AndyPuppy’s Bark

A colleague of mine from Readify posted a link to this article article on ComputerWorld and asked if we had any thoughts. The article itself is entitled “20 Things You Won’t Like About Vista” and seeks to highlight supposed problem areas within the next Windows operating system based on the Beta 2 version that was released recently.

I think it’s safe to say that I apparently did, based on my reply, so I thought I’d post it here so you can see for yourselves what I think about articles like this:

One common problem with these kinds of articles is that they mix “truth” and “lies” and “opinions” together, much like Dan Brown and his fiction-de-force The Da Vinci Code. Because you know X is true, you start wondering if Y and Z are too. I found this to be the case in this piece.

I find it ironic that the article starts out by saying it’s going to talk about the bad stuff, NOT the good stuff and then uses the remainder of the first page to highlight some of the more powerful “good stuff” features of Vista that are particularly relevant to most of our customers such as better security. And I still can’t understand the point in comparing it to OS X - they’re based on different hardware, and how many corporates use Macs besides publishing houses?

So, that said… here are my initial thoughts…

20. Is stating 128Mb video memory as a minimum requirement really that bad in today’s hardware terms? Sure, two or three years ago maybe, but now? The author then discusses ways of getting around it, including the fact that his own (admittedly subjective) testing using a 64Mb video card in a laptop didn’t slow him down any, which basically is implying that Microsoft is just being cautious with their minimum spec.

19. Aero-differences. We’ve gone through this pain before with XP styles. Even looking around here at I can see users with WinXP in both standard and classic styles. Applications look different in both and developers need to consider them when building an app. How is this different with Aero except for the fact that it might not be a user choice that dictates when Aero is used/not used? And again, at the end of his rant he then says “but it aint that bad”.

18. I think we’ve discussed UAC enough amongst ourselves to know that we do/don’t like it. I think the tell in this section wasn’t his whinging about the feature but the sidenote that said his kids would definitely be set up as standard users under Vista - it’s an implicit acceptance that he will indeed be running Vista at home and that he appreciates the very feature that he is supposed to be knobbing!

17. bah… not worth its own number - should have been part of 18.

16. Is this true or could he just not find it? I actually don’t know the answer, so feel free to give me one.

15. This could be a fair comment that we need to communicate with our clients and colleagues - but it could also be a complete non-event.

14. Hopefully this will continue to improve until RTM. I don’t really have anything to add here.

13/12. No comments

11. I agree - this is something I feel frustrated about myself.

10. I agree, sort of. I agree in the sense that changing fundamental UI designs that will affect millions of uses is stupid, but I also suspect that in twelve months time after Vista is being used in anger (perhaps literally) all over the place, the new way of doing things may well turn out better. Why? Because I think that usability-wise, if you look at Vista in this area without the baggage of previous versions of Windows, it’s actually quite nice.

9. Windows Defender Beta 2 is buggy. That’s the heading text, and to me, is self-explanatory with the word “BETA”.

8. Non-issue at this time - if it persists on final release, come back and talk to me then.

7. If you don’t think there are enough gadgets, go write some! As I’m sure a number of other people are, and I suspect the number of gadgets will severely increase.

6. Can’t comment.

5. Pure subjective opinion. I actually agree with Microsoft’s goal and if it takes me an extra click to shutdown as opposed to put the PC to sleep, fine. Does that make my “opinion” any less valid than his? No, but neither does it make it more valid.

4. Aww, complain about how long it takes to install a beta version of an operating system? Sheesh… stretching for complaints now, aren’t you? But wait - most of your comments actually talk about how good the driver support is and how you’ve installed it numerous times.

3. Whatever… am over this guy well and truly by now. If I walk into OfficeWorks, I can see half a dozen different SKUs of QuickBooks, but you know what? I’m a big boy and I can read the back of the box for a feature comparison. And lo and behold I bought the right version. Vista won’t be any different.

2 & 1. ? I have absolutely no idea. This is when computerworld.com decided to stop working for me. Now, if they had published this thing over a few pages instead of THIRTEEN, I may have actually had the opportunity to review those last problems. As it is, I’ll just give up.

— UPDATE —

OK, I regained some modicum of patience and went back to the final page of the article. Here’s what I think about the last two of the top 20 so called “things you won’t like”.

2. Pricing. Ah… an arcane art normally reserved for professional analysts who do nothing but, the author has gone to some effort to think up some pricing levels that “might” have some accuracy, some day, at some point. But who knows? That said, is there a problem with consumer OEM PC makers getting “serious” about equipping new PCs with the low end of Vista? Particularly with the Anytime Upgrade option being a more palatable solution to getting higher end versions than the current pain of upgrading XP Home to XP Pro.

1. And the number one thing that you most definitely, without a doubt, no questions asked, will not like about Vista? The user interface has parts that are (apparently) copied from OS X. Hmm… you mean, that OS that the author keeps praising about just how good it is? Why on earth is this a problem? Let me see… if I was building an application and there was a similar app already on the market that was being awarded left, right and centre for its design, I would seriously consider incorporating components of that design in my own solution. If I didn’t I would actually be making a bad business decision, ignoring the potential customer base I am supposed to be building this for.

This kind of argument smacks of the purity wars that go on from time to time - where techos implement a feature “just because” or refuse to use a particular technology because it doesn’t fit with their own personal sense of pride.

Ha.

After my blog being down for more than three months despite a few half-hearted attempts to fix it, I gave up. But somehow, left on its lonesome, it’s come back up and seems to be working just fine.

I guess that means all these things I’ve been thinking now have a way to get out… uhoh.

One thing that was confirmed this morning was that Vista does indeed have the Sidebar that was missing in Beta 1.

Apparently, much like the code that the Hot Coffee mod of GTA San Andreas took advantage of, the Sidebar code was always present within the Vista codebase, but just hidden from the end-user as it was not ready for public consumption.

Regardless of the reason, it was good to see it return - I currently use Konfabulator and while I like the gadgets I can get for it, I find it runs incredibly slowly. Hopefully the Sidebar performance will be a lot better.

Putting my developer-geek hat on for a minute, I’d just like to rave like a loonie about this morning’s keynote by Bill Gates, Jim Allchin and various other participants. I’m going to probably spend an hour or two digesting it all and writing up a proper story, but for now I want to forget that it’s been two years already since the last PDC when they showed us Longhorn.

What I mainly want to say is, wow. Vista is of course looking pretty slick. I’ve seen a lot of the new features of the OS in various other systems or third party add-ins, but to have them all baked into the core of Windows is definitely not to be sneezed at. And if Microsoft can actually finalise it all properly, this IS going to be an operating system that you’re going to want. Add the new features found in Office 12 as well and I’ve now got lots to think about.

Some of my favourite points:
Peer to peer sharing and collaboration looked cool. I would have liked to have seen Avalanche in there as well but I’ll settle for the ad hoc peering demo of deploying a Powerpoint slide over to another machine where changes were made and reflected back (my assumption is that you would be able to preclude this latter action from happening if all you wanted to do was display the file).
The templatised system for the various components within Office. Being able to change a bulleted list to a variety of graphical representations was impressive.

Concerns? Yes, I have plenty of them. For instance, not a lot was said about the programmability of the various Office applications. Everyone who knows me knows I love Office development while constantly cursing the various object models. They did show us a demo of an Excel add-in that had its own task actions, but nothing was actually discussed as to how that worked and my least favourite app to program for (Outlook) was demo’d but there was no mention of the object model redesign that I’ve heard rumours about.

Still thinking it through.

Most humourous moment? The many times the person responsible for dictating the various speakers onto the big screen got it wrong. I can understand things like Zamel instead of XAML, and also the typos where one or two letters were slightly off, but when dozens of new words have now been introduced to the already crowded English language? Someone should hire that person for the next dictionary.com rewrite.

There have been reports that the convention center along with a whole bunch of city blocks lost power. Those reports were true and for a while here in the media room everything was dark and quiet with the exception of those of us using laptops on battery power. Mostly we seem to be back up now but it brought back memories of E3 earlier this year when big chunks of the convention center went down because of the huge amounts of power being consumed.

Gotta love laptop battery power though - would have hated to be in the middle of a document on a desktop when that happened.

I spoke to a couple of network/infrastructure guys and they didn’t know what was going on either. I’ve just heard one saying that the main network is down, while the wireless network is working just fine (hence this post!).

Today (Day 0) started off with a recap of the past 12 months in case we somehow missed the various news items that have been blasted across the IT media space. While the news about the various product releases is fairly old hat to pretty much every one, but there were a few interesting tidbits that had me impressed with what’s been going on.

For instance, I knew there were about 3.5 million professional developers worldwide that use .NET as part of their development strategy. What I did NOT know however was that there have been more than 1 million downloads of the Express editions of Visual Studio - and this is before it has been released. This indicates that the concept of releasing a free version of Visual Studio languages for free is a potentially huge growth point for Microsoft. If even a quarter of those downloads translate into people becoming new developers using .NET the numbers for professionals increases by around 7%.

And the likelihood is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. When the Express editions are finally released a combination of advertising, word of mouth and the various inevitable articles in general consumer computer magazines will push these numbers even further. Of course, it also blurs the line for Microsoft in that there may be a large number of programmers happy to stay with Express rather than converting up to the professional versions of Visual Studio. How will the company count these numbers - professional, amateur; who knows?

Another statistic I was interested in was the comparison of growth of .NET development compared to Java. With the caveat that these numbers are reported by Microsoft’s own analysis group DevTracker, .NET is looking healthy. The following tables show the proportion of the developers in the US that are using the two different technologies, year over year:

Quarter 2 2002 – Java 30%, .NET 25%
Quarter 2 2003 - Java 34%, .NET 37%
Quarter 2 2004 - Java 31%, .NET 40%
Quarter 2 2005 - Java 33%, .NET 53%

One last note before I get back to the sessions. The launch for Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 is going to be huge on November 7. The main launch event will be held in San Francisco, CA, but on top of that Microsoft are saying there are more than 180 events in 74 countries to support the launch. That kind of simultaneous effort is mind-boggling, but I guess given that there are three major products all being released in step is also pretty mind-boggling too.

Enough! I need to start listening again.

I’ve discovered the ultimate time to fly - September 11. I had a complete set of 4 seats in the Qantas flight we were in, and looking around, most others had similar spacious accommodations.

To top it off we drove to our hotel in a stretch limo and besides the detours we had to make for the triathalon got here without too much trouble. The hotel (Millenium Biltmore) is old school - huge ceilings, great style decor and nicely sized rooms - add wireless broadband and the setup is perfect.

Tomorrow morning we’re headed off to the actual conference. There’s an extra day for international media which I’ll call Day Zero. We’re meeting up with various Microsoft people to hear about a general platform strategy overview, the connected systems direction and then closing with talks on Vista, VS2005 and Trustworthy Computing.

I’m looking forward to seeing Ari Bixhorn again (he’s doing the Connected Systems segment) as he and I see eye to eye on programming and the importance of VB.

I also bumped into Adam Cogan on the way from the airport and he mentioned that the guys doing ReSharper are doing a version for VB in the next version of Visual Studio which is good news as far as I am concerned - ReSharper is a great tool but since I have VB as my language of choice, I don’t get to use it much.

Not much to say at the moment - hopefully tomorrow I’ll have quite a bit more.

Well, I’m off to PDC this morning. I’m actually really excited about going this year. While Vista is something a lot of people are keen on, I’m thinking that the sleeper hit for developers is actually going to be Office 12 and the development hooks for that. I know I’m biased because I love Office development but I really do think there’s some cool looking stuff coming for creating Office based applications.

I will of course also be looking at Vista as well as anything else I can get my hands on (AMD is going to host a roundtable on 64bit computing - this might be my opportunity to find out what all the fuss is about).

Toodles - need to get going or I’ll miss the plane!

I had a pretty damned good birthday today (besides turning 35 that is).

THQ (a computer game company for those who don’t know) had their inaugural game day today and I was invited. So I got to spend from 10.30 through to 5.30 playing upcoming games - from stuff on PC, Xbox and PS2 to some really cool looking stuff on Xbox360. I know - I’m a gamer geek, but I honestly love games and I couldn’t really think of a much better birthday than spending it playing games and writing that time off as work.

That was followed by a couple hours of drinks at the James Squire Brewhouse down on King Street Wharf. A bunch of IT freelance journalists banded together to put on a small “thank you” drinks for various PR people and editors and we managed to make it fall on my birthday, so it rounded off the day quite nicely.

PDC in a few days - looking forward to it big time.

Well, Glenda and I decided towards the beginning of this year that I would work fairly hard for the first half, then take the second six months off paid work to launch my vision that is GAMEparents. It didn’t start well when my contract was extended into the first week of July and then I proceeded to have something on almost every day for the next three weeks, leaving me very little time to get the website up and running the way I had envisioned.

Even now it’s not “all there”, which has got me a bit depressed.

Anyhow, we got to the beginning of August and realised that there was no way we were going to be able to have six months off so I started looking around vaguely for work. At this stage, I still haven’t found anything that is of interest, so I’m just throwing my line out here to see if anyone’s interested in having me on board.

Those of you who know me, know the drill - .NET coding, design and all things surrounding those activities are my specialty and with my experience in the journalism industry I have a fair amount of skill in the writing department as well.

*sigh* I went to a recruitment agency today and they’ve got heaps I can do, but I want that personal touch that I normally get with my contracts and going through an agency like that kinda detracts from the appeal for me somehow.

I know - beggars can’t be choosers…

*sigh*

Oh - someone just pointed out something missing. You can contact me at andrewsblog@parsonsdesigns.com