Cogs can think.

By God IE7 is a mess. I did not blog about it yet, so here it goes.

Too many different button types.

By default, the menubar is gone. This makes IE7 not fit in with the rest of Windows. That sucks.

When you do enable the menubar, it sits underneath the location bar! What would happen if the steering wheel suddenly was placed above the front window? Err…

IE7 itself uses a completely different theme and icon set compared to the rest of Windows XP. It stands out like an eyesore. Bad.

They place the replacement for the menubar, a series of icons of which some are icon+label, and some just icon (at will, seemingly, luckily it can be altered), at the right of the tab bar? Why? What problem does it solve?

When you disable tabbed browsing (I hate tabbed browsing), the icon bar mentioned above moves to the left (sanity!), but now the unnatural order of location/menu/iconbar looks even weirder…

This is a UI disaster. IE6 may have been a bad browser security-wise, at least it made sense UI wise. This IE7 thing is simply a mess. UI-wise. I’ll never be able to use this weird unnatural layout, as it simply makes no sense. The most important part of your window (other than the actual content, which is more important than any other thing) needs to be located as much to the center as possible, and now, the most important parts in my browser experience (location bar and bookmarks bar) are located the furthest away from the center of the window! Argh!

We have to get rid of this nation that, for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. (…) If we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude. The era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I’m concerned.

Just a quote from Steve Jobs’s keynote speech at MacWorld, Boston, 1997. The world has changed. Sadly.

An article at CoolTechZone (I never liked that Fisher Price name) glorifies the iPod and states that Microsoft will never be able to crush it. How wrong they are. Microsoft needs to do little:

1. Design something that is as ‘good’ or at least marginally better than the iPod. Not hard to do, as the iPod is a crap little thing in every aspect (build quality, audio quality, price, fixability), and sell it at a bargain price (which MS can do with such cash reserves);
2. Install the sync/online shop software (Windows Media Player 11+) on every OEM install of Vista;
3. Give a big sack of money to any chart-leading ‘artist’ to carry one in a music video;
4. Byebye iPod.

It’s that simple. It will take very little to replace one inferior product with another. Of course I will continue to use HiMD.

Now this is why companies and governments suck ass. It doesn’t matter whether the headquarters has Apple, Microsoft, or Dutch Government on it– they just don’t give a fcuk about us as individuals. It’s the same reason I hate politicians and government officials. They aren’t people; they’s just sucking their boss’s cocks as hard as they can, and us individuals don’t mean a thing.

It’s kinda pathetic, in the end.

For all to see: a video and screenshot proving to the world that Aero will run fine on even pre-DirectX9 videocards, in this case, my Ati Radeon 9000 128MB RAM. The computer used for this video only has 512MB of RAM (old and slow pc-133 even), and an Athlon XP 1600+ processor.

However, in order to bypass Vista’s DX9 compatibility check of the videocard it runs on, you need to do some minor registry tweaking. Since I’m not sure about the legality of that stuff, fire up Google to find which tweaks.

One caveat: even though window borders were transparent during these tests, they did not sport the blurr effect. The fact that this effect seems to have been disabled might mean that less strain was imposed on the crappy videocard. Bear that in mind.

I’m putting this video up as proof for each and every one to see that FUD has been making its rounds around the internet against Microsoft, instead of by Microsoft ;). Since I hate false information… If you would like to share your videos of Vista running on ‘older’ hardware, let me know, and I’ll add your videos to this page. Bear in mind that I cannot host all the videos, since my space is limited, so host them somewhere yourself.

Oh. My. Fcuking. God.

David Pogue,

You complained about Vista stealing stuff from Apple’s OS X. You were at the keynote at CES, and THUS you now are completely educated and experienced in using Vista. Sure, my friend. Let’s recap the things you complain about:

Transparent window edges. Well, it’s true that Vista looks nicer than any previous version of Windows. But I’m just not sure about the value of transparent window edges. They’re cool, sure; but exactly how many times, in your work life, have you muttered, “Darn! If only I could see just the part of the background window that’s currently obscured by the 1/3-inch margin of the foreground window”?

I have been using Vista on my machine for a few weeks now, and even though I was the first to say, “what’s the use in transparent borders??”, I now completely understand Microsoft’s point. They wanted to do 2 things in the Vista Aero UI: 1) create a sense of depth, and 2) put the actual repeating UI elements (window borders, etc.) out of focus; make the user focus on the actual content. It takes USAGE to figure out they’ve succeeded in doing just that– you cannot understand that by watching a keynote.

Widgets. Vista will let you summon, at the right edge of the screen, widgets: single-purpose, single-window little programs. One’s an egg timer, one’s a news ticker, and so on. It’s a lot like the Dashboard in Mac OS X (or the shareware Konfabulator that came before it), except that apparently, you can’t put the widgets anywhere on the screen you like.

The whole concept of the sidebar is much older than Dashboard in Tiger. You would be right as to say that in effect, Apple has invented the idea of widgets (in pre-System 7 environments), but that wasn’t because Apple had this cool idea of widgets; no, it was a nescesity. Because those early systems lacked multi-tasking, Apple needed a hack to give a sense of multitasking. And as such, they created this idea of ‘desk accessories’– small applications like calculators, that weren’t really calculators, but drivers, so they could run simoultaniously, giving a sense of multitasking.

Apple ditched this concept with the advent of multitasking in I believe System 7. Then, with the advent of OSX, we had Konfabulator– the same basic idea (mini-apps) but done in acompletely different way, and this time ’round not as a hack, but as a feature. Apple blatantly ripped the creator of Konfabulator off, and implemented an exact copy of it, renamed it, and squealed innovation.

But, before Apple did Dashboard, the earliest builds of Longhorn in 2003 and maybe even 2002, already had the sidebar, in which you could load, well, plugins (widgets) that did the same as Dasboard widgets do now. Who’s ripping off who here?

Other than that, BeOS had replicants. Also very similar (but replicants had much more potential). I believe os/2 had widgets too, thanks to Stardock (and thus Windows too, also thanks to Stardock).

3-D application switcher. With a keystroke, Vista can present you with a stacked deck of every window that’s open on your machine, making it easier to hunt through them for one particular window. It’s a lot like the Exposé feature in Mac OS X, except that you don’t get to see all of the windows simultaneously; you have to walk through them one at a time with the mouse or keyboard.

I do not really see the point in this 3D application switcher either. But to call it a rip-off of Exposé? Are you serious? Exposé as well as this 3D switcher are just a logical step forward from the ordinary alt+tab switcher, just two different ways of doing the same. Hey, Apple has a two-button mouse now, a total rip-off of all other mice since 1267! I mean, not every tiny insiginificant feature even deserves to be looked at in the sense of a rip-off.

Vista has icons. It is such a rip-off of BeOS– BeOS also has icons!

Global, fast search. Vista can now find words in any of your files, quickly and easily, just like the Spotlight feature of Mac OS X.

Spotlight is nothing more than an improved variant of BeFS from BeOS– illustrated by the fact that ex-Be engineers now work at Apple. It is clear to everyone who has even the slightest understanding of the operating system business where Spotlight came from. Apple took BeFS, improved upon the concept by adding searching inside documents and squealed innovation.

Other than that, Vista’s search also started somewhere in 2002/2003. I even remember using it in 2003.

Photo organization. Some limited photo editing is now built into Vista’s photo browser, which couldn’t look more like Apple’s iPhoto program if you ran it through a copying machine.

I’ll give you that. Then again, there were a thousand iPhoto-like apps before Apple. Should now suddenly no one be allowed to make photo managers anymore, just because Apple made one of those thousands?

I’m sorry David, but by reading your article I have only come to one conclusion: you are an obvious pro-Apple, anti-MS troll. Nothing more and nothing less. And yes, I use two Macs on a day-to-day basis, and I’m really happy with them. But at least I don’t have my distortion field up.

Good day,

Thom Holwerda
Managing editor of OSNews.com

If Microsoft is putting as much thought into Vista as they’ve been putting in the new Office 12 UI, than the competition is screwed. Seriously screwed.

Office 12’s new UI is awesome. Now that I’ve used… Err, read about it, it is awesome. I can tell you that. It may look odd at first sight, but wait until you’ve used… Err, read more about it. OpenOffice: be afraid. Be very afraid.