some thoughts on the Vista UI

Couldn't wait for the public beta, so got a friend with a MSDN sub or
whatever you call it to let me play with his beta 2 setup, and here are
my thoughts.

I think the problem is MS started out with the HW in mind, and designed
the UI to target it, instead of thinking about what the UI needs to be
then seeing how it can be implemented. It's like they were designing a
game and thought "wow, we can do this and this and this with DX9/10; now
where/how can we put this stuff in?"

take the beloved Aero glass thingy. Looks cool and gets people excited,
but how functional or useful is it to see what's behind the window's edge
"through a glass darkly"? (Keep in mind you wouldn't need to see behind
the window in the first place if the frames hadn't been made so much
bigger.) Not that useful, really. What it does do is leads to more
visual confusion and blending the windows together. It also makes it
harder to see the window caption at a glance (you actually have to LOOK
at it now). In fact they must've realized this so now many dialog
windows don't even HAVE a caption in the title bar, but incorporates it
somewhere in the window itself. Now it's just a piece of glass you click
on to move. But why waste the screen real estate?

and yet with all the new gfx toys to play with, they've made it HARDER to
see what window has the focus. The main visual cue is the different
colored close button.

the flip3D. Wouldn't it be more useful to just display a rectangular
grid of window snapshots or just large icons with titles? On a 1024x768
(typical minimum these days) you can easily get 4x3 quite large snapshots
on the screen and let user select one very quickly. But it sure is
cooler to flip through 3, 4 windows at at time IN SUPER 3D!!!

The taskbar: the glowing effect as you mouse over task bar button is a
little cheesy and makes it harder to read the caption. Again: just
because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you should.

The way the Mac handles the taskbar with the expanding/contracting icon
is both cool and functional. It's done in one smooth motion and
addresses the problem of having too many items in the bar. The Windows
team has a dilemma here. They couldn't copy the Mac, out of self-respect
if nothing else, so they tried to outdo it. But here is another instance
where less is more. The window thumbnail popup doesn't feel as good. I'm
not sure why exactly. I think it's b/c it gives you too much visual
information to process. Users learn to recognize application icons after
a bit of use (and people tend to use the same few apps most of the time).
So the enlarged icons are all that's needed for ID. The window snapshot
is too much and often changes depending on application state. Plus the
click target is still the same size. If you have a lot of windows opened,
you still have a shrinking target to click on. So it's only a fancier
balloon tip.

I think the start menu is a disaster. And no you can't revert it back to
the XP start menu, only the 98 menu. What's the idea here. Did MS
decide we'll all be using Windows on a cell phone or PDA or a TV via
remote? Click click click. Then click click click to go back. And you
lose track of where you are.

I suppose they wanted to address the problem of the ever expanding menu,
but there must be better ways to handle that. For example, detect when
the menu no longer fits on screen and walk the user through reorganizing
it. Or grouping infrequently used item under a folder. Or something.
But not throwing out the cascading menu system which most users have now
gotten used to. Heck, it's even used on web sites now.

As for aesthetic, I think it looks better than Luna blue, which I detest.
But to me it still doesn't compare to the Mac for simple elegance. It
still looks too toyish. I mean, look at the start button. That doesn't
belong in a computer OS. It belongs on a gaming console.

At least they've put back the folder tree in beta 2. Phew. It still has
a habit of disappearing and I didn't find an obvious way to get it back.

UI aside, beta 2 is more usable than the last build I tried. Doing a
search is still slow as heck, but at least doesn't bring the system to
its knees. (The machine I tested on has X2 3800+ and 2G RAM). Much
fewer UAC nags, but now the screen goes blank and resets whenever it
throws up a "do you want to..." dialog.