Windows Vista RC1

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.