Archive for the 'Reviews' Category

Why I’m not going to review Vista

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at January 31, 2007 in Reviews, Software and Features. 2 Comments

Reviewing offline software is a bit out of the scope of this blog. But still, since I’ve been spending a couple of weeks with Vista, I thought I’ll write a detailed review. But I won’t. Here’s why.

The thing is, it has some good points, it has some bad points, and it has some mediocre points.

But my overall impression is that it’s just not that important. Not Vista or Windows, but a desktop OS in general. The world has changed in the last 6 years. Desktop OS is not the be all and end all of your computer experience. Six years ago you wanted to start your computer up, open up your applications, and work as fast and as efficient as possible. Now, you don’t really want that anymore. You need that. You expect that. Those are the basics. You want something else.

What you want now is to get online, and you want the web to work the best it can, because the web is your new playground.

Of course, you need your applications and games to work. But let’s get realistic: they worked in WinXP, they (except the games) work in OS X, and they work in Linux. New versions of applications will come out and they’ll work with Vista perfectly even if some of them stutter at this moment. But all that is nothing to get excited about. Are you excited when a plumber comes to your house and swaps some old pipes with new ones? Didn’t think so.

You know which applications I used mostly in my couple of weeks with Vista? Besides Firefox, they were: Gmail, a couple of CMSs for the sites I work for, Netvibes, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, a text editor and a bit of Photoshop. Although I write all day (and night), I’ve barely felt the need to open Office 2007, although I have it installed. And you know what? All those worked exactly the same in WinXP. If you’re a gamer, you can get mildly excited over Vista and DirectX10. But not right now, as the games don’t work any better yet. I did, though, try out over a dozen really cool new Web 2.0 applications. But I didn’t need Vista to do that.

The analysts which predict that this will be the last ‘big’ version of Windows are probably right. It’s just not a big deal anymore. Let’s get over it and enjoy the web, cause that’s where the fun’s at.

Why power users will hate Vista

Published by

Stan Schroeder

at January 24, 2007 in Reviews, Software and Features. 41 Comments

I’ve been testing the final version of Windows Vista in the last couple of days and I’ve been trying to wrap my head around it. I’m trying to figure an objective approach to it, but it’s really hard, because I simply don’t like most of the things I see. One of the reasons for this is the fact that Windows Vista doesn’t offer anything new for Windows power users - actually, it’s only taking away from them.

I could make a long list, but basically, all the problems stem from several simple facts:

First, there are no more expanding menus. Instead, you have a system similar to web browsing - one menu at a time is visible, while navigation is done with back/forward buttons. Result? Start - Program Files - Accessories - System Tools takes 4 clicks now. In WinXP, it was one click (and a short wait for menus to expand), and going back was just a small movement of the mouse. Sure, you don’t really have to click the items in the new menu, you can just hover over them and they will expand after a second, but most power users don’t want to wait - they want to do things fast. Moreover, the new menus (especially the Start Menu) offer less information because it’s all crammed in a small space. I can’t see any benefits to this new approach - all I see is drawbacks. Of course, you can turn this off in most places and go back to the good old expanding menus, but it means you’re going to have to do it every time you fix someone’s computer.

Start Menu

Which one do you prefer: the old version, or the crammed up version?

Then there are the task oriented menus. Questions, wizards, and tasks everywhere. When you want something done, you don’t want to ask questions. You want to go to that particular option and do something with it. Yet, in Windows Vista, everything is task-oriented, which may simplify things for some, but only complicates things for advanced users. For example, open display properties. You get several subsections, which you have to click again to get to the actual options. However, the option for changing the font size, is - for no apparent reason - listed as a ‘task’ in the left pane of the window. Why? Why is it a task, and why can’t it be with the other options? Why have two panes in the first place? It’s going to confuse the newbies, and it’s going to annoy the pros.

Also, there’s the placement of the options. It’s even harder to find some of them than before. I swear, most power users would probably be happiest if all options in Windows were just a long list with checkboxes, but Microsoft is doing their best to put the options in a million different places. And when the same application appears in several places, it usually opens up with different options available. The worse thing is, the options are pretty much the same as in Windows XP - it’s just a little harder to find your way around.

Here’s an example. The Resource Monitor is one of the most useful new applications in Vista - it monitors all system activity: CPU load, memory usage, disk access, network usage. You would expect this new tool to be in the Control Panel, right? Nope. OK then, Control panel, then System? No. Control Panel, then Performance information and tools? Surely this has got to be it? No.

Resource Monitor

Resource Monitor. From here you can also get to Performance Monitor and Reliability monitor, but not if you’ve opened it from Task Manager. I guess we’ll just have to remember that.

So where is it then? Two places. Start, right click on Computer, click manage. Expand System Tools and click Reliability and Performance. The other place is under the performance tab in Task Manager, but if you open it from here it will open in its own window. So, what I’m interested in is: why couldn’t this option be added in the Control Panel? It’s the logical place for it to be. Everyone is going to look there first. The name ‘Control Panel’ implicates that an application which lets you control your resources will be there. But no. For no reason at all, it’s entirely impossible to get to this option from the Control Panel. *update: it is present in the Administrative tools also, but there it’s not called the Resource Monitor, it’s called Reliability and Performance monitor. And in all the three instances I’ve mentioned here, it opens in a different window, with slightly different options on the side. Go figure.

This is a great example of Microsoft’s continuing strategy of obscuring certain important features (remember Disk Management in WinXP, and tell me how many casual users can find it? Yet it’s pretty damn important, don’t you think?), probably with the idea of simplifying things, but achieving the exact opposite effect. Microsoft engineers sure spent a lot of time thinking about the clueless users, but they haven’t added a single option that would cater to the needs of the pros. The options are reduced; menus are removed, important options are obscured. I bet many seasoned WinXP users will probably be struggling just to get things back to work as they used to, and it makes you wonder: what kind of progress is that?

Why I don’t care much about Vista’s Aero

Published by

Stan Schroeder

at January 20, 2007 in Reviews, Software and Features. 2 Comments

I’ve finally received a copy of Windows Vista final (Business Edition) for testing purposes, so I’ll be spending some more time with it in the next couple of weeks. I didn’t have a very positive opinion of the Vista RC1 when I first tested it, and while the final version has improved as far as bug and software incompatibility goes, Vista still fails to impress me - at least in the visual sense.

The first thing you notice when you launch Vista (other than the pretty slow boot, slower than Windows XP on both my new and old computer) is, of course, the GUI - Aero. Well, on my testing laptop (Dell Latitude D820 - Intel Core 2 Duo T7200@2 GHz, 1 GB DDR RAM, nVidia Quadro NVS 120M, 15.4” display - not a bad machine by any means) Aero stutters. After half a day’s work, I had to turn the animations off, because every time I closed or opened a window CPU meter would go crazy and everything would freeze for half a second. I know that with a better video card this wouldn’t happen, but still - did it have to be that demanding? Even dragging the transparent windows around on the screen seemed slow.

Even without this issue, I’m generally underwhelmed by Aero. It does look nice, but it has the feel of a WindowBlinds skin over the old Windows XP GUI. The animations and the effects seem like bloat on top of the old interface. This is a subjective opinion, but I think that it illustrates one of Vista’s biggest problems. In the 6 years of development, so many applications that can customize and enhance Windows XP have appeared that much of what Windows Vista has to offer seems dated or even obsolete. If you take Aero as an example, all you have to remember is the smooth animations of OS X, or thousands of WindowBlinds (a program which customizes the standard Windows XP) themes, or dozens of alternative Windows shells (DesktopX, LiteStep, BB4Win and others), and you’ll understand that Aero simply didn’t bring enough to the table.

And this goes for many other features that Windows Vista has. Sure, advanced system monitoring that Vista’s Reliability and Performance Monitor offers is nice, but there are dozens of WinXP applications out there which do it just as good or better. Photo gallery? Cool, but I already have Picasa. It goes on and on. In other words, as Microsoft’s team was developing new Vista features, in the 6 year long process pretty much everything that Vista has to offer has been done - and done better - for Windows XP.

Now, going back to Aero, I’ll give you my personal reasons why I plan to turn it off and never look back. One of the reasons for this is that I’ve never liked the Luna Windows XP theme - I would always go back to standard Windows 2000 look. However, after a while I started experimenting with alternative Windows shells. These are programs that replace the standard Windows XP shell - explorer.exe (not the file browser, but the shell with the same name), which is responsible for pretty much everything you see on your desktop. After some experimentation I’ve settled for Blackbox for Windows - BB4Win. It’s way faster than explorer.exe, uses up less memory, has more options, it supports plugins, its themes are cross-platform (Blackbox was initially (it still is) a shell for Linux - the Windows version is a port of some sort). It only lacks one thing - the drag and drop desktop functionality. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re interested, the place to start would be here.

In Blackbox, you can change the entire look of the GUI with a simple text file called style. I’ve created quite a few of those back in the day. If you’re interested in how they all look, you can see all my Blackbox styles here.

This brings me to my initial point. After spending some time with Windows Aero, I still don’t want to exchange it for the current look (and speed) of my desktop GUI. Would you? Here’s a couple of screenshots of my desktop:

This is a very specific and personal example. However I think it shows that much of Vista’s bling might not be that exciting to seasoned Windows XP users. All this won’t change my overall opinion on Vista much, as I firmly believe that GUI and bundled applications aren’t all that important for an OS - what’s important is under the hood, and I’m going to thoroughly examine it in the next couple of weeks. Still, it definitely kills the excitement over something Windows users have been waiting for over 6 years.

Joost beta reviewed - TV just got a little smarter

Published by

Stan Schroeder

at January 16, 2007 in Reviews, Reviews, Web, Software and Features. 1041 Comments

I installed it, I started it, and in 5 seconds I was watching television.

I did it for an hour before I remembered that I’m actually supposed to review the thing. I guess there’s no greater praise, but for those who like details, I’ve included the details as well. So, here’s what I think about Joost, the latest project from the authors of Skype, formerly dubbed as the Venice Project, for whose beta I was lucky to be invited a couple of days ago.

Introduction and installation

Joost is a streaming P2P platform for television. It brings you TV or near-TV quality content in an application that uses P2P protocols to fetch the content, but it’s not really transparent to the user, who simply has to start using it and needs not worry about how it does its thing. The app is based on Mozilla’s XULRunner engine, which basically means it’s cross-platform. It’s ad-funded, and from what I understand you won’t be able to simply share content on Joost like you can on YouTube. It’s TV in the old fashioned sense of the word - they give you content, you watch it; only on internet. It makes up for this with the quality of the content and the features of the software.

The installation is simple and smooth. Joost was behaving very nicely and it never crashed or stopped responding. I’ve noticed that when playing a video, Joost, on average, eats up around 35% of CPU time which is not that bad, but it’s also not negligible, as my Opteron 144 overclocked to 2.8 GHz is a relatively speedy beast.

GUI

Joost starts in full screen. Unaccustomed to this kind of behaviour, I was startled for a few seconds before I remembered that this is nothing like YouTube or BitTorrent. It’s television. The general idea is that you fire it up and start watching, and in this Joost succeeds immensely.

In accordance to this, the GUI looks more like a media center interface than your standard Windows application. The icons are big and easy to hit, and while the scrolling may be a little slow at some points, it’s perfect for using on the TV screen. The GUI consists of the main controls at the bottom, channel chooser on the left, info link on top and a link to My Joost, your customized Joost screen where you can load up plugins, on the right. A button for making the menu items invisible is on top left, and double click switches between full screen mode and window mode (in window mode Joost looks like a detached window of a media player such as BSplayer). It’s not the most beautiful GUI design I’ve seen but it’s good enough, and what’s more important, all of it’s transparent and made with the idea of not getting in the way of your viewing experience.

Video quality and content

I’ve got a 100 KB download connection - definitely not the fastest in the world - and the videos did stutter, but rarely. This was my biggest concern, and I can say that Joost passed this test, although not with a perfect grade - I expect further improvements in this department in the future. The actual quality of the videos varied quite a bit, but it was definitely much better than anything on YouTube or Google Video. Overally, I’d call it a compromise: it’s just barely good enough for full screen, but not any better than that. This said, the quality probably improves with the speed of your connection. Still, it’s beautiful to switch to this after all those low quality videos I’ve been seeing on the internet for years. A revolution? Maybe. I can’t stop watching it, that’s for sure.

One thing I cannot judge well at this point is the amount or variety of content the service will ultimately have. Currently, there’s enough content to watch, however there’s not nearly enough content to do a search and actually get meaningful results. The amount of content will grow when Joost goes out of beta invite-only mode, and some big fishes might jump in (currently you can, for example, watch content from MTV, or the famous auto show Fifth Gear) but what I’d actually like to see on it is cheap, independent productions. I hope they introduce a model for people to get their own content up there, because it would bridge the gap between old school TV and YouTube, but I don’t know if this will ever happen.

Plugins

One of the most important features of Joost is the support for plugins. If you’re looking at Joost as a competitor to YouTube, all that was said so far makes it clear that it definitely has some advantages (and many differences). However, if you look at it as a competitor to television - be it television from a TV tuner, cable TV or IPTV, then plugins are what’s going to make the difference. Joost’s plugins are simply widgets you can load in your Joost screen, and currently these include clock, feed reader, instant messaging (Jabber and Google talk are currently supported), rating plugin which enables you to rate the current clip with grades from 1 to 5, notice board, and channel chat. This is not bad at all, but the developers are promising many more to come. The widgets are somewhat basic but fully functional, however it’s not really important, as the possibilities are huge. Imagine watching television and chatting about it on the TV screen itself. Or watching a concert and reading new posts from your favorite sites. In one word, it’s great.

What’s not to like?

Ads. I’ve seen commercials break the program in half without a warning, which is annoying and I hope it’s just a glitch and not a ‘feature’. Other than that, ads are what Joost is funded upon and we can definitely expect them - I just hope they don’t get overly intrusive. I also expect more content and a better way to organize your own content, opposed to the current simple My Channels list. I could add other minor points, but I expect that a lot of things that are missing that I could name will probably happen in the way of a plugin.

Conclusion

Well, it’s free TV. It can’t be bad. The application works great, looks ok, and if you got a decent internet connection, you’ll have no problems using it. Its success will depend on the amount and quality of content, and of course, ultimately, the success of Joost’s ad-based business model. Everything else seems to be in place, so if the content is there, I’m sure people will love it.

*the test platform was Windows XP SP2, Opteron 144, 1 GB DDR RAM, DFI UT NF4 SLI-D Nforce4 motherboard, and a 100 KB/s download on an ADSL connection. The tested version of Joost was 0.7.3.1

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Real features new to Windows Vista

Published by

Stan Schroeder

at November 30, 2006 in Reviews, Software and Features. 2 Comments

Among the hundreds of Vista reviews I’ve read, I don’t recall seeing one that actually mentions real features that are new in Windows Vista. That means OS-specific features, not bundled applications such as Internet Explorer 7 or Windows Media Player 11

The problem is, Microsoft has been pushing their bundled apps as features for so long people have probably forgot what an OS-specific feature is. IE7, WMP11, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows DVD maker…hell, even Windows Aero GUI, those are all nice and dandy, but I for example use Firefox, Media Player Classic, ACDSEE Classic, Nero and BBlean as shell. Not much there in Vista for me, eh?

Wrong. Contrary to the popular belief, Vista does carry a significant number of new, important features. Here’s a rundown of some of the interesting ones:

- User Account Control - asks for the admin password whenever some app or part of the OS requires administrative privileges. The idea isn’t new - all Linux variants have something similar. At the moment it’s relatively poorly implemented - it will be annoying to the end user who will want to turn it off at all cost.

- Various security measures, including ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) which prevents exploits, Windows Service Hardening which prevents services to edit registry or the file system, Data Execution Prevention (DEP), and PatchGuard, which prevents third-party software from modifying the kernel. Most of these sound good, but we’ll have to wait and see how they really work.

- Hard drive encryption. Hopefully Microsoft wasn’t forced to include backdoors in there.

- DRM measures. One of the bad ones. One is Protected User Mode Audio (PUMA) which restricts the copying of copyrighted audio. Protected Video Path - Output Protection Management (PVP-OPM) and Protected Video Path - User-Accessible Bus (PVP-UAB) do the same thing for video. Finally, there’s Rights Management Services (RMS) support, which allows setting DRM restrictions to documents and email. Not much to say about these, except that we can all hope that someone will be able to reverse engineer them.

- Desktop Window Manager - handles drawing of all content to the screen. Uses more video memory than the previous one, enables all those fancy Aero effects. Lets hope we’ll never see the dreaded ‘dying window’ effect when the system is low on memory, which was a common occurence in WinXP.

- DirectX10. This one was covered well in the media, probabyl because people actually care about playing games.

- Windows Color System - should make color calibration easier. Nice for designers.

- Audio stack completely rewritten - basically, it should make all things audio faster and more stable under Windows. Audio professionals should be able to get lower latencies. Oh yeah, and if anyone ever used speech synthesis under Windows, there’s a new voice doing it, and it should sound less robotic.

- Network stack completely rewritten - native support for IPv6, better performance, better encryption, better support for P2P networking, and *much* better support for wireless networking which is good, because the old one sucked

- Stand by and Hibernate are now combined into a single ‘Sleep’ function, which basically does both: writes all the data from memory to the hard disk, and then goes to stand by mode, waits for a specified amount of time, and then shuts of completely (goes to hibernation).

- ReadyBoost - the ability to use memory from USB flash devices as RAM memory. You can also use RAM from other networked PCs running Vista as your RAM. The idea seems nice, until you remember that the idea of RAM memory is to be fast, and USB drives aren’t fast enough, nor is ethernet. A USB 2.0 flash drive is better at sending small chunks of data than the hard drive, which is obviously better when it comes to accessing and copying big amounts of data. Microsoft says that this works in combination with SuperFetch, which is a new and improved version of Prefetch, and that we should expect ‘impressive improvements in system responsiveness’. I think it all boils down to: if you need more memory, buy more RAM. If you’re desperate, stick a USB drive and hope for some minor improvements.

- Improved memory manager and processes scheduler - these, together with other Kernel and core OS changes, are IMO the most important features of Vista. These will actually determine the real performance of Vista. When you switch all the fluff for third party apps, and when you start doing some real work, this is what you will care about. Although I don’t explicitly see it in any lists, Vista should also be better at using multicore processor power.

This is just a short rundown, the most complete list of features new to Windows Vista, (but also possibly tiresome to read), see the Wikipedia article under the same name.