Justin secured a copy of Release Candidate 1 for Windows Vista this week, and true to form, I’ve proceeded to install said incubating operating system with reckless abandon: a digital equivelent of Cortez burning his ships upon groundfall in the new world.

Thus far using Vista is a wild duality that pits great improvements and excellent implimentations against poorly executed ideas and downright confusing UI conventions. I definitely believe that Vista is going to be a worthwhile upgrade, but if you think this rendition of windows will see Microsoft shed their talent for poorly thought out interface choices, think again dear friends.

The Good! (or: I’m writing this before I ran out of beer!)
Vista’s installation process is the condensation of pure joy into dvd form, spinning at 150 miles per hour. Not only was it faster and easier than installing Windows XP, but upon startup it actually downloaded my motherboard drivers automatically, which is unarguably a holy grail in the PC community. To be emancipated from the arduous process of downloading and installing drivers for most add-on components for a system? That’s money out of my wallet right now.

Aero, the name Microsoft has given to their UI look and feel is pretty cool so far: I’m still not 100% sold on all the transparency, but I see now that they’ve used a neat graphical trick to compensate for other items showing through the active windows: words and images seen through an Aero window are blurred, similar to a frat-boy’s vision after finals (would a Mel Gibson joke have been more amusing?).

Frankly, just seeing a graphical treatment different than the last 5 years of the traditional Windows look is extremely exicting, actually making it fun to sit down at a Windows PC again.

The Bad! (or: how do you spell apacolypse?)
So while the above demonstrates the in-your-face, this-is-why-you-just-spent-$400 features intended to wow the general consumer, how does Vista fare in the more mundane, truly helpful interface refinements that are the hallmark of a next generation operating system?

WHERE’S MY @#$% SPELL CHECK. The keen eyed reader will no doubt deduct that this statement means Vista has no system-wide spell checking capability. Look, I know you rely on sales of the MS Office suite for a great deal of your profits, but please, PLEASE, affording your users an automatic, integrated ability to check the spelling of their documents just isn’t optional in 2006 (special note: this was written in Vista, but all the spelling mistakes probably gave that away!).

I had really hoped that Vista would take a hard look at the way MS programs organize data and tasks and refine that into a more palatable product. While there have been improvements, it hasn’t been as ubiquitous as I was hoping. Microsoft has a reoccuring habit of overloading the user with too much information at one time, under the auspices (god I wish I had spell check) of “providing more functionality to the user”. Maybe it’s just me, but I generally feel that this ends up overwhelming the user and leading to more confusion than neccesary.

The Epilouge! (or: nobody will read this far anyway)
It should be said that I really want Vista to succeed. A fast adopotion of Microsoft’s new flagship OS will benefit both the home computing community, and the web as a whole, with their inclusion of IE 7 and stronger security measures. With luck both the Windows and Web development communities will pick up on Vista quickly, and help to usher this new era of transparent-windowness into mainstream adoption.

And they can do it, especially with Balmer rooting them on.

Dictionary.com is an old favorite of mine for quick reference while surfing the web. I often use it to decode exactly what the hell Tycho from Penny Arcade is talking about: I’m convinced he blogs with a thesaurus next to his iMac. The site was always very useful, if a bit slow, but it had become very dated looking and some would argue downright ugly over the past few years. Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised today when I punched in the URL and found a nicely redesigned, clean interface. It still offers users the ability to search using dictionary or thesaurus modes, but now there is an intriguing encyclopedia feature as well. For power users they are rolling out new premium subscriptions for $19.99/month that will allow visitors to view the site ad-free and with enhancements such as color illustrations and word games. One negative note: the audio pronunciations that were once part of the free site are now only available with a subscription.

Feel like working outside the office today? Sounds like a good plan, but where to go? Starbucks costs money and the local library doesn’t have wireless access yet. Windows Live Hotspot Locator allows you to search for nearby hotspots so you can be sure you will have internet access before venturing into the great outdoors with your handy laptop. The service boasts 99 countries and 106,978 paid and free WiFi hotspots. If you desire a more specific locale, you can drill down with the Advanced Search, allowing you to specify certain categories (Airport, Bar, Beach etc). Once you submit your details, you will get a list of results organized by distance from your starting location and icons indicating whether they are free or paid access points. You also have the ability to view the results on a map in case you are not familiar with the area. I’ve got to hand it to Microsoft for this service. The site is attractive, not cluttered and highly functional. Imagine if they designed their operating systems this way!

Gaming enthusiasts who have followed the continual advancements in technology no doubt remember the tremendous impact dedicated graphics processors had on PC gaming back when they debuted in the era of 3DFX and Matrox. Separating the heavy graphical lifting from the main computer processor to a separate graphics card allowed developers the push the limits of their products to create more and more realistic and therefore compelling entertainment software.

A similar revolution may be gaining in the PC gaming industry, this time promising to create far more realistic and breathtaking physics that will allow cloth to tear, water to splash, and wooden crates (every gamer’s arch nemesis) to shred under a hail of bullets.

You guessed it: a company called Ageia has created a stand-alone physics processing card called “PhysX” that handles the hardcore mathematical processing needed to create realistic physics in-game. Their premiere title for the card is called CellFactor, and it features are incredible array of objects that the player can manipulate with psychic faculties.

Check out a video after the jump!

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