Windows Vista Review-2

1.3 Search

Vista's search does what it is supposed to do. It searches files, finds them, and lists them. The biggest problem remains the fact that the actual start menu contents get replaced by your initial search results. If you press enter after entering your query, an Explorer window shows you all the results, including tabs to see the results per file type. You can obviously save the query; however, when you open this query later, Vista will not give you the search pane (which allows you to view by filetype, as mentioned). You'll have to enable it by hand; not a showstopper, but sloppy, still.

1.4 Sidebar

Vista's new sidebar is not at all much different from other, similar implementations in other operating systems. The sidebar can house gadgets (or widgets or applets or replicants or whatever you prefer), but the gadgets can also be dragged onto the desktop.
What I like about it is that the sidebar and its gadgets are always visible, so you are not forced to interrupt your workflow if you want to look them. Apple's Dashboard widgets are only visible after hitting a shortcut key, and this interrupts your workflow (only cli magic enables you to permanently display widgets on the desktop in OS X). In Dashboard's defense, the Microsoft implementation does lack a bring to front shortcut key or button.

Of course Vista's sidebar has one major disadvantages: lack of gadgets. The gadgets database is still fairly empty, and the ones that are there, are of debatable quality (especially in the visual department). I am sure that after the consumer release of Vista, the amount of gadgets will explode, but for us early adopters the sidebar remains pretty empty.

I feel compelled to touch on the originality issue often being referred to on the net. Is Sidebar similar to Dashboard? Yes. Is Dashboard similar to Konfabulator? Yes. Are all of those similar to Microsoft's Longhorn sidebar, which I first used in 2003? Yes. Are all of those similar to BeOS's replicants? Yes. You get the idea.

2. New and upgraded applications

Obviously, Vista comes with the latest release of Internet Explorer, version 7. I have already expressed my thoughts on Internet Explorer 7, and those complaints generally remain for Windows Vista. It is not a bad browser per se; it just is not my thing, and this is mostly caused by the highly confusing interface. The browser is my most-used application, and hence I want an interface that leaves me with little to desire (to give you an idea of how far this obsession goes, the fact I cannot remove the 'Go' arrow in Firefox 2.0 was almost a breaking point for me).

Windows Mail, however, is a completely different story. This is a really good email client, and it inherits the best feature Microsoft ever devised from Outlook 2003: the vertical preview pane; I refuse to use email clients that do not have this feature (save for BeOS's BeAM). For the rest, Windows Mail has a very clean interface, which focuses completely on the task at hand: reading and sending email. Contacts and emails are now individual files, meaning you can manage both using Explorer. Annoyingly, emails are given gibberish numeric names, meaning you can only know what an email is about by hoovering over the .eml file, showing a tooltip which will give you the subject field.

Problems remain with Outlook Express, err, Windows Mail; especially creating rules directly from a message is very cumbersome (it refuses to copy the information from the selected message, meaning you have to manually enter all your filtering conditions). Another annoyance is that even though I tried to set all fonts on incoming messages to a standard font, lots of messages still display custom fonts. Other than that, the junk mail filtering is a bit too enthusiastic at times.

Windows Photo Gallery is nothing to write home about; it does what it is supposed to do, and that's it, basically. It is surely no match for Apple's iPhoto, so let alone it being a match for Google's Picasa2 (the best in its class, if you ask me). Picasa2 is faster than Windows Photo Gallery, it has a cleaner interface, and it supports Picasa Albums; the choice is easy if you ask me. Photo Gallery badly misses export features; it cannot export photos to the popular photo sharing sites (Flickr, Picasa Albums, etc.). This is really a bad thing, and I hope Microsoft improves upon this issue in a service pack or update.

Windows Media Player 11 shines on Vista. The application is to the point, and centrered around what really matters: content. Where I could easily get lost in pre-11 version of the application, Media Player 11 is much more user-friendly and usable. Nothing revolutionary (it's just a media player), but I enjoy using it much more than iTunes 7 (which is, I'm sorry to say, a really bad application (slow, buggy, and just plain weird), especially compared to the outstanding version 6).

Since this is Ultimate I am using, I also have the new Media Center installed. Windows XP Media Center Edition may very well have been Microsoft's best product user-interface wise (Office 2007 might be better though), and this trend continues in this new version. It is very difficult to explain exactly why MCE is such a good interface; the only way of ever understanding this is to actually use it for a while. It simply makes so much sense.