann]

so... when i sit down at a mac, it doesn't look like the one in the screenshot?

you're saying stuff like "well the animations are the same, blah blah", but how the hell else do you animate a window coming up onto the screen?  what were you expecting in vista?  an animated dog to run up and take a shit on the screen to make the window come back up?

there's also a lot of very nicely redone interfaces in there.  there's an interface that lets you see your running process, it organizes them by company, shows both the task and associated process id(s), whether they make any outside connections, etc.  there's also a similiar interface for any open/waiting/etc connections and all associated info (local IP, remote IP, protocol, etc), which also links to/from the process interface.  the flip3d shit is really cool too.

as for the sidebar thing w/the clock, i actually left it up there and removed the clock from my taskbar.  i don't know if i'll keep the sidebar thing but i stuck a calendar & weather "gadget" in there for now to mess with it.  there's some ms document i was going through with all the specific changes between xp & vista.  i'll pick some stuff out of it and take some more screenshots at home.

The screenshot looks the same, but you're using that and that alone to make the assumption that just because that looks a little different (different colors, different bars) everything is different.

They have the same fade and drop down to the taskbar, just like OS X. They could have left it completely out, could they not have? WinXP doesn't have animated minimize and maximize or close.

Also, the "Show All current running programs" is an OS X clone to the T.

The running processes thing, yeah, I have that in OS X. I can even see the contents of the packets if it's connected to the net.

Flip3D eh? Yeah, been done. It was available in Linux oh, I dunno, 4 years ago. They have not done anything innovative with Vista, just "improved" existing technology. Hell, even MS has admitted to not being innovators.

My main problem though, for the "cool" features the memory takes a hit. I would not be posting anything about the look if these neat things that are already present in OS X didn't eat up so much memory in Vista. If they fix that, then a lot of current WinXP users will upgrade.

I wasn't trying to make this a "my OS is better" thread, I was just pointing out what was already known, Microsoft is not a company of innovation, just repackaging and slight improvement for their architecture. I mean, they tried to innovate with WinFS and that went down in flames when they realized a database driven file system was the dumbest thing ever.

As an aside, I just feel like MS is building cool for the sake of building it, not functionality. WinXP is functional, it does its job and that's it. It seems like they are adding these new "features" into Vista just for the hell of it. I'm sorry but animations aren't going to help my grandparents write an e-mail. And don't give me the "Well Apple does it, blah blah blah", that's because Apple's target market is different. MS is targeting the everyday user and business. They don't care about these niche markets of developers and designers.