This blog entry is about some projects I am trying to push forward and my endeavor to migrate my development environment to Microsoft Vista.
The last few weeks were very intense. A colleague of mine and I are working on a new product that is starting to get in shape. A file sharing tool that facilitates available free online storage and will hopefully released by the end of the year.
We already spent about one man year in this project and it is growing day by day. All core components have been finished and right now we are plumbing the parts together.
In the last few weeks I was also working on several smaller projects:
First of all I want to replace this blog using ASP.NET MVC. C# is my favorite programming language, and with the MVC framework it even seems to get suitable for creating web sites. Right now I am tinkering around with some Ajax live updates and Textile previews. Hopefully this project brings enough experience to put up and run a corporate website to sell our product mentioned above.
Because hosting a Linux Machine is much cheaper and is easier to maintain, I decided to put a Windows 2003 R2 server into a VMWare Server VM and host the web-sites on my Ubuntu server at home. As a side-effect it is now easily possible to move the Windows installation to another host OS. Usually I am against virtualization, because it complicates things, but making a web-site physically movable, gives you a lot of more flexibility.
Earlier this month I was visiting IEEETabletop conference in Amsterdam and discussed a lot of ideas of future UIs with friend of mine. We actually drafted a great product that is leveraging these new multi or shape touch input devices. We may start this project in 2009.
It’s time now to interact with the content in a direct way, indirections like keyboard and mouse may be eliminated in future desktop UIs, as seen today with the iPhone.
I moved to Windows Vista SP1, and it was an entirely frustrating experience. The only good things in Vista is the side bar, and probably the explorer search box. Everything else seemed to go down in usability compared with Windows XP: Here is my installation log:
- Explorer more often shows an inconsistent state with the file system, you move some files, if moving fails for some reason, Explorer seems to forget them.
- Desktop icons are losing their position if the files behind get modified.
- The dialogs that appear on file system overwrites are graphically much to heavy to be confronted with, and mostly the best option is the last one offered.
- Copying and moving files in Explorer seems to try to check user rights and the amount of files before it starts, but there seem to be limits. I copied one of my larger directories and the pre-scan step did only scan 14000 of about 50000 files, showing an inconsistent state all along and finally presenting a dialog that some files could not be copied because of some security violations. I expect Explorer to precheck everything before starting to copy! Sadly it was even possible to set the required permissions from within the current account, so I wonder: If I have the permission (as Administrator) to change the settings to what I want them to, why do I need to actually change them at all if I want to copy some files?
- There are a lot of new system services which go over your harddrive all the time. If you want the slightest control, configure the indexing service, disable automatic creation of restore points as long you are installing software (otherwise your harddrive won’t stop ever), disable automatic defragmentation (this is totally useless for desktop configurations), better should be done by hand, additionally may disable SuperFetch. Also, setting a fixed location and size of your pagefile.sys may help, too.
- Configuration of Background Color and some other settings are simply lost if you switch from Aero to classic and back, eventually disable Aero features using “Performance Information and Tools” in the “Control Panel”. The Aero Engine (3D Desktop) can be disabled by disabling “Windows Composition”.
- Multi-Monitor configuration: Don’t expect your Explorer Icon positions to be retained as long your graphics driver is not properly installed and the monitors are configured. Sometimes you even end up with all Explorer icons stacked up in the left part of your primary screen.
- Glass: Fancy at first, but totally distracting when you see through your windows borders, it’s like driving a car with transparent frame components, so, effectively glass is totally useless and distracts, better disable it.
- The new Vista font: It simply looks broken. My suggestion: replace it all by Arial. The standard Vista font is pretty condensed and its spacing of glyph parts looks irregular and may annoy your eyes on the long run.
- New Folder Icons: IMHO totally broken, they look somehow thorny and so absolutely unfriendly (imagine you would feel them when touching them, ouch!), they conflict with the round and “seamless” and “smooth” vista style, they show a vertically balancing folder where – by rules of gravity – content must fall out from. Because of their rotation, it is not even possible to associate fast enough with anything in the real world (who uses such folders, anyway).
- ClearType: The quality is again rather disappointing! Best choice: Disable it everywhere, you won’t be disappointed, but beware: The standard Vista font looks even more ugly without it. You may reenable ClearType together with Arial.
- Auto-Thumbnails on Desktop icons: Nice feature, but I don’t know yet for what it is worth, it somehow distracts from the text below, because now most of my PDF, PowerPoint and MindManager Icons look different. We will see if it suites me in the long run.
- Windows Popup Animations: Initially I found it pretty cool, smooth window transitions are welcome, but when windows popped up initially, the animation was pretty distracting. My eyes were not able to grasp the window content as fast as without, so I disabled it “Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing”, well, but changing this setting disabled the minimize animations, too, sad.
- The New Start Menu: It basically finds a lot, but mostly not want you want to find, or too much. Launchy seems to be a better alternative because it searches only in Programs. Additionally, when selecting from “All Programs”, the screen space restriction (you can not resize the start menu) is pretty annoying, and when you open sub-entries it seems to be rather slow. I would personally prefer some solution where it expands and uses the rest of the screen space. Especially on a 24 inch full HD TFT with 50+ programs installed, fiddling around in the start menu is heavily annoying.
- I found no way to create and position additional toolbars. Even if you unlock toolbars you can not detach them from the Start bar anymore :(
- Control Panel: All these layers over layers and different applications mixed with legacy dialogs is totally confusing. I am never able to remember how exactly a setting can be reached.
- Power Options / Advanced Settings: Every time you select a different power plan, the entries fold again, making it impossible to compare power plans. It would be nice to get some overview of the detailed settings.
- When clicking the right mouse button on the power button in the start menu, a properties entry appears, but this does not allow to change the functionality of the button.
- When trying to explicitly defragment a volume, the defragmenter always analyzes all volumes. When you run defragmentation, it does not say when it is finished. For defragmenting a 100 GB drive it may take several hours (I don’t know how much exactly, it ran the night and half the day), there is no option to shut down the computer when it is ready. Bad usability anyway.
- The new desktop window manager adds one frame of lag to any .NET WPF application. Probably this is a graphics driver problem.
- If you need a guaranteed epileptic seizure, install the latest NVidia drivers on a multi monitor configuration. I’ve not counted the number of times the monitors are switching on and off, but the installation process could be surely used to support the effect lighting of some techno events.
Tipp:
- To use the shutdown menu: Always select the explicit option or configure it somewhere in the Control Panel: Power down is configured to put the computer in Stand-By. Stand-By is only useful for Notebooks and Desktops with UPSs. Someone should have told Microsoft … Off means off.
Why I installed Vista? Because users of my future software will be using it.
No offence Willi, but now it’s time for me to buy some more hardware from Paule.
Be more direct!
yours
armin
