DogsWithoutWings.com Blog

How often have you heard this line. "Vista is only XP with a new theme". To be fair the same could be said about ME->XP, but I couldn't be paid to run ME (well, up to a certain amount). As a software developer I know the amount of work that goes into the non-visual part of a program, the part that's not on display at conference shows, the magician's assistant who does 90% of the trick but gets none of the fame (or the women). To please customers software has to have more tangible features with a prettier user interface. I mean, there has to be some way to sneak the more important features to the user.
 
"But all the new features have been done in OSX though (Calendar, Photos, Movie), so none of them count". Would you not want a car company to sell cars with air conditioners because it has already been done? It still takes money to make, should a company give it away for free? Remember all the 2+ button mice that came before the Mighty Mouse? How about all the music players before the iPod? I know it's hard to justify purchasing software upgrades, but no system will ever be perfect. We all learn from mistakes, and given a second chance, MOST programmers will do a better job.

My personal feeling about Apple? I certainly wouldn't want them to be in first place. Not only would I have to buy their operating system, but their hardware too! Other than my laptop, I haven't bought a premade in maybe 7 years. I like reusing parts to save money, I like picking all my components, and I like having a case with enough slots for multiple optical drives.

I've been playing around with Beta 2 of Vista, and my biggest complaint is its speed. I have it installed on my test PC which is an Athlon XP 2400+ with 1 gig of memory and a Geforce 5200. I may upgrade the video card soon, but with the current setup the hard drive is access way too much, and videos (not high def) seem to skip with nothing else going on. I like the new user interface, and I'm very happy they moved it away from the old Bitmap design. Maximizing/minimizing windows could be more streamlined cause it sucks seeing the window being redrawn. Being able to run as a restricted user will hopefully protect people from viruses/worms. My prediction is that most users will give the virus permission anyway (bah). Those Kournikova pics are too hard to avoid. They could probably catch me with Keira though, lol.