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• Says Does not want to read Maddox, roughly 4 years and 6 months ago:

  Vista was in development for years and thoroughly overhauls the whole concept of Windows for the desktop

  As somebody who has to use XP and Vista every day, I have to disagree. Vista had a chance to revolutionize the desktop, and I thought it would when it was announced: Microsoft had a chance to break backwards compatibility and implement better user interfaces, but mostly they went halfway. The new Start menu doesn’t really throw off the old hierarchal folder idea. The Sidebar hasn’t attracted enough of a community. Windows Search doesn’t really integrate as well as it should with Windows Mail or Windows Media Player or any other metadata. The 3D-accelerated windows compositing engine isn’t as fancy or light on resources as it should be (not recommended on 512 MB of RAM!). What I’m discovering is that I notice the UI a lot more when I use Vista, and it’s getting in the way more often than not.

  The rest of this will just be nitpicking. I think there are significant criticisms to be made of Leopard, but picking broad topics and playing the fanboy card isn’t one of them.

  Stacks? You patented it, what, 5 years ago, and your current implementation is exactly like toolbars for Windows’s taskbar

  A better analogy could be made to folders on the Sidebar. (There really isn’t an equivalent to the Dock in Vista, for better or worse. The predominant application launching process when not touching the Desktop seems to be to use the Start menu and typing out the first couple of letters.) The taskbar really isn’t the place to put file or folder shortcuts: They get in the way of minimized windows, they’re tiny, and folder shortcuts don’t interact much at all.

  And I’m sure all the extra space and I/O operations that come with the previews are music to hard drive manufacturers’ ears.

  Cover Flow doesn’t generate thumbnail files as far as I know (or it uses thumbnails already available e.g. music albums). It probably spends more I/O cycles but then again so does opening up each file just to see what it contains, which is one of the user problems Cover Flow tries to address.

  So, basically, [Quick Look]’s another preview, but larger. Well, la-de-fucking-da.

  It’s an extensible framework for previews: iChat, Time Machine, and a lot of Apple apps hook into it. Windows has some equivalents of these: the big Office apps have viewers and there’s the built-in image viewer. But there’s no unified solution, and a preview feature that can potentially preview anything at high speeds beyond just updating the file icon is powerful in theory.

  Unfortunately, journaling filesystems and Windows’s System Restore feature have existed for ages, so, again, you’re just playing catch-up and obscuring that fact by adding obnoxious visual effects.

  Again, Time Machine is different because it integrates with apps (third-party and Apple’s). Currently, iPhoto and Address Book and others support it. Window’s System Restore certainly is a large step up from the 9x era of the Spartan “Backup” utility, but it’s completely ignorant about file formats. Wikipedia makes the example of being able to restore an Address Book entry without having to hunt for e.g. an abook.dat file, opening it up, and copying/pasting.

  Even if it were true, being faster than any other browser on OS X is hardly an achievement.

  I think Safari benchmarks, as published and reported by Apple, are run on Windows as well since they mention IE 7. I don’t think it’s a big deal that Safari is beating IE and Gecko for a different reason: Opera has done that for ages now in addition to running on mobile devices.

  Goodness, it’s a boot loader capable of starting Windows on an x86 PC.

  It also loads drivers correctly and works seamlessly with Apple’s hardware the first time. Apple can control what goes into its hardware and software, for better or worse (again), so it can do what PC manufacturers can (or try to do with the bloatware that come installed with Vista without even providing a clean OEM Vista install disk anymore).

• Says ct^, roughly 4 years and 6 months ago:

  Microsoft had a chance to break backwards compatibility and implement better user interfaces, but mostly they went halfway.

  For now, I don’t use Vista myself, since I don’t see any need for it; however, eventually, I’ll have to, and I don’t think I’d be very comfortable with it if they’d changed all the UIs. Granted, a lot of them are far from perfect, but there has to be a certain degree of familiarity. But from what I’ve seen, yes, they could’ve gone a lot further.

  The 3D-accelerated windows compositing engine isn’t as fancy or light on resources as it should be

  Probably a valid point. Rewrite or not, backwards compatibility probably screwed them over here. It’s the price they pay for dominating the market.

  […] but picking broad topics and playing the fanboy card isn’t one of them.

  Ah, but I’m merely distorting reality the way their marketing department does.

  […] and a preview feature that can potentially preview anything at high speeds beyond just updating the file icon is powerful in theory.

  This is definitely true. I’m not debating the use of such a feature. Engadget compares it to Vista’s Preview Pane, and I could see myself using it. As long as it’s absolutely unobtrusive until I actually want to use it, that is—KDE, for instance, tries to create preview icons of everything by default, and I’m not sure if they’re mimicking Finder, but it’s not something I find useful.

  I think Safari benchmarks, as published and reported by Apple, are run on Windows as well since they mention IE 7.

  I stand corrected. Still, Safari on Windows strikes me as sluggish, probably because of the theme.

  It also loads drivers correctly and works seamlessly with Apple’s hardware the first time.

  Well, it’s mostly the same hardware that goes into other PCs, so it couldn’t be that hard.

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