Vista downers (first look)

Just some quick hits after my first day of Vista RC2 & more generally the current state of Vista.

 

UAC Popup hell.  Right now I'm trying to play nicely in Vista's Least-Privilege User Account (LUA) world, and as a developer I can deal with some extra prompts - but what about my wife, and other pure end-users?    I went ahead and created a user for my wife, since she tends to use my PC for quick web browsing adventures, so I logged-in with this new (non-super) user account and proceeded to do a bit of cleanup so she can easily find the things she uses most.     What struck me the most was how disruptive  and often unexpected were the UAC popup's when doing seemingly trivial things like deleting icons off of the desktop.  I can't wait to hear my wife's response the next time she tries to get quick driving directions via Google maps.  :|

Windows Mail minus web-mail?  The first app I tried to run on Vista was Windows Mail.  When launched it explains nicely how Windows Mail is the descendent of Outlook Express, etc and then its first popup is a prompt for the email account to which you want to login.   Considering that this is all new, I figured I would pick something that Microsoft would obviously test first...Hotmail!  So, I punch in my Hotmail email, and low and behold, it says "Sorry, Http email is not supported in Windows Mail" blah blah blah blah....  WTF!?!?  Sorry folks, you must use the web UI, or upgrade to Outlook for this.   Oh my!

Bread-crumb Navigation aggravation.   I consider myself to be a fairly advanced Windows user, and have no problems adopting new navigation styles, but what I detest, is when new tools are given, but at the cost of an old ones.   The Vista explorer navigation pane is one such case.  I really dig the new Bread-crumb navigation, but I just wish they hadn?t removed the "Up" button from the folder navigation toolbar.  After years of Microsoft encouraging a habit of using that up-arrow to go up a folder, I keep missing it.   Why take it away?   For the same reason that I like to have at least 2 ways of navigating a website, you shouldn't limit users to one way of traversing files.  Breadcrumbs are nice, but far from the best nor the only UI device that is useful for navigating a hierarchical structure.

Missing-In-Action. I'm sure this has something to do with the anti-trust lawsuits, but I have to ask anyway.   Where is Windows Live Messenger?  Great, they give us an icon to download, but everything under the "Live" moniker seems like it should be integrated with Vista.  At the very least I would expect a special Vista edition of Live Messenger that was Glass-enabled and fit more seamlessly.  Yeah, its great that we have some collusion between the sidebar gadgets and the Live.com site, but is that as far as they really plan to take this?  Seems like a wasted opportunity.  Also, if Vista is to be the RSS dream platform as billed, why isn't Windows Live Writer packaged with Vista?   It seems like something that would be a great selling point for the 55-million (and growing) blog-owners, or at least to better support the Windows Live Spaces.   Also, where are the WPF apps?  We now have .NET Framework 3.0 in the OS, but I see little dogfooding of Microsoft's new application development framework.  What gives?

 

In this post, I have purposefully focused on some of the aggrevations I had, but there are still a lot of things to like, such as ReadyBoost, RSS aggregation, the Aero shell, performance analysis tools, task manager, etc. I will try to include my thoughts on these in a separate future post specifically about the Vista successes.

2 Comments

  • Almost all the frequent betas BSOD my machine. Usually while watching TV, but this has also happened with just resizing windows, copying files, leaving my PC on overnight, etc. XP runs like a champ, it's never crashed in years of constant use (minus the 6 month format and reinstall)

    UAC is also a huge problem. I love how when I set the clock on my PC I need to grant access. Or, when I try to run steam off my D: drive, it needs approval for that. Pretty much every single setting and file operation will require at least 2 extra clicks to allow the computer to continue. I've also had BSOD's during the fade-uav popup animation.

    You'd think they'd look at the mac osx security settings, why not ask for the user password? This way, when others are using my machine they wouldn't be able to grant permissions on the annoying popups they'll see every time they try and do anything. I also love how you can't turn off UAV for a single user, it's either on for everybody, or off for everyone.

    I've submitted hundreds of crash reports, with 95% of the answers saying this is an unknown issue, the other 5% say it's an issue with my TV tuner driver.

    I really wish we'd see an RC3, because I'll bet money these issues will still be in the RTM. Looks like I'll be waiting for SP2 or SP3 for these issues to be finally resolved.

  • I agree with you about the UAC hell, and I have the bread crumbs. As far as the "Missing-In-Action" items I think this is a result of the EU and all there complaining. I imagine if microsoft includes Messenger and other useful live/msn tools, someone would complain and sue microsoft for not putting there IM on the machine. To me vista is a complete waste of time now that the licensing issues are such a big deal

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