Vista Shmista Barrista – part 2

I was listening to a PodCast of Paul Therrott and Leo LaPorte which I subscribe to in iTunes (Windows Weekly), and they were discussing what’s to like about Vista.  It was interesting from start to finish, but the part that hit me most was how Paul described the manner in which you have to respond to someone asking what’s good about Vista.  He compared it to someone asking what’s to like about Boston.  You have to turn the question around and ask the first person what things they’re interested in so you can then take that and focus your response accordingly.

It’s the same with Vista without a doubt.  Paul used the examples of asking if the person was interested in media/music, developing software, games, business use, etc.  There’s no doubt a plethora of changes in Vista.  Many are widely known.  Many (MANY) more are not.  There’s a lot more going on than any white paper or advertisement will be able to expound upon.

I for one have found that, even if subtly, Vista runs my existing apps faster than XP/SP2 does.  Some things I’ve found in testing that work faster small in scope but matter to me: zipping and unzipping large volumes of files.  Converting media files from one format to another (WMV or AVI to MP4 for example), and so forth.  Tweaks abound as well.  For example, click twice on a file to rename it, and it no longer highlights the extension, just the basename up to (but not including the period and extension).  Small as a grain of sand, but another nagging irritation of XP put to rest (finally!).

I still stand behind my hatred of the changes to Explorer however.  I don’t like the new address bar, nor the logical treeview panel (I still turn on the folder display beneath it, but it won’t remove the logical tree above it – arg!).  However, I’m learning to live with what I don’t like.  I suppose that’s a sign of my 42 years of breathing air and dealing with life’s irritations in general.  I think that what bothers me about Vista’s GUI flavor is the “boxiness” of it.  The roundness and smoothness of XP’s icons and so forth seem to have given way to a more “polished” Aero look with less roundness and more edginess, which I don’t like.  I prefer the Gnome look with big cartoonish, 3D icons and shadowing stuff.  Call me a cereal box reader, I don’t care.

The jury is out still as to how Vista will take up adoption in the coming year.  Some predict incredible uptake, while others predict abysmal results.  Who knows.  It’s like predicting Wall Street I think.  What will be interesting is to see how their competition will adapt to whatever Vista (and Office 2007) do.  Linux and OpenOffice will surely have their work cut out for them in winning additionally converts.   Work is good.  Competition is even better.  Game on!!!