When i previously blogged about Vista, i had just spent a few hours working with it on my girlfriends new laptop.
It was my first real chance to get Vista to myself for a few hours.
I didn’t like it. It was trying to widgetize windows XP and fatten it up with tubs of gloss and polish. That was, and still is, my opinion on it.
But i noticed how people’s faces light up when they see the sort of ‘cool’ factor involved… running Vista and Media Centre, all the little touches of class when scrolling etc..
Very smooth, very easy on the eye.. Now that sort of stuff doesn’t really interest me much as a heavy user of computers. I want something to just do the job i want without any fancy effects or diversions along the way.
But then i started thinking… if this sort of stuff WOW’s average Joe’s and gets them interested in computers and multimedia, surely that’s an achievement, surely i shouldn’t be criticising something that can attract more people in to IT.
After all, the more people we have that use computers, the bigger the internet becomes, the more content we have, the more readers we have, the more money people spend etc.. Vista does look cool i suppose to an outsider knowing nothing really about computers. I guess it’s pretty user friendly too..
So with that in mind, i have to change my view on Vista slightly. It’s still fat and too fancy in my eyes, but in a ‘promotion of IT / attracting people to use computers/internet’ sense, i think it IS perhaps more valuable than we may think as webmasters/tech savvy people.
my wife has vista on her laptop, it’s not fun.
I’d rather use Mac Os.
I’ve not had a proper play on Vista yet, but from what i see, i don’t think i will be upgrading just yet. If i was to buy a new computer, i will probably just get used to Vista.
A friend of mine just bought a mac mini and I saw it in action, watching some short videos and browsing photos. It looks absolutely gorgeous, you can set it up to have a basic menu of images movies and music
which can be navigated by use of a remote control.
Any one can pick it up and use it and then fire up safari and surf the net.
The thing is, the machine isn’t actually very powerful – certainly nowhere near vista spec.
It’s a pity that VIsta seems to waste so much energy on just displaying programs and transitions/effects
something that should never be much of an overhead.