Made the switch to Vista
Well I took the plunge this weekend and installed the August CTP (build 5536) on my MacBook Pro. I know, I couldnt wait for RC1 to be posted to MSDN. So far everything has been running smoothly. Due to the nature of working on LearnVisualStudio.NET I have all of my dev tools in VMWare so changing out primary OSes is actually a breeze for me.
I've ran Beta2 on a secondary desktop machine in the past and let me say that build 5536 is a great improvement.
Here's my likes and dislikes:
Tip Of The Hat
Windows Search
After using spotlight on the OS X side of the house I really missed that search capabilty when using XP. Yeah you could use Google desktop search and all but that still felt just hacked on top. The search in Vista feels just as integrated as spotlight in OS X. I'm not looking for a flamewar on who did what first here. The bottom line is search is something that everyone needs no matter what OS you use and Vista has delivered from what I've seen.
TIP: It seems that you can search in parts of email messages too using a from:,subject: like prefix. I tried doing "from:Bob" and got just the emails that were from bob in the search results.
Windows Photo Gallery
Goodbye 3rd party photo apps. I've tried everything from ACDsee to Photoshop Album/Elements to Picassa for organizing my photos. I have about 18 gig of digital photos spanning from 1999-today. Photo Gallery rips through them like butter. Windows Photo Gallery has iPhoto beat IMHO. Even with all this goodness there are still some things that I wish were better. (more on that in the wag of the finger section)
Windows Media Player
WMP11 is a big improvement. In this build MS FINALLY saw fit to ship a software DVD codec! Performance doesnt seem that great though. For whatever reason playing a DVD at any other resolution than native looks like crap. I hope this is just a video driver issue or its still an early build of the codec.
For music unfortunately I use an iPod so using MP to manage my music collection is probly not going to happen right now. Hey Apple, you need to start your photocopiers and add a view to iTunes that lets me browse by album art!
Windows Mail
This is basically a revamped version of outlook express. The reason I like it though is that it now stores all its email as simple .eml files! These are just plain text files so compatability with other email apps in the future should be high. My main concern with OE or Office Outlook is the proprietary message store. Since I'm no longer a cog in a large corporate machine Windows mail seems to fit my needs. Oh and no more cryptic guid folder for storing the mail either. Mine is under: C:\Users\Dave\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Mail.
Wag Of The Finger
Windows Photo Gallery
Pretty please with sugar on top give me more options for naming folders and files when importing pictures. I DO NOT want to use a "tag" as part of the folder or file name. I want ot use a filesystem scheme that makes it easy for me to back up the photos. A simple date time taken scheme like 2006\August\20060801_123345.jpg works. at the end of a month or year I can back up 1 folder and I know that folder will not ever change.
Requiring me to enter a tag as part of the folder name is just lame. If I have a mem card with birthday pics and 4th of July pics on it what "tag" should I use when importing? Heck I dont even have the option to import just some of the photos. This is just downright lame and makes the feature useless. I'll still have to resort to 3rd party tools like Breeze Systems Downloader Pro.
LEAVE MY ORIGINALS WHERE I CAN FIND THEM! After you edit a photo it nicely keeps a copy of the original. The problem is that it tucks it away under the hidden "AppData" folder: C:\Users\Dave\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery\Original Images
This is just stupid. If you dont realize this is going on and you dont let windows handle all the backing up for you you are going to lose some of your original photos.
Whats even better is if you decide to relocate your Photos folder to a differnt drive than C, you have to always remember to come back over to the C drive and backup your "Orginals".
My suggestion? Create a folder called "Originals" directly under the folder that the image is in and once a photo is edited save the orginal image in that folder and auto tag it as "Orginal"
One last nit pick. Get rid of the sample photos and music. Step 1 after installing Vista is to remove all the demo content from MY library. If the purpose is to show the user how the app works use an introduction video or something to show them.
Volume Shadow Copy/Auto Backups
I may just need more time to play with this but I just dont get it. Everytime I think I understand how its working I realize I dont. If I'm having trouble using it how is joe home user going to cope? People gave Apple a hard time about ripping off MS with Timemachine but at least they are focusing on a UI that average people can understand.
I'm assuming if I use the "Backup Status and Configuration" to setup a scheduled back up that once these backups are made they will simply show up in the "previous versions" tab. This is not intuitive and after reading the help apparently there are two ways to restore a file. First you can restore from a "Shadow" copy. Second, you can resotore from a backup. Whats the diff why do I care? What is the decision criteria for using "System Protection" on a data drive vs using the Backup and Restore Center?