Ars Technica has managed to source an internal feature request list for the next version of Windows. Some notable sensible requests include improve taskbar for multi-monitor and option to “Reopen closed tabs” in IE, as well as some less likely ones, such as backup XBOX360 games to Windows PC.
In a statement Mike Nash, Microsoft’s Windows product manager, said: “…maybe we were a little ambitious to think that we would need to make Windows XP available for only a year after the release of Windows Vista.”
I’ve been using the new Safari for Windows Beta for a few hours now, and here are my collective thoughts:
Overall a very nice beta that does have it’s fair share of problems. If Apple (or a third party developer) can fix these at the final launch in October, I can see myself switching to Safari on Windows.
Supposedly now Safari is the fastest browser for Windows, effectively killing the Swift project.
Twitterlicious is a small Windows app that makes Twitter much easier to use.
I was impressed by Twitterific, and when working on my MacBook I used it exclusively for reading Twitter updates and writing. But when I’m at work I have to use a Windows machine, and looking around I couldn’t find a Windows Twitter client that worked the way I wanted it to, so I made one myself.
It tries to be as un-obtrusive as possible, hiding itself in the system tray until needed and it’s multi-threaded which allows multiple requests to be sent and received from Twitter at the same time to increase responsiveness.
You can find out more about Twitterlicious and download it for free on it’s project page, and by all means do give me a shout if you have any questions or suggestions.
The How-To-Geek has a decent selection of hints and tips for new users (isn’t that everyone) to Windows Vista.
Just when I thought I had a nice and clean installation of Windows XP, one that was stable, fast and had everything where I wanted, it starts randomly freezing up. The main problem is that it seems to do it randomly, it can freeze up because I plugged in a USB device, unplugged a USB device, tried to shut down the computer, opened My Documents even start a phone call on Skype for christs sake! I’m not trying to sound big headed, but I do know Windows reasonably well and I like to think I can fix the majority of problems it presents me. But when you get random crashes that don’t BSOD and don’t write to the Event Log, I’m completely stumped for a fix.
However I don’t want to spend several hours reinstalling Windows XP, only to have to do it for Windows Vista less than a month later! Repairing Windows is also a long shot, I’ve tried it before with no avail.
Fortunately, I do have another computer, an Apple Macbook which only ever crashes when I try to run Adobe Photoshop CS3 on a 18MB RAW image from my D80 with just 512MB of RAM, which will do for a month. I’m still to lazy to shell out a couple hundred to upgrade the RAM of the Macbook to 2GB, all I currently use it for is web browsing, e-mail checking and instant messenge sending.
Going from twin 19″ TFTs at work and on my desktop to a rather clostrophobic 13″ TFT on a laptop with as much memory as Saddam Hussein at his trial is going to be a challenge.
A cost analysis of Windows Vista copy protection. It’s Executive Executive summary reads:
The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.
Microsoft Windows Vista isn’t even in the stores yet for us normal folk to buy, and they’ve started working on the next release of Windows codenamed Fuji. Mary Jo Foley speculates that this is only going to be an incremental upgrade to Windows Vista (ala Windows 2000 to XP), and possibly just the first service pack…
Fuji is Windows Vista R2, and may eventually be called Windows Vista Plus, or Vista 2009 or some other crap Microsoft will come up with. However, Microsoft learned its lesson from Vista: the code base is a stinking pile of crap. It took five years for Microsoft to make a comparatively minor upgrade to Windows XP. Okay, so there’s the new security model, Aero a.k.a Windows Presentation Foundation and a few interface upgrades, but this is far less than what you’d expect from Microsoft with 10,000 employees, five years and over $20 billion burning a hole in their pocket.
Since development of Longhorn was announced, we’ve lost WinFS (possibly the one thing that got me excited about Longhorn when it was announced) and PC to PC synchronisation of data, and it hasn’t implemented many wanted features, such as better user account control, a better driver management model, enforced driving signing and many more other security related details.
But the post-Vista Microsoft knows the errors of its ways, it knows that implementing a feature in Vista was too difficult, there were too many people involved on each feature, a chance affected too many other features, and so stifled innovation and frustrated developers and designers. Everything took too long, cost too much and wasn’t implemented well enough.
The next major release of Windows needs to be a complete rewrite, it needs to be redesigned with compatibility as a secondary thought, it needs to concentrate on making Vista + 1 the best operating system ever released. Here are a few free tips:
They have five years to do this, if you include the time spent developing Fuji. It’ll be a big shock to everyone, especially for developers who find their applications no-longer work. Not everyone will be happy, and Microsoft will generate a lot of bad press, but they have the money and the monopoly to ride the storm, and its what Windows needs if it wants to have a sustainable future. Its about time the Windows NT 3.1 code base got retired for something a bit more modern.
You would expect a member of the Law Technology News Editorial Advisory Board
to know their stuff about computers. You would forgive them for being a little naive about Macs, but expect them to research them with an open mind and then compile an accurate report, not necessarily recommending them (they aren’t for everyone), but at least being subjective and fair.
Instead, you get idiots like Larry Bodine and his Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree commentary that shows you how some people are grossly overpaid and under qualified.
In his commentary he compains that he was suckered in by the hype about freedom from viruses, simplicity of computing and versatility
while what he got was a computer that can’t view Web sites properly, is not compatible with Microsoft Word and can run only dumbed-down versions of regular software
.
Let’s break this down paragraph by paragraph and see where Larry went wrong.
I was suckered in by the hype about freedom from viruses, simplicity of computing and versatility. Instead, I bought a boat anchor that can’t view Web sites properly, is not compatible with Microsoft Word and can run only dumbed-down versions of regular software.
Thats fine, if you didn’t contradict yourself later on with a long monologue about your problems
with Microsoft Word for OS X, and if you gave examples of dumbed-down
software other than AOL.
This time, I’m buying from Hewlett-Packard Co. or Dell Inc. — anything that runs on Windows. (I’ll assume the risk of flaming batteries.) Goodbye Steve Jobs, hello Bill Gates. I’ll be lucky to get half of the $4,552.71 I paid for the Mac on May 21, 2006.
Let’s ignore the fact that all new Macs can run Windows now, and concentrate on the $4,552.71 he paid for his Power Mac G5 2.7GHz on May 21, 2006. Now the dual 2.7GHz G5 Power Macs were introduced on the 27th of April 2005, and were discontinued on the 10th of October 20051 On the day they were released, the 2.7GHz G5 Power Mac cost $2,999. Larry however, paid $4,552.71. He doesn’t mention any accessories he bought2 so the only explanation is that the Larry Bodine, a member of the Law Technology News Editorial Advisory Board
, someone who is paid to advise on technology, got duped.
I realized it was time to unload the silvery box of frustration when I had to buy a
Dummiesbook on how to operate it. I’m smart; I shouldn’t need this. Aren’t Macs supposed to be intuitive and easy to learn? My mistake.
Yes Larry, you should expect to know how to use an entirely new computer and operating system that cost $4,552.71 without ever reading the manual. Did you become a Windows expert the first time you started using it? Did you not need to fiddle around, read a book, or at least ask for help?
I notice you insert a I’m smart
into a paragraph that directly contradicts itself, because it reads like I’m so smart that I had to buy a “Dummies” book to learn something that is easy to learn
. Nice.
The signs of doom were there on day one, but I ignored them. I pretended that I liked the one button mouse. I quickly started using click + command keys (and other keyboard shortcuts). I really missed the little scrolling wheel in the center of the mouse. I put up with the fact that the HP printer, which I had purchased on the recommendation of an Apple Store, would work about 50 percent of the time with the Mac. I was constantly deleting print jobs and starting them over.
Wait, a one button mouse? The Power Mac G5 came with a two-button-scroll-wheel Mighty Mouse from the 2nd of August 2005, so I can only assume that you bought one of the last stocks of the old Apple Pro Mouse as an accessory with your order, and trashed the Mighty Mouse.
And as for the printer support, it is all rather shabby on OS X, but then ask anyone who hasn’t been infuriated with the print queue system on Windows too and you’ll see this is as much as a problem with printers as with operating systems.
I noticed it was slow; I saw that stupid spinning colored wheel a lot. The Mac would hang up; the TV ads said Macs didn’t do that. The widgets were cool and snappy, but after a while I stopped using them. They were fun — for five minutes. I did like the Finder because it was quick in locating files, but it would turn up a lot of false hits. It was comparable to the Google Desktop searcher on my PC.
You’re right in saying widgets only have niche appeal. And yes the dredded spinning beach ball (not colored wheel
) does appear more than it should do. But aren’t you expecting too much for a search engine that takes one to two word queries to find, and only find the exact document or web page you’re looking for?
What drove me nuts was that I would open Word for Mac and couldn’t delete files while I was in Word. There is no File | Delete option. So the documents took up space on my hard drive, until someone told me I had to find the document in Finder and then move it into the trash from there. This seemed stupid to me; I just wanted to highlight a file and tap “delete.”
File > Delete seems like a Windows Word exclusive feature3 and it doesn’t feature in the Word for OS X because it’s not standard a OS X UI design feature. I think you’re expecting OS X Word to be a direct clone of Windows Word, when (to the credit of Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit) it’s an OS X port of Word, using many OS X conventions instead of Windows ones.
Word files transferred from the Mac were missing pictures. PowerPoint files transferred from the Mac would lose their formatting. PCs and Macs are not compatible, regardless of what they say.
Some image formats don’t translate from Windows to OS X Word (even though they are supported by both Windows and OS X). But wait, whats that big Compatibility Report... button doing in the save file dialog? I wonder what that does…
Doing a simple screen capture was an immense chore. On a PC you just press Alt and tap PrtScr. With the Mac I had to download and launch special programs to accomplish this simple task.
Maybe if you bothered to search for how to take a screenshot, you would’ve found Command-Shift-4.
I didn’t even bother with the Mac’s iCal or Mail, which required me to buy an @mac.com address. Instead, I went straight to Outlook for Mac. A lot of the software for Mac — such as AOL for Mac OS X — was dumbed down and missing may features of the current PC versions.
It’s quite clear you had incorrect preconceptions about these applications, and didn’t even bother to open them and have a look before dragging them to the trash4 You don’t need to buy a .mac subscription, Apple Mail will work fine with POP and IMAP mail boxes, and iCal works fine on its own without syncing to any internet based service.
Wait, did you mention that you use AOL in an article where you claim to be a technology consultant? There goes any shred of credibility you have (which was none at this point). And then saying that it’s a dumbed down
version suggests that you actually use the AOL software that comes with your PC. I also fail to see how a technology consultant could actually use the piece of crap that is AOL, and how you can consider AOL software being dumbed down
, when it is already targeted at the lowest common denominator of Internet users (i.e. you).
For me the killer was the Web browser. Safari simply cannot read Flash. It is, quite simply, a second-rate browser.
I even called Apple headquarters and asked when a better version would be available and was told that Apple is in no hurry to improve it.
Right. OS X comes with Flash support built in, but the last time I checked Windows doesn’t. Some people prefer other browsers to Safari, so I would forgive you on the second-rate browser
quip and the obvious lie that Apple is in no hurry to improve
(when Safari will be upgraded to 3.0 when OS X 10.5 is release), if it wasn’t for what followed.
On the suggestions of friends, I downloaded Netscape and Firefox, which were no better.
I scraped along with Internet Explorer 5.0 for Mac, and then discovered in 2006 that Microsoft would no longer support the Mac version. You can’t do WSYWIG on Typepad (where many folks create their blogs), which you can on a PC.
I run several Web sites, all optimized for IE 5.5 or higher. I couldn’t operate my own Web sites with the Mac. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
What kind of friend
would recommend you use Netscape (last updated August 2004)? More like someone with a grudge against you because you persuaded them to buy a year old mac at nearly double the original retail value. And what were Netscape and Firefox no better at? Rendering Flash? I believe Firefox pops up with a yellow information bar when a plug-in was needed.
I’ve had a look at your so-called websites
, and I’m not impressed. Optimized for IE 5.5 or higher
means you or your designers were too lazy to test on other browsers and other platforms, and didn’t bother with any sort of standards at all (except for the overzelous use of the now defunct XML and RSS buttons). But blasting your websites is the subject for another article.
Then the hard drive croaked on me after only three months of owning the machine. I couldn’t tell what was going wrong and had to hire someone for $125 an hour to come over and tell me what the heck was happening. Apple replaced it for free, but I became leery of what other hardware would fail unexpectedly.
Yeah, because failing hard drives are an Apple only problem. You know you could’ve phone Apple first, told them what was happening and they probably would’ve guessed the fault for free. Even so, they replaced the hard drive for free, so your problem is?
Wil Shipley sums up the commentary best, so I’ll quote directly from his article:
I let the repaired shiny Mac sit on the floor for weeks, and instead used my reliable IBM ThinkPad, and rediscovered how much I enjoy it. Wish me luck on selling the Mac.
Well seeing how you blasted it in your commentary, and state that you became leery of what other hardware would fail unexpectedly
, I estimate the value of your unreliable, unusable and near-death Power Mac to be $1.43, excluding postage but including packaging. That, you can have for free.
Apple recommendedHP printer, which we can safey assume cost less than the difference in question. ↩
Another day, another public Windows Vista release candidate, and this time it’s RC2. This is probably as close to the RTM release as Microsofts going to release, and has the build number of 5744 (perhaps hinting at 5800 build number for the final product?)
A post RC1 build of Windows Vista is available for download from Microsoft, with a build number of 5728, which means it’s now in the RTM branch, although this is not the final RTM build.
It looks like Microsoft are plowing ahead with their release schedule for Vista, and we’ll see the final RTM release sometime this year.
I installed Windows Vista RC1 over the weekend, in what turned out to be a relatively painless install procedure. You give it your product key, your name, your region, and it does the rest. Fantastic.
But the Vista doesn’t come with the full NVIDIA graphics drivers installed for my GeForce 7900GT1 so I headed over to the NVIDIA site to download them.
The standard driver experience seems to be an InstallShield based Windows Installer application, which then gives you a few Accept buttons to click on and then does some “magic” to your computer. However the experience can vary wildly. Sometimes they force you to install some other software that bloats up your computer with the drivers, and sometimes the install doesn’t finish properly and you have no idea whats happened or how to fix them.
Seeing as Microsoft overhauled Vista’s driver management, I hoped to see some kind of unified installation and management application for drivers, ala Windows Installer for application set up packages. This management would handle the installation 2 upgrading and uninstallation of drivers. It would be able to rollback failed attempts to install drivers, it would uninstall previous drivers and install newer versions, and it would keep track of the drivers installed, and when uninstalling, delete all the files associated with it.
But no, we are stick with the old system. The NVIDIA installation seems to have corrupted my second display, and screw up Vista in the process. No error messages, no option to roll back and start again. A restart fixed this, and the driver seems to have installed, but there was no control panel or configuration application. This is something that an OS like Vista (five years in the making) should be able to handle properly and gracefully.
After a few days of using Vista, all it feels like to me is an interface upgrade to Windows. I personally can’t see where five years of work went to, especially from an organisation like Microsoft. Theres no WinFS, perhaps one of the few features that got me excited about Vista, it’s Windows Mail application can’t connect to my IMAP server, and the basic essentials have not been touched3 Even some new applications, like the Sidebar, have serious interface consistency and usability issues.
I think people don’t give Windows XP as much credit it deserves. It’s a stable and mature platform, and Service Pack 2 really gave it the foundation to be a secure operating system too. I think Microsoft struggled to create an operation system that is significantly better than XP, pinning it’s hopes on the legacy of Cairo‘s object-orientated file system. It probably would’ve faired better if it did an internal redesign of Windows instead, reducing the bloat and increasing the stability, something which everyone would probably like.
But what they’ve ended up with is a slower and more unstable operating system that offers very little past XP for the average user. Take-up will be slow, it will happen, but people expecting the kind of difference going from Windows 9t to XP are going to be disappointed, and rightly so.
Microsoft has made Windows Vista RC1 available for download for the public, but have given no obvious way to get a product key unless you got one when they released beta 2.
However, if you do want one, here are a few simple steps to getting one:
TE06-KVM4-3RM9.Boot Camp 1.1 Beta now adds support for the built-in iSight, some keyboard key mapping fixes (now has right click), fixes the dredded bug that leaves the speakers on when headphones are plugged in and the clock always being an hour early. Groovy.
Swift is the WebKit based browser for Windows. If you ever wondered how Safari rendered pages, then this will give you a very rough guide.
It is, however, still in pre-alpha and very buggy, but worth a look none the less.
Try this: Create a shortcut on the desktop, make it point to something such as calc, but name it www.microsoft.com. Then fire up Internet Explorer and navigate to www.microsoft.com. Enjoy!
All I ever wanted from my PDA is to keep my contacts, calendar and music synced up with one device (but I’ll live with having a seperate iPod for music for now). But as I use a Mac and Windows based PC, I also needed something that was cross compatible and would do any contact and calendar syncing between the two.
Have you ever tried to rename a folder to be called CON in Windows? Give it a try, you might be surprised at the result.