Installation
Monday, August 08, 2005
9:25 AM
The install went very smoothly, though it took a long time. The OS comes on a single DVD, and takes around an hour to install. However, it's almost fully automated. I had to enter in a license key and a computer name to get the OS to install (instead of the old Windows installers which used to ask you questions at various times during the install).
Boot time (from loader to usable desktop): 54 seconds on my 1.6 GHz, 768 MB of RAM machine.
The OS incorrectly guessed that I was in the Pacific time zone, so I did have to change that information once I booted into it. However, it had the time set properly to my local time.
It located most of my hardware automatically, which is amazing since the OS is in beta. The only hardware it didn't find that surprised me was the sound card -- I have a SoundBlaster card (very, very common), so I assumed that would work. The other hardware it couldn't figure out is: a Davidcom NIC card (found the 3COM just fine though), a PCI input device (my firewire card), and my web cam (WebCam Live!). So on a scale of 1-10, in terms of hardware readiness, it gets a solid 5. It'd be a 9 if it had found my firewire card (since that drives my external hd) and my sound card. But it did pretty good finding the proper video card, a network card, etc.
First Blush
Monday, August 08, 2005
9:35 AM
When the OS first boots up, the boot screen reminds me of the RedHat bluecurve UI. It's a dark, gradient blue background. White text describes parts of the boot process (such as "Starting Services", etc).
Once the OS was fully launched, I was surprised by how similar it looked to Windows XP. Instead of the meadow with a blue sky background, I have a close-up of some blades of grass. There are icons in the upper-right of the desktop. The taskbar is (themed) at the bottom of the screen and still has its familiar feel (start button, quick launch bar, task list, system tray).
Then I took a little harder look, and the first thing I noticed was that My Computer is no longer on the desktop by default. The first icon is the Recycle Bin (which looks more like the OS X trash can now). Not to be esoteric, but… It's ugly as sin and useless in terms of UI in this beta. There's no visual distinction between a bin that's empty and a bin containing items. Furthermore, when you select the bin, the icon becomes almost unintelligible due to a poor mask.
The other desktop icons are "How to report a bug" (since this is a beta, that's sensible), "Install Supplemental Drivers" (again, it's a beta -- and no, it did not locate any of my missing drivers. It only supports video and network drivers) and "Learn more about Avalon and Indigo".
The lack of My Computer surprises me since that's functionality that I use fairly often, and I suspect it'll be put in before the OS ships. I know I certainly miss it, since I am continually going to the upper left of the desktop to double click it.
User Interface Changes
Monday, August 08, 2005
9:44 AM
There have been a number of UI changes for Vista. The frame styles of windows are different, the buttons have gotten much larger, the titlebar has gotten more narrow, etc. Basically, the themes from everything are different.
One thing that is going to annoy me to no end is the disable window widgets look. The widgets get a mouse-over effect similar to what OS X does. So the default state of all the buttons is faded back into the window titlebar (which is nice because they're not so obtrusive now). When you mouse over them they colorize if they're enabled. However, if they're disabled, they stay in their default state. This bugs me because I want to be able to glance at the widgets and know whether I should even bother trying to use one of them. In this case, I have to bring the mouse over to it just to determine the state! Yech.
One of the theme changes is that the buttons look quite Aqua-esque. Mousing over a button has a roll-over effect that highlights the button in an Aqua blue. Default buttons have a very slow pulse to them.
Another titlebar UI change that took me a while to notice was that the system menu (the icon in the upper left) is gone. So the only UI widgets in the non-client area are the min/max/close buttons. But that appears to be only in some applications. For example, Explorer and Internet Explorer do not have the widget. But Calculator, Hearts and other applications do.
Explorer has a lot of hidden UI, which is bothersome. For example, the window splitters do not appear until you mouse over them.
One piece of new user interaction that I like is the fact that every interactable display widget changes its state when the mouse is over it or when it has focus. For example, if you bring your mouse over a scrollbar, the entire bar "raises" out of the window background and takes on a more colorful appearance. This is really helpful since a lot of UI elements just blend into the background until you try to interact with them. Much less distracting!
I really hate the new Start Menu functionality. It has *three* different styles of sub menu lists. First, there's the typicaly (old-style) list. It has a disclosure widget on the right, and when the mouse is over the list item, the submenu is diclosed. The second type is the "All Programs" list item. This has a disclosure widget (different style than the last) on the left side of the list item. You must click on the list item to disclose its list, which then replaces the current left-hand side of the menu. Finally, there's the third style of sub menu, which is the folder in the All Programs list (such as REALbasic has). These display *no* disclosure widget, and when you click on them, they disclose all the folder's sub items below the list item clicked on. Definately a step backwards in terms of usability for the average person.
Overall, I generally like the new look and feel of the user interface elements as individual UI widgets. The entire OS has a much softer look, without it being too childish. However, it's still more "bubbly" than I'd like, but it's much better than the default XP theme. OS X users will like the interface because shares a lot of similar points with their OS. However, the sum of all the parts leaves a bit to be desired in some instances. Applications like Internet Explorer 7 have UI difficulties due to the strange use of the new UI elements. If I had to describe the interface changes to the OS in one sentence, it'd be "Pretty, but dangerous."
Error Reporting
Monday, August 08, 2005
9:57 AM
Wow, the error reporting tool is absolutely amazing. It's close to being like Radar (for Apple), except the interface is 1) an application, not a website you must log into and 2) Has a very easy to use UI that only asks needed information (so I don't have to hunt down information like what OS build I am using, it's already there). We should certainly look into doing something like this for a user error reporting tool for our product. It took me about a minute to enter my report and send it to Microsoft -- it was easy enough that I don't mind reporting any bugs I see (unlike our web interface).
I was able to report my feedback (about 15 reports, ranging from cosmetic issues to hardware support requests to incorrect functionality) with minimal effort. Out of all the different engines I've used (Bugzilla, Radar, RB Feedback web and internal, among other less common ones), this has been the most painless experience I've had yet.
REALbasic on Vista
Monday, August 08, 2005
10:26 AM
I created a simple Hello World GUI application, and it ran in Vista. The UI appeared to be correct in that it has a themed look to it.
So then I decided to be daring -- I downloaded REALbasic 2005r2 from our web site (using Internet Explorer 7) and installed it. It launched without a hitch. However, we have some visual glitches. Our listboxes stand out quite badly because they're not the standard OS listbox. In the form editor, the window that we draw has an incorrect-looking frame (it uses the old style widgets and titlebar). And, just as we switch to use a more native-looking mode switch icon on Windows, the old-style mode switch icons look correct.
Most items being drawn in the form editor are drawn with the old style look and feel too them. For example, progress bars display using the selection color. GroupBox has a dark highlight (it's been lightened a lot in Vista). Things like that. However, when running the application, the UI elements look correct. Items that display wrong at runtime are: EditField, ListBox, UpDownArrows, and indeterminate progress bar. The rest of the controls seem to display with the proper system UI. We still need to draw them properly in the form editor though. Assuming Microsoft supports it under the hood, it shouldn't be too hard to bring our form editor up to snuff for Vista.
We're using the old-style Windows XP save and open dialogs. While my personal preference is that the new ones are quite ugy, we should still be using the standard system UI for this. I'm sure there are other dialogs that may need changing (such as SelectColor), but I didn't test them.
We should look into using the system's UI for our browser toolbar buttons. The buttons used to look correct on Windows XP, but now they look very out of place. The new system UI uses much smaller buttons, with a different form of roll-over effect, and the buttons are now more round than square.
Console applications in REALbasic are functional using the cmd.exe command line. I was unable to launch Monad (it may have been yanked by the time I grabbed a build), so I'm not certain whether our applications work with the msh shell. This is a topic worth revisiting once more information about Monad is available.
Neat New Features
Monday, August 08, 2005
11:03 AM
The new searching functionality is quite neat. You can tell it's still in beta, but it's quite fast (every bit as fast as Spotlight on OS X).
The Windows Communication Foundation (code named: Indigo) is the new communications manager included in the operating system. In includes things like service support and interprocess communication.
Windows Presentation Foundation (code named: Avalon) in the new presentation manager for the operating system. It is responsible for displaying the UI, text, printing and other visual items.
From everything that I've been able to determine, none of the new UI elements are available to non-managed applications. I just found official documentation on the "Windows Presentation Foundation" FAQ page that explains (among other things) that the APIs are dependant on the .NET framework. It goes on to explain the relationship between Win32 APIs and .NET and how it relates to the WPF. Basically, the presentation layer is written using both Win32 APIs and managed .NET code. So instead of rewriting the threading code, they use unmanaged threads, but they wrote all the new functionality using .NET (which is inaccessible to non-managed code).
Some new functionality is available to non-managed code if you know how to find it. For example, the new P2P subsystem that Windows Vista introduces has its entire API exported via the p2p DLL file. But the core of what our users will want (which is the flashy new UI elements) cannot be created from unmanaged code.
You can embed Avalon UI within Win32 UI and vice versa (which is also something you can nest). However, you still need to compile your Win32 application with the /clr flag to turn it into managed code.
Many of the new features to Vista are being back-ported to Windows XP. But again, these features are only accessible via a .NET application.
Windows now supports ClearType fonts, which are smoother and easier to read.
Many of the new features are lacking in API documentation. I have the new WinFX SDK, but I haven't gotten it installed yet (since it's all .NET oriented, there's not too much benefit from installing it).
IE7 and WMP10
Monday, August 08, 2005
11:15 AM
Internet Explorer 7 Looks rather interesting, but its tabbed browsing still leaves much to be desired. The UI from it though is standard with the rest of the system UI, which is nice. Overall, it's an improvement over IE 6, but I'd still use FireFox for web browsing.
The rendering engine for IE 7 seems to handle web pages a bit better than it used to. There were a few pages which used to not render quite right under IE 5 and 6 that do better now with 7.
The HTMLViewer in REALbasic works with IE 7, so that did not break.
I didn't think it was humanly possible, but Windows Media Player got even uglier and more non-standard. However, the REALbasic MoviePlayer still functions (though it's using the WMP 9 interface), so I can't complain too much.
Without a functioning sound card, it's difficult to say whether the non-UI quality of WMP has changed at all. I suspect it's still decent (since WMP 9 works well) though.
Overall Thoughts
Monday, August 08, 2005
1:09 PM
Vista has put a lot of effort into providing a better look and feel for the operating system. They've improved some areas of the user experience, and made some questionable decisions with some other areas.
The main benefits of using Vista is that it support your 3D accelerated graphics cards to off-load much of the graphics processing to the GPU instead of the CPU. To this end, the user interface is quite pretty.
However, at the core, it's the same operating system as Windows XP (at least, from the user's point of view. The control panels are all familiar, as are the applications included with the operating system itself. Because of this, the OS doesn't seem very revolutionary -- instead, it feels more evolutionary.
The one thing about the WPF is that it will use your GPU if you have one and a lot of the effects/pretty things will rely on it. This should make for an awesome UI performance boost, once it gets finalized.
Absolutely correct, assuming your application never "touches" Win32 GDI APIs. It's sort of like how CoreGraphics works on the Mac -- it works great until you use QuickDraw, and then you're back to software rendering.
I agree 100% with the bug reporting ideas. I try to file reports about RB whenever I find a bug, but sometimes it's frustrating to go on, search for reports, fill out all the fields, etc.
Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing a return to a desktop application (like the old REALbugs, but improved), as long as it uses HTTP for transport (and you add support for NTLM proxies to the HTTPSocket class). I think the desktop UI is still better for the response and usability when it comes to bug reporting.
I definitely think the web could work as well, though. Something like FogzBugz comes to mind. Has RS considered simply adopting a 3rd party solution like that?
We've considered 3rd party solutions, but none of them really meet our needs (from my limited understanding of the situation).
Personally, I wouldn't mind a web interface so long as it wasn't as annoying as the current one. An application is just some other thing for me to have to keep track of on my machine, so I'm not too terribly excited to have an app. But I agree that something needs to be done about the current solution because it's a pain.
However, that's not my area of the product, so I have no clue what could happen when or where or how. You just need to send feedback to the feedback team about these sort of things (there's a link somewhere on the feedback page IIRC).
When are you going to go screenshot happy? :^) It's hard to find a number of good pictures.
Lol, I suppose I could make some screen shots of Vista and post them....
Just stick the "app" in the IDE. It's not like it'd add a bunch of code. You can also just have it report straight through the web form too.
Screen shots? Bring them on. I was wondering where they were...
Sorry for multi-posting:
I'm surprised you didn't spaz at the the translucent windows. A) They look stupid when they're translucent and active, B) Active and inactive windows look the same to me in all of the screenshots I looked at. It's *really* hard to tell what window is active.
http://www.vistaarticles.com/content_images/lh2.jpg
Which window is active?! I think I know, and then I can't tell! The shadows look exactly the same between active and inactive windows which is a major clue on OS X which works very well. The deeper shadow makes the window stand out more than the others and it becomes obvious that window is front most (plus the widgets are colored). In the Vista shot, the widgets all look the same (though the left window's are darker because of the background, which threw me off and made me think it was active, but if you look at the media player window, it's close widget is dark too, but it's definitely inactive).
Pulsing aqua blue default buttons, eh? Well that's obviously an original idea...
Did you say the default was with the icons at the top right instead of the top left?
I'm surprised they still have the nasty dotted outlines for selected stuff. That's so 1990. It just looks uuuuuuuuuuugggglly.
The splitter rollover sounds ridiculous.
http://www.vistaarticles.com/content_images/lh6.jpg
I know it's just a beta, but that looks horrible in a few places. The dark gradients look very out of place, as does that pale blue background header thing on the left side. The "Sort By" buttons are very oddly placed. They look like part of the content.
Text finally looks decent. I'm surprised it's going to take them until the end of 2006 to ship an OS with decent looking text.
The tab panels are still pretty boring looking. I figured they'd do something better than just a big square block with a blocky header.
Overall it looks better but it's definitely nothing revolutionary. It's simply catching up to OS X in terms of appearance. It took Apple two revisions (till 10.3, 10.1 doesn't count - nothing changed) to get a really slick and refined polish on it, but I think they hit the nail on the head and Vista is somewhere around Jaguar's level.
I look forward to running it on my Dual Pentium 4 PowerMac in 2007 alongside 10.5. :^)
Oh, another thing.... too bad there aren't email notifications of replies to comments in blog entries that I comment on. :^\
I tried looking up Managed Code in Wikipedia, but the article was brief and unhelpful. Can you explain what all this managed stuff is, what it has to do with compiled-on-the-fly bytecode, and how RB is going to deal with the situation? It would be enormously helpful.
I turn around for an hour, and I get a billion comments. ;-)
@Seth -- You bring up a lot of the same gripes that I do. Instead of having an understandable (in many instances) UI, they've gone the way of Apple and made things pretty, but useless. Such as inactive window titles, rollover effects that are pointless, etc. I think it's a step backwards in terms of usability.
@Adam -- screen shots are forthcoming. I was busy fixing Vista bugs today, so I didn't get too many shots. I'll probably post them tomorrow.
As for what managed code is, that sounds like a whole different blogging topic. ;-) I'll see if I can get to that sometime relatively soon for you though.
Aaron - I thought they stopped putting My Computer on the desktop in Win XP, but maybe it varies by OEM distribution. I'm not sure if Vista works the same way, but in XP you can get My Computer back on the desktop. Right click the desktop, click Properties, choose Desktop tab, click Customize Desktop and check the My Computer checkbox.
Thanks for the info on Vista. Bummer about some things becoming less intuitive for the user.
That's right, I forgot about them removing it in XP. The reason I forgot is because I always put it into Classic view, which does that for you (I believe). I hate the XP bubbly theme stuff because it's so obnoxious. :-P
And you're right, you can get My Computer back in Vista with those same steps. Thanks for the tip!
Yeah, it is obnoxious. I usually leave the new theme, but change the color scheme to Silver. It tones things down quite a bit.