Story: Windows Vista Beta 1: screenshot gallery

Posted by: David Wright (Monday 22 August 2005, 7:19 AM)

Same old same old :-( Looks like Windows XP with some of the features of KDE, Gnome and Mac OS X thrown in on top.

When I saw the mini-pictures on the icons of image files, my first thought was, but it already does that. Then I remembered, it's my Linux desktop that does that.

The sorting of control panel items into groups, erm, doesn't XP do that? YaST does it as well, so what's new there? I use the classic view any way.

"Photo-Quality" desktop wallpapers? Don't you get that if you stick a photograph as the desktop wallpaper? I know I can choose photo's as a background for XP (I don't it slows everything down) and Linux.

The new start menu looks like they've nicked the best bits of the KDE equivalent, with putting a list of regularly used programs on the left (KDE puts them at the top).

User accounts, wow, erm, yes, erm, like NT4 then? If normal software and games will work on a non-administrator account like a real-operating system, then I'll be impressed, otherwise nothing new to see here, move along.

Making the users non-administrators by default is a start, question is, will our software work with this scheme? My AV software won't update itself or scan unless the user is an administrator, making it pretty useless. The Linux equivalent runs in its own process which has the rights it needs and the user can't mess with it...

The new my computer looks like a tarted up version of the KDE equivalent - although as you don't have drive letters or access the drives directly, the bars for the physical devices are layed out slightly differently.

IE7 - well as IE 7 doesn't support the open standards and is very insecure, it is restricted to only accessing the Windows and Office Update services, so not really a big selling point here.

As I keep most of my documents and images well indexed and structured, I rarely need to search my desktop, 99% of my searches are for DLL's which either shouldn't be there or are corrupted and need replacing, so searching on bit-depth wouldn't be something I'd need, so nothing really worthwhile there - haven't bothered with any of the existing desktop search tools either.

The re-organising the files into categories without moving them sounds more like a new way to use shortcuts or links to the files - maybe not stored as shortcuts, but as links in some sort of database to speed it up? Whatever, sounds like polish on an existing feature.

Thumbnails of deleted files? Hmm, just like KDE you mean?

There might be some nice features there, and for Windows users, maybe some nice changes. For those of us fed up with the problems that Windows causes and have moved on, the gallery doesn't show anything that isn't unavailable elsewhere, so probably not something that is going to tempt us back.

Nice try Microsoft, but if you want to win customers back, you'll need to include innovative idea's not just cut and paste existing ones from the competition.