Not really news, but an observation. I just got the above sent to me in a newsletter from MyMemory, a flash memory shop. It really is ridiculous how cheap flash memory, and hard disks for that matter, have become. Its great that manufacturers are driving prices down through competition, rather than just tacitly agreeing that consumers are prepared to pay current prices. Only a year ago, I paid £17.99 (about $37) for exactly the same product, and was getting a bargain then. I just hope the price crash doesn’t stop!

Well, as I said I’ve now put the beta on my main computer and can enjoy the beautiful Aero User Experience. So I’m going to look here at what makes the Aero user experience feel so nice.

Eye Candy

Apple have traditionally been world leaders in wowing people with eye candy, and with recent developments in the open source space such as Xgl, it’s about time for Microsoft to catch up.

Credit to Microsoft, they’ve done it well. If your computer can handle it, the transparent window decorations look pretty awesome and again from an eye candy point of view, the ‘glass extensions’ in Explorer and other windows; when the transparency is continued into the window, do look very nice.

But aside from looking nice, does Aero actually make your workspace more ‘clear’, as Microsoft is marketing it? Personally, I think it’s nice that 3D graphics cards are finally being exploited on the desktop and I like the new ‘Flip 3D’ Alt-Tab replacement, but I don’t think my workspace is a lot clearer. What I’d like to see? The concept of virtual desktops (where you have multiple workspaces, each which can have its windows open in). It’s something that, in my opinion, should have debuted in Vista. Having said that, there are third-party applications like Nview (for Nvidia graphics cards) that offer this, but it’s not as cool as having integration right into the OS. I think there’s a lot of hype (a lot of it Microsoft-generated) about Aero going to radically change the way you see your computer, but I’m not too convinced it will have that much of an effect.

There are also some other subtle changes in the Aero user experience, such as fading window transitions when opening and closing windows and mini previews when hovering over windows listed in the taskbar. I like these additions, and I think they make for that extra polish that you’d expect considering how long Vista has been in development.

Flip 3D

Flip 3D, as it’s codenamed, is the new replacement for the Alt-Tab window switching system; this time it uses the keyboard shortcut Win+Tab. Alt-Tab still works and is called Flip, but is much the same, apart from a small preview on Aero-capable systems.

Flip 3D is a very good window switcher. It’s not quite as convenient as the taskbar, but it does give you a good idea of ‘the big picture’. I suppose I would agree that this does make the desktop experience clearer, as you can see everything.

This is clearly, however an idea which has been a little more than ‘inspired’ by Apple’s Exposé, and personally I think Apple pulls it off slightly better, as the windows aren’t confined to just using a small portion of the centre of the screen. To be fair to Microsoft, though, it’s not just them who have used Apple’s idea, the Xgl people did a similar thing for Linux as well.

Menus

All of a sudden, it seems Microsoft have decided menus aren’t ‘cool’ anymore. Several applications, including Windows Explorer, Windows Media Player and Windows Photo Gallery don’t seem to show menus by default, although you can access them by pressing Alt.

Instead, menus have been replaced by coloured toolbars at the top of the window with common tasks. I suppose this does simplify things and save screen space, but a lot of people will be left wondering where their favourite command disappeared to and won’t know how to get it back. Admittedly, with Aero, menus don’t look quite as acceptable inside windows as they used to, but I don’t think the time has come to remove them completely. A lot of people depend on menus; power users in particular can go through a keyboard shortcut sequence to access a command without touching a mouse. We’ll have to wait and see what the consumer reaction to this will be.

Performance

Warning - Aero really drains system resources. With only three Aero-powered windows (Firefox, and two Explorers) in the foreground, I found that CPU usage jumped around between 0-10%; sometimes even peaking at 30%. A quick Task Manager check shows that dwm.exe, the Aero window decorator is the culprit.

It’s up to the user to decide whether they think the performace hit is worth it, and of course, it depends on your hardware (my Vista was on a 3.0GHz P4 with 1GB RAM). The transparency alone can be switched off, still leaving the nice decorations enabled in Control Panel > Appearance and Personalisation > Customise colours.

Conclusion

I like Aero. I think it’s about time Microsoft updated the Windows user interface to keep up with the rest of the operating system world. Inevitably, some people will not like Aero and will switch it off, and my concern at the moment is that there are no fairly decent-looking alternatives to Aero; Aero Basic looks terrible.

Aero is not fully integrated with all parts of Vista, and considering the size of the Microsoft Windows operating system, it’s unlikely it ever will be. There will always be those legacy applications left in to provide support for older applications, and bits which the MS developers won’t have time to redo. But Aero in Vista looks infinitely better than Luna does in XP, and to me it seems like a step forward in the evolution of the Windows desktop.

I think it will certainly earn some of the sales of Vista and it’s beautiful. But in the long run, I think it’s features like the Search that will be more likely to revolutionise people’s computing experience.

Digg this

I managed to get my hands on a copy of Windows Vista Beta 2 and I’m going to share my first experiences with the pre-release version of Microsoft’s new flagship product.

Installation

To begin with, I was pleasantly surprised by the new installation process. Up until now, the first parts of the install were handled by a text-based installer, but now that is all changed. After a fairly quick loading screen, Windows jumped straight into a nice graphical installer.

One complaint I do have about the installer is the lack of consistency. Some windows were drawn with Windows Classic styles, while some used pseudo-transparency (they looked nice, but you couldn’t move them), and some just looked strange. I wouldn’t really mind personally if the whole install was done in Classic, but it seemed very strange to have different styles here and there.

User Experience

The machine I used to test the beta on doesn’t have a meaty enough graphics card, so I am stuck with the frankly quite ugly Aero Basic interface. Apparently, Microsoft have decided that it looks even uglier than Luna (the Windows XP style) and are pulling it from the final version of Vista.

Windows Explorer is vastly improved and images are now automatically displayed as thumbnails regardless of their size (except when coming over a network). Also, the whole navigation and tasks system is updated, and I found it surprisingly easy to adapt to the new Explorer style. Search is built in to Explorer, which I’ll discuss a bit later. One thing I would add, though, is tabbed file browsing, which I find helps me organise space a lot when I’m using Konqueror as a file browser on Linux.

Control Panel

The Control Panel is completely updated, and I like it. Most of the individual Control Panel applets now open inside the main window, rather than launching a new, small window, although there is usually an option to open the ‘Classic’ version of any applet. It takes a bit of time to get used to the reorganisation, but once you do it is really nice having everything in one unified window.

Security

Security is a big focus for Windows Vista, and rightly so. Microsoft has an awful track record when it comes to security; real security features only recently debuted in Windows XP Service Pack 2 with the Security Centre.

One of the best features is User Account Control (UAC) and it picks up on something that Mac OS X and Linux have had for a very long time. When running as administrator, applications can do whatever they want to your computer. With UAC, any tasks that require admin privileges are marked with the Windows shield icon. Applications that need admin (such as installers) are also marked with the icon.

If you’re running as admin, you’re prompted to whether you launched the application and whether you want to continue. If you’re not admin, you are prompted to enter an administrator password to continue with the action.

This is a very important step forward in fighting malware, and although it can sometimes be an annoyance, in my opinion it is worth it for that extra level of security it provides.

Search

Search is awesome in Windows Vista, without a doubt. Search is built in to almost every part of the operating system, from the Start menu (convienient for searching for programs when you have loads installed), to Windows Explorer and applications like Windows Photo Gallery.

Searching is fast (and by fast I mean less than a second on a Sempron 2600+ @ 1.6 GHz with 1.5GB RAM). Searching is really easy, because search is so well integrated throughout all the applications.

In Explorer, I can search for keywords and instantly get results from all the files I have, regardless of where they are. The best bit about this is I can save my search and open it later, and it will always be up-to-date. Searching in Windows Vista is much better than Google Desktop, which is what I currently use on Windows XP, probably because of the integration and the ability to save searches.

Microsoft isn’t exactly the first to use search. One of the best examples of search at the moment is Mac OS X Tiger’s Spotlight, and it seems Microsoft have taken a leaf (or rather, a few) from Apple’s book.

Overall, Vista Beta 2 is impressive and also considerably stable considering its beta status. I’ll post some more of my impressions when I’ve had a chance to go a bit deeper into the OS.

EDIT: I have just installed the Beta on my main machine, which has a decent enough graphics setup to support all the Vista Aero interface features. I’ll post again soon with some of my opinions of that and more…

This is just a quicky, I’ll post my full thoughts on this later, but Scoble has decided that the time is right to leave Microsoft. More over on his blog. It’s certainly a big shake up for the blogosphere, and will have interesting effects, both for Microsoft and the rest of us.

VNUnet is reporting that a lot of people are labelling Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage Notification service as spyware.

The service was introduced by Microsoft through Windows Update, so a lot of users had it automatically downloaded without realising it. What the tool does is that it checks to see if your copy of Windows is genuine. If not, it nags you to buy a real copy.

Recently, however, it was discovered that the software ‘phones home’ daily, and people are starting to ask questions.

Unfortunately, the Windows licence agreement does mean that you have already allowed Microsoft to install software to your machine without permission, so there’s no escape there.

Google has released a new product, Google Browser Sync. It has an excellent premise; it syncs all of your different firefox profiles between your computers, so that you have one central profile, stored with Google, with the extension automatically downloading that profile (cookies, passwords, bookmarks, history. I don’t know if it does extensions and themes.)

I’ve often thought about writing such an extension myself, which I would have done if I could write extensions! I would add an option, though. I would allow syncing across a local network, as this would certainly increase startup times (which apparently is an issue for some people), and removes the potential privacy issue. The other possible problem with the extension is that it copies everything. For example, I would like to be able to set it to copy fewer bookmark folders to my bookmark toolbar folder on my laptop than on my desktop, as the laptop has a significantly smaller screen.

I just got into the beta version of eBible, the Web 2.0 bible tool that’s dragging the over 2,000 year old document into the 21st century! There’s a TechCrunch review here, with the rather facetious title of ‘Jesus loves Web 2.0′ . It actually shows quite a lot of promise, although it has a few foibles. It has a good range of versions available, and commentary is instantly viewable by clicking on a little button by each verse. A good idea, and a godsend (pun unintentional) for theology students.

I’ve got three invites, so if anyone has a burning desire for one, comment below. Trust me though, its not as exciting as Writely!

It’s official - Windows Vista Beta 2 is now available for the public to test. I have got my activation key now, but unfortunately the download servers are too overloaded to accept anyone else at the moment.

So grab your activation keys now and we’ll have to wait for the download to be open again. A review will be coming as soon as we get our hands on it.

Of course, there is always the option to (at a price) get the DVD sent to you in the post. More updates as they happen.

Update: Huw here. It turns out Microsoft are capping the number of product keys they will give out, so just in case they are a bit stringent with their capping, reserve yours now. Also, theoretically there’s no need to uninstall XP.

Google today launched another component in their online office suite, Google Spreadsheets. This is obviously the Excel of the suite. It is currently in Google Labs, as a ‘limited test’. I found out about it reasonably early, so was able to get my name high up on the first-come, first-served basis waiting list for accounts. I have just got my invitation email.

For a full review, see Google Blogoscoped. Philipp’s got some videos up of the service in action.

I’ve not had long with it, but from what I have seen, it looks like a very good product. What it does, it does well. For example, collaboration, although I haven’t tried it (I don’t know anyone else with an account), looks as though it has a very strong feature set, with the ability to see realtime updates and IM with people editing the same spreadsheet.

It also does formulae well. It has a nice list box with which you can chose a formula to use, and it works as I would expect with Excel formulae.

What it lacks are graphing options and the ability to change, for example, borders and fonts. These are features that are eminently possible (the excellent Zoho Sheet provides them). GSpreadsheets seriously needs these sorts of features if it wants its product to be taken seriously, both by home and business users.

The case for such a product is strong. With people increasingly working from home, or with people in different offices and countries, the need for strong collaborative tools in office software is clear. The increase in productivity possible will make people give up the inefficient status quo of emailing documents around and then having to collate revisions. Web 2.0 technologies, such as AJAX make this sort of functionality easily within reach, and provide an ideal solution. People will not, however, give up their current way of doing things if they have to sacrifice any of the features they have become used to.

The Google Spreadsheets product is a good one, but at the moment it is not one to get excited about. However, it will be in the future. At the moment, if you need a web-based spreadsheet for collaborative reasons, go with Zoho Sheet. It has more features and is far more mature. The only advantage Google Spreadsheets has over it is that it looks a little better.

Update: The Google Blog has a post on Google Spreadsheet. Mike Arrington isn’t impressed. He describes the Google Blog post as ‘blathering on’, and doubts whether Google has released a product since it’s core search that has changed the world. It seems there is starting to be a feeling that Google’s scattergun approach has got somewhat out of hand, and maybe isn’t working as well as most of us thought it was.

InformationWeek are reporting that Microsoft are going to remove the ‘Save as PDF’ function from its upcoming Office 2007 release, to keep good relations with Adobe.

Apparently, Adobe threatened legal action against Microsoft if they left the functionality in Office, saying that it would cut into their market for PDF creation products (such as Adobe Acrobat).

Microsoft are also introducing a rival format to PDF, called XPS, in Office 2007. This will remain in Office, but OEMs (companies that distribute PCs, like Dell) will have the option to completely remove XPS support from Windows Vista PCs.

Despite the PDF functionality being removed from Office 2007, Microsoft plan to offer a free patch to users which will re-enable the PDF export capability. Adobe are still not happy about this, and it seems a legal battle may happen unless Microsoft charge for the PDF patch.

This seems quite a blow to the long-standing partnership between Adobe and Microsoft, and it might result in the companies growing further apart. Adobe produce some of the most popular programs for Windows on the market, including Photoshop and Acrobat.