A lot has been said about the new user interface for Windows Vista. In this chapter from his latest book, Paul McFedries runs through the foundation, functions, and eye candy for Vista’s latest UI.
The Windows Vista Interface
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
The work done is very impressive, but the problems I am worried about is the Windows GUI hanging up or encountering the explorer.exe error and exiting. The timeout parameters like for example in Internet Explorer are set so high, that if a ‘web-page’ is unavailable or not a valid URL it hangs up the system.
In Fedora for example, FireFox will state within seconds the URL is not valid or not available. These are very basic concepts and I hope MS has resolved some of these settings/bugs.
Other than that, it is a huge improvement over XP > on down.
One last note, if they fixed it to where you do not need to run as ‘Administator’ all the time and have a regular ‘user’ account as in any Linux distro that will be wonderful!
I don’t actually need all these GUI changes vista brought to windows; I would like to stick with windows XP (or even earlier GUI) if it has the stability of linux when handling pictures and some video codecs.
Windows crashs in a matter of month when we use a video codec like xvid, in all linux distros it never happen.
Windows vista GUI is still inconsistant and fatigue producing; you can blame it on nested windows. You want something click a window and then another window and then a menu to get what you want.
uh… I have the ACE Mega CodecS Pack installed and I play all KINDS of video/audio formats and I’ve never had windows ‘crash in a matter of months’ from that. My current XP install is almost 1 year old now…
still rock stable…
But don’t forget that my windows installations have a different mixture of applications than your windows box; and as we all know, programs tend to crash each other; and your system might be up to date, mine not; add to this that windows admitted that it is a flow in all windows versions and that it will fix it, but never fixed it (explorer handlers to .avi files and .jpeg)!
Windows installtion is like orange juice (water+orange+sugar), once you prepare it there is no way to go back (I mean seperate water from orange from sugar), blame MS for their registry which contribute to this aging and thus crashable behavior of windows.
And vista still inhereted this from XP and the previous versions thats why it will never be as linux or Mac or any unix in stability, which I always seek!
Bad analogy as it’s pretty easy to seperate water, orange and sugar. The registry has nothing to do with application or system instability unless some bad application or user screws up key settings, no different than a bad app or user screwing up system files or configuration settings on a *x or OS X box.
“Bad analogy as it’s pretty easy to seperate water, orange and sugar.”
How?
Distillation would be one method.
“Distillation would be one method.”
Distillation would separate the solutes (orange and sugar) from the water. Now tell me how would you seperate the orange from the sugar genious?!
Is not the orange also a liquid?
“Is not the orange also a liquid?”
No, it’s a complex solution in a liquid form, form is not important in definition as you could freeze it and become solid but still its orange.
A complex solution is made of at least 100 structural proteins, minerals, natural dies, enzymes, phospho-lipids, carbohydrates and other cellular components as you know that the orange is a plant creature, and thus its cellular, and also remember that heating the orange will denature the orange protiens and its no more and orange in the previous process that you suggested, namely distillation.
Ouch, too much to remember from cell biology and chemistry, right?!
What I’m getting at is if, as eluded to in the previous post, the orange, water, and sugar are seperate components in solution, you can seperate the components. They aren’t inseperable.
and as we all know, programs tend to crash each other;
No, we all know that in NT-based OS programs cannot crash each other due to memory protection mechanism.
add to this that windows admitted that it is a flow in all windows versions and that it will fix it, but never fixed it (explorer handlers to .avi files and .jpeg)!
How exact your windows “admitted” that nonsense? Even if there was some bug in explorer it just would crash and restart itself. The only software that can crash NT (as well as Linux and Mac OS X) is kernel-space software such as device driver, and video codecs are not in the kernel space.
And vista still inhereted this from XP and the previous versions thats why it will never be as linux or Mac or any unix in stability, which I always seek!
You seek in the wrong direction. The source of your problem definitely lies between keyboard and chair.
“The source of your problem definitely lies between keyboard and chair”
No the problem is with windows. but it is not in the registry and it is not about crashing programs you are right about that it is about dll’s. The thing is people who do not know computers that well may still observe the problems with windows xp very clearly.
No the problem is with windows. but it is not in the registry and it is not about crashing programs you are right about that it is about dll’s.
I fail to see how 3rd party buggy dll is the Windows problem.
The thing is people who do not know computers that well may still observe the problems with windows xp very clearly.
Such people would experience similar problems with buggy software in any other OS.
Edited 2006-10-08 18:32
Then you probably fail to see why a virus or worm is a windows security problem they must just not write that kind of software;-)
A dll that is better for one app and is therefore replaced can make a other app unstable that kind of problem does not happen on linux but that is one of the many serious design flaws of windows.
I fail to see how 3rd party buggy dll is the Windows problem.
If program is the only thing suffered, then not. If system was the one suffering, then yes, it is a problem. It simply shouldn’t happen’
“uh… I have the ACE Mega CodecS Pack installed and I play all KINDS of video/audio formats and I’ve never had windows ‘crash in a matter of months’ from that. My current XP install is almost 1 year old now…
still rock stable…”
Uhh.. that’s a phrase I’ve come to loath. ‘Rock stable’ is a Reiser4 root partition. ‘Rock stable’ is the Gentoo Jackass/Rockhopper/whatever ricer install. ‘Rock stable’ is exactly what your computer is after installing that abominable codec pack.
‘Rock stable’ is selective blindness. Enjoy your computer AIDS.
Edited 2006-10-09 12:29
ok, so its an overused term. But my PC *IS* stable. I have yet to have ANY BSODs of any sort. Rarely do any of my programs crash and XP hasnt slowed down any. Probably because I do proper maintenance.
And no, I’m not some blind MS fanboy.. Nor any other OS fanboy. I run multiple OSes at home
And yes, I’ll enjoy my PC AIDS thankyouverymuch. I’m not one to limit myself for ‘theological’ or otherwise annoying reasons.
Fair enough. I’ve just seen too many ‘zOMG my system is ROCK STABLE with random experimental feature‘, followed up by ‘WTF my system is borked HALP’ on the Gentoo forums.
And I stand by my assessment that 50 meg codec packs are sheer insanity.
ha, true enough. But I’ve not, as of yet, come across an AV file that I cannot play
It IS possible to turn off that huge vertical bar on Windows Vista, isn’t it?
Yes. It’s not even on by default.
In the installations I have performed, the sidebar is on by default. I guess it depends whether the system is capable of running the full Aero Glass or not. But, yes, it is possible to turn it off.
… that people would forget all about which operating system they’re using.
Well I’m not a shrink, it’s just, the thought comes to mind when you see the menu.
I quote:
Windows Mail
Windows Media Player
Windows Ultimate Extras
Windows Photo Gallery
Windows Easy Transfer
Windows Collaboration
There’s even more programs in the “All programs” submenu:
Windows Calender
Windows Collaboration
Windows Contacts
Windows Defender
Windows DVD Maker
Windows Fax and Scan
Windows Mail
Windows Marketplace
Windows Media Player
Windows Movie Maker
Windows Photo Gallery
Windows Update
I hope I didn’t miss anything.
I’d say they’re terrified at Microsoft.
Wow… that’s a whole lot of anti-trust cases. It’s gonna be a great year for us Europeans! Norway’s so gonna regret…
I don’t think you’ll find that council in Norway is going to have much use for Windows Movie Maker or Windows Photo thingie.
I don’t understand why these anti-trust cases happen… OSX comes with all of the same types of programs, though they never get raped by the EU. How is that possible? It isn’t hard to install other programs instead of using the ones that MS, apparently, says that you must use because they are written by MS.
I am not pointing the finger, I am asking a question from the perspective of a noob.
Nah. It’s pre-emptive strike against people who complaing about Windows being not consistent. lol
I’m a little confused regarding your post title. Did you mean to say “Microsoft is afraid of competition”? After all with the use of “Windows” used so much in the start menu they either believe the user will forget what OS they’re using or that it’s an attempt to brainwash the user into buying Microsoft only products.
>> I’m a little confused regarding your post title. Did you mean to say “Microsoft is afraid of competition”?
I think MS is afraid of people ever thinking they could do without them.
I’m a bit surprised that many improvements in functionality of Vista are already present in KDE. I mean: showing a pop-up with window title when moving mouse to a program thumbnail on taskbar, instant search in current folder. Also Widgets are already running in KDE, even widget manager is similar to that on Vista.
Perhaps the reason is that both window managers borrow ideas from MacOS X.
Active Desktop, anyone?
It was the first concept of widget/gadget/whatever, in 1997…
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie6/previous/gallery/default.ms…
We already have all the technology here, what we don’t have yet is full exploit of these technologies. Yeah, we have Compiz/Beryl which are Composite managers, but we have more than this, we have Qt4, KDE 4 people are creating Plasma, Kwin will have beautiful effects for KDE 4, Raster (the main developer of Enlightenment) has great libraries (EFL) in E17 and for E18 he will do Compositing effects, Compiz and Beryl right now already surpass Vista GUI’s, we also have already a modular X.Org, they are replacing all the core, like Xlib for XCB, and stuff like that. Vista will launch a product and that will get stuck, while we will grow our technology even more.
I stopped reading when I saw…
“Most of us think of video as a real performance killer. Just running video in a single window can slow your system noticeably,”
What OS has this author been using?! Win3.1?
I’d like to know why Microsoft hasn’t ordered one of its thousands of programmers to replace some of the really old icons, dating back to the Win 3.1 days, I think! You have to look for them, but some of them are still in there!!!!
C:WINNTSYSTEM32MORICONS.DLL
The interface is too pretty for Vista to do anything *but* rack up millions in sales. Watch the stocks
. It’s too bad the interface has continually become obnoxiously huge and obtrusive since Win2k. On this widescreen example, the ‘start-menu replacement’ takes up 1/6th the screen!
http://www.only4gurus.com.br/longhorn/screenshots/winvista_5365_01_…
Large fonts, bulky interfaces, lack of any form of menu organization, inconsistent program listings (in the “most used” or “most recently used” lists).. the menu interface in Windows has been near on broke since they implemented the chevrons to unhide stuff rather than encourage a proper organizational structure.
How applets and menu’s are handled by windows is going to need a revamp sometime, and I’m shocked that this lesson was only partially learned from XP. Maybe I’m just used to living in a fluxbox world.
Edited 2006-10-08 13:50
Who gives a flying rat’s ass if the start menu takes up 1/6th of the screen or all of it. It’s not like you can perform a task in the start panel AND somewhere in the Explorer UI. The start panel is supposed to give you quick access to shortcuts to apps and folders and once you click one of them it goes away. It performs its task perfectly and I might add that KDE is developing their own (poorly designed IMHO) start panel-like UI as well. How much you want to bet that everyone who declared the start panel as being a poor UI choice and ugly will miracuously find the KDE start panel to be the best UI design in the world and a beauty to behold?
Edited 2006-10-08 23:40
hmm. I suppose you don’t then, but really how many tasks can you perform at once? Why have multi-tasking at all?
Larger interfaces take more resources to display and more time to navigate. Thus, if the goal is quick access to shortcuts and apps, it becomes less ‘perfect’ with wasted size.
It was a novel change from 3.0/1/11, certainly a bold change from progman; nicely compacting program choices into a heirachal structure. Now it seems the idea that an interface should follow that KISS philosophy is being eroded.
I believe your final point is rather valid as well. Regardless of the OS, oversized start menu’s *are* ugly and terrible. No doubt the linux fanatics will find much to love in KDE’s kickoff, but thats what makes them fanatics!
This is so very sad when a new OS release can be reduced to how the UI looks (which is not that dramatically different from XP). I guess it one more time underscores the utter uselessness of so called “innovation” churned by Microsoft.
Vista… Yaaaawn
Amein.
No, it underscores the utter ignorance of many online. It’s like they have a learning disability. They choose to focus on the UI despite the many innovations elsewhere. Even their focus on the UI is often superficial, discounting Vista’s display architecture just because MS doesn’t turn on wobbly windows OOTB. There’s a lot more that’s possible than some tech demo effects MS was doing in 2003.
OK, so what features of Vista ARE innovations, then? And I mean “innovations” in the sense of “something Microsoft invented” rather than “something they copied from someone else”?
Concepts and idea’s copied from others are not a bad thing, far from it. If it works, use it or implement it. Take a look at OS/X, huge benefits from the Darwin projects; BSD underpinnings.
It’d be nice if MS where to incorperate ideas & ‘best practices’ of some of it’s contemporary stablemates, given their market share it’d generally help us all.
That’s a completely different issue. The question is what features of Vista are innovations in the proper sense, rather than just being what Microsoft CALL innovations.
“OK, so what features of Vista ARE innovations, then? And I mean “innovations” in the sense of “something Microsoft invented” rather than “something they copied from someone else”?”
How about the ability for a user to increase his RAM simply by plugging in a USB flash drive?
That’s simply swapping on disk called another way (and a feature you could replicate with probably a 3-4 line bash script).
dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/usbdrive/swapfile bs=1024 count=65536
mkswap /media/usbdrive/swapfile
swapon /media/usbdrive/swapfile
Done.
That’s great.
Now do it in such a way that you won’t wear out the USB flashdrive in short order. MS devised an algorithm that allows the USB flashdrive to be used as extra RAM without wearing it out for 10 years.
Any decent flash drive uses built-in “wear-leveling” algorithms. I’m sure I could hack up a loop mount command for you that does the same thing in software if you’re too lazy to look up the info yourself.
Remember, other people can “innovate” too, not just Microsoft.
really? that’s cool.
The Amiga had the ability to add RAM by adding a PC card in the early 1990s.
One thing I noticed while intensively evaluating Vista RC over the past week is that Microsoft’s uses of eye candy while nice to look at is a complete resource hog. It’s not the only factor in memory being used to nearly 1 GB of RAM but it is an issue that Microsoft needs to resolve. I admit I’m surprized with the amount of money and time Microsoft has claimed to invest in Vista that it can hinder a system more than Windows XP does. When a new OS is released it’s expected it may require additional memory but it should use memory more effeciently. Current Linux distributions such as SLED which offers XGL don’t have this issue so why does Vista? I’d recommend for those considering upgrading to Vista to either increase your RAM to 2 GB or turn off the eye candy effects. 1 GB unfortunately seems to be not enough if you plan on leaving the eye candy effects on while using Windows Media Player and have multiple tabs in IE 7 open.
I recommend that people hold off on moving to Vista as long as possible, at the very least.
I’ve been running Vista for 3 days with 1.12GB of ram and an ATi 9550 256MB Video card.
No slow downs here at all. Some incompatabilities, yes. But it runs just as fast, if not faster at times than XP.
Maybe these results vary from PC to PC, who knows.
Some of us don’t have that kind of hardware, and don’t feel a need for it.
What’s your point? I was stating how it ran on my hardware compared to his 1GB and stating results may vary.
In the context of Vista being a resource hog.
Companies are copying from each other all the time. This is not a bad thing as long as the company copying makes it better, this is the way ideas evolve. The problem now is that as far as I see Microsoft did not really improve anything compared to Mac OS. It merely performed a catch up, but let’s not forget that Apple will release Leopard shortly after Vista is released.
So let’s see how vista will look then.
And I’m not sure the Linux world is lagging so far behind.
The article was about the UI so let’s stick to it.
Visually speaking I think vista is an improvement over the terrifying design in XP, I mean, honestly the blue Luna theme was one of the ugliest themes EVER. The first thing I always do in XP when reinstalling (every 6 months) is to change that horrible theme.
Now seeing all the pretty Vista screenies I must say that the non-aero theme is the one that looks best colour-vise ( I really hate that blueish-greenish stuff they put everywhere… I know I’d get bored of the look of vista after a week), and hoestly apart from the fact that window-tearing and ugly rebuilding of the interface should be history thanks to GPU powered desktop drawing I don’t see a lot of benefits in the eye-candy they provide.
I’ve been using Mac OS for a long time now and I must say the best solution to window management is the bloody taskbar… there is no exposè or whatever that can make your life on the desktop as easy as the taskbar. so basically from my point of view all the trasprency, the flip3D and stuff is just pretty useless.
What on the other hand is better in Vista than in previous versions is explorer, how elements are organized, it looks less cluttered. Still I think finder or nautilus seem much better designed from a usability point of view (less stuff, and better arraged). I always take my father as a reference for the non-technically-savy user… and for example he had far less problems finding the right tools on gnome than on windowsXP… would be nice to see how he’d cope with vista.
To me there is improvement, but it’s not enough… to justify the huge price I’d have to pay…
Best thing will be to wait and see… there’s still a lot of questions left open, and at a first glance Vista does not seem to be the killer OS it’s often taunted to be.
1. Beautiful textures and backgrounds are not a Vista innovation. There are literally millions of nice images that float around, for free, to use for background.
2. Transparency of the window frames is a bad thing. It is very confusing.
3. Flip 3d is a joke! most people have a problem with overlapping windows, let alone windows floating in 3d space…
4. Taskbar thumbnails are useless. Most programs’ screens look similar: a bunch of controls and a main white area with black letters and images on it.
5. Taskbar application window stacking is useless. The stack can not be navigated.
6. File dialogs are disorientating. They contain many unnecessary and confusing functions. Burn CD? email? what the heck?
7. Metadata search will not work for any data type, simply because the O/S is not datatype aware. Microsoft applications will use the relevant feature, but other apps will not: it is simply too much to have to cater for such a beast, especially when my apps are cross platform and I have to cater for other O/Ses as well. And can the text be a query? can I say to Vista “bring me all the pictures that contain the word ‘gypsy’ from this to this date”?
8. Even with Vista, the user can not organize his/her data into user-defined live views based on queries.
9. The preview pane will not work for all kinds of data. Of course Microsoft Office documents will display fine, but smaller companies would have to struggle.
10. Live folders is another joke. Live icons are too small to be able to tell what they contain.
11. Gadgets are useless for serious work. They are even distracting. There may be useful under certain circumstances, but they are there simply because they look cool.
12. WFP primary API would be in C, right? so if we take into account every C API Microsoft has written so far, I expect it to be a mess of flags, nested data structures and functions with tons of arguments. Of course the .NET interface would be nice, but for us developers that do not want to sandbox our apps (using C++ or C for example), I seriously doubt it would be nicer than Win32 (and Win32 is a nightmare!)…
Microsoft will fall under its own weight. If it wasn’t for new computers, no one would go into Vista. The “innovations” Microsoft offers are not what enterprises and home users want.
The UI is not the only thing that is new in Vista. There is so much new stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista