rant whine 'splain espouse: First look at Vista

Friday, August 05, 2005

First look at Vista

Early screenshots of Vista (the operating system formerly known as Longhorn) indicate that Bill and his team have once again been paying some attention to what Cupertino's been doing for the past two years in OS X.

Some of the UI improvements in Vista look promising: Finally decent-looking text rendering (hopefully this will extend to all apps), support for inline changes to the assumedly XML metadata associated with all sorts of files (like "Rating:" above -- doesn't that look familiar?), and an overall cleaner interface. Although I've always preferred this awesome theme done by Chinese designer Rokey.

Of course, the look and feel is merely a fancy dress on a pig (or a steer in this case?) if it isn't backed up by significant changes in usability, operability, stability, trustworthiness, and a long list of other things Microsoft has a less than stellar track record on.

But I was fairly impressed with XP. It wasn't gonna make me switch or anything, but XP was a vast improvement.