The Author – Bart Busschots
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Feb
5
Windows Vista – First Impressions of a Mac OS X User
Filed Under Computers & Tech on February 5, 2007 at 7:53 pm
I just got my first go on Vista (with Aero). I didn’t get to play with it much so these really are my first impressions. I’ll be playing about with it quite a bit over the next few months so I’ll post with more details later. I’ve been hearing for ages how much like OS X Vista is so I was expecting to say ‘wow, this feels familiar’. That was my first reaction, but not because it reminded me of OS X, no, because it reminded me of Windows XP. Sure, it looks much shinier than XP but the user experience is basically the same. There is no big paradigm shift. This is not like the jumpt from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 or arguably even from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. I was basically underwhelmed.
[tags]MicroSoft, Windows, Vista, OS X[/tags]
The first improvement I noticed was the way you get a preview of a window when you hover over its block in the task bar. The Windows task bar with it’s text-filled square boxes has always seemed like a waste of pixels to me. As soon as you have even a few windows open the text becomes pointless as most of it has to be truncated anyhow. Worse still, with all that pointless truncated text in the way the icons which are actually helpful have to be ridiculously small! OS X and Windows have adopted fundamentally different techniques for managing open windows and launching apps. MS opted for text with some small icons to help you, OS X chose icons with text available on hover when you need it. Windows have a start menu AND the task bar, where as OS X just has the doc which both launches apps and manages windows. The doc in OS X uses icons instead of text for apps, and live previews with a small icon instead of text for minimized windows. We all know the icons for our apps, so it makes sense to use them rather than lots of small hard to read often truncated text. However, even considering the fact that I think the task bar is fundamentally badly designed, these new previews do make the it more usable which is a good thing.
It has to be said that Aero looks pretty. I’ll have to play around with it a bit to see how usable it is but without a shadow of a doubt it looks very nice. I’m a little concerned that the window edges are a bit too transparent and that the edges of windows kind of get lost when you have a cluster of them but I’m not sure about that yet. One thing that does worry me is how little emphasis there is on the window that’s current. On all previous versions of Windows the current Window has been the one with the darker window title area, on Aero that’s not the case. All the windows have very light colored title bars and the active one is the lightest one, not the darkest one. To me the contrast between active and inactive windows seems too weak which could make using Vista with Aero turned on a bit awkward.
Something that really disappointed me was the exposee ‘equivalent’. The idea of this feature is to let you see at a glance all the Windows you have open. In Vista it does this by stacking the Windows BEHIND EACH OTHER. How does that help you see stuff at a glance? To actually see your windows you have to scroll through this 3D stack of windows. That’s a lot of pointless work. You need to bring up the stack and then scroll through it. On OS X you get to see a small version of all your windows at the same time tiled across your screen so at a glance you get it all, no scrolling to search for the window you want. You even get control over the granularity, you can see all windows or just all windows in the current application. The Vista implementation reminded me a lot of the interface to Apple’s Time Machine for OS X Leopard. However, when you want to watch a folder evolve over time it makes sense to have a stack and to scroll though it, when you want to see all your windows at once it does not. This Vista feature looks looks very pretty but it smacks of form over function.
The hardware requirements for Aero mystify me. For what you get I just don’t see why you should need 128MB of graphics RAM. I’ve had basically the same graphic experience on OS X for two years now with an old G4 MacMini with 32MB of graphics RAM. Why does Vista need so much more to deliver basically the same thing? Why is Vista so ridiculously inefficient?
I haven’t had a chance to play with Gadgets or the enhanced security features yet so my thoughts on those will have to wait till later. All I did today was look at Vista from the point of view of a regular end user and really very little has changed. Although there have been massive changes under the hood (some good, some less so IMO), from a purely HCI (human computer interaction) point of view, Vista really is just Windows XP with a few bells and whistles. It’s not really anything new. There is no real change in the start menu, the task bar, or window management, so the basic model of interaction is no different to XP. The only big thing from a user-interface point of view that I can see is the spotlight-like search feature and perhaps the Gadgets. I’d compare the differences between XP and Vista to those between OS X Panther and OS X Tiger. However, Panther and Tiger were about a year and a half apart, where as there are five and a half years between XP and Vista! Anyhow, bottom line, Vista is nothing like OS X, it’s still just Windows 🙂
But it IS Windows. They can’t make it like OSX, cause 95% of the computer using people in the world would say “WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED???, What the hell is this crap?”
They have chosen a set way to do the desktop, and whilst they can evolve it, they can’t throw it away and start new, there is too much inertia there.
If they copied OSX the iFans would be disgusted and sit around smugly saying “we had that first”. If they carry on along the Windows development line the iFans will say “OMG it’s still windows”.
Meanwhile the Linux users are writing blog posts about how 2012 will be “The year of the Linux Desktop” , yet they’ll be making the same points they made 5 years ago.
And all the while, Windows will keep its 90% market share.
I’m not saying Windows should become OS X. It already exists, it’s called OS X 🙂
OS X is not perfect and there are an infinity of good ways to do things and an even larger infinity of bad ways. By comparing Vista to OS X I was not implying that it should become OS X, I was just pointing out why I feel Vista is inferior in some of it’s basic GUI elements.
Operating systems can and do change dramatically. Look at the quantum leap forward between Win3.1 and Win95, that was a big change, a real paradigm shift, but people got on with things and enjoyed the new OS. The way MS are hyping up Vista you’d expect a similar quantum leap forward but it’s just not there. This was their big Windows re-write, they can’t do that again for many more years so we will be stuck with derivations of this for years to come. They had a chance to make a leap forward and didn’t take it.
I’ve kept my examples MS in this reply to keep to the 90% audience but OS 9 to OS X was one hell of a jump even though it was only for the 5% out there who used Mac and that too went very well. You can make big changes and I think MS should have.
I don’t see that he’s saying Windows should be more like OSX, it’s just that in the things they DO mimic (which are good ideas, so why not mimic them) they seem to do them worse. What I’d like to see is Windows jumping ahead of OSX with new and different things that add to the experience, not just poorly done mimics. Let’s be honest here, OSX mimics Windows sometimes too – look at the column view in OSX – best thing they ever mimiced (sp?) from Windows. I think they did it better, but it’s such a slight difference at least it’s equivalent. Come on Microsoft, with that many smart developers and that much money – do something NEW!
“Why is Vista so ridiculously inefficient?”
It’s full of bloatware? Try opening Mircosoft Office and Open Office on the same computer.. which one starts up first and doesn’t hang randomly?
I happen to have a dual boot computer (I need windows for games) and I see it all the time. Why would they do it? It could be just sloppy code on their part, but I think it’s a mix of things.
Vista is still windows, but I still don’t like the direction it’s going in. They’ve taken their “the user is stupid, the OS knows best” policy even further with this DRM rubbish.
Is it just me, or does it seem like with every “progressive” version of windows, it seems more restrictive? Any of the “new” features I’ve seen have been available as plugins for XP for years (fancy transparent windows and the desktop search for example)