Vista: Under the skin
Staff writers
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Jan 29, 2007 4:34 PM
Is Vista’s suave new interface and menu system window dressing or a radical improvement in usability?
While XP employs cartoon colour schemes and cloying canine search assistants to appear approachable and friendly, Vista takes an altogether more sophisticated approach. It’s not just the pretty graphics and new icons that have changed either, with new ways of finding and managing files, configuring your PC and keeping you informed about what’s happening. Transparency is the order of the day, in some cases, quite literally.
The interface has been thoroughly revamped, with everything from the control panel to file dialogs being upgraded to make them more accessible. There are fewer multistep wizards, and entirely new interfaces have been added to make more complex areas - such as networking - easier to understand, but it’s the visual and organisational changes that will have the most day-to-day impact.
Aero & Windows Basic
Alongside a new graphics driver model that promises greater stability and an end to visual glitches, Vista brings in a new, more powerful graphics engine, known as the Windows Presentation Foundation. It’s a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) that take advantage of the power harnessed in today’s graphics cards.
Depending on how powerful your card is (see here for what you'll really need), you’ll end up with the option of one of two experiences in Windows itself - Windows Vista Basic, or the premium Windows Aero.
The most obvious change under Aero is the much-hyped glass look on windows, and the taskbar. This comprises not just the see-through title bars and borders, but a host of subtle lighting effects. The idea is to provide a more lightweight environment that interferes as little as possible with the task at hand. In terms of where your attention is drawn when working in an application, it’s largely successful.
You also get live previews of open windows when you hover over minimised windows in the taskbar - particularly handy for checking on file progress. Aero also brings a much-needed replacement for the task switcher, using live thumbnails of applications to make identification much easier. There’s also a big eye-candy hit in the form of Windows Flip 3D (accessed via the Windows key and Tab), which spins all the open windows askance, and allows you to scroll through them in a pseudo 3D environment. Even once the novelty wears off, it does occasionally prove useful.
The Windows Basic scheme ditches the glass effects, glowing buttons and live previews and, if you so wish, you can go even further and revert entirely to a Windows 2000 appearance. While Aero adds a fair amount to the experience, those with older systems shouldn’t lose sleep if their systems won’t cope with it - it’s far from all that Vista offers.
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| Windows basic mode drops the glass effects. |
Explorer
In keeping with the more grown-up approach, the farcical My Computer naming convention of Windows XP has been dumped. The folders have been reorganised too: rather than everything being crammed untidily in to My Documents, a root folder named after your user account contains discrete folders for Favorites, Contacts, Downloads, Music, Pictures and Video - plus folders for Saved Games. Besides being more logical, it’s also good news for simplifying a backup strategy, just as long as you’re reasonably organised.
Explorer windows themselves are very different too. By default, the left side holds a navigation pane or Favorite links list (also common to file dialogs), which can be edited as you see fit. Underneath that, there’s a button to bring up the old-style folder tree should you want it. The bottom holds the Preview pane, performing the same function as right-clicking to see a file or folder’s properties although, frustratingly, it doesn’t show the size of selected folders.
The big, friendly navigation buttons of XP have been replaced with a context-sensitive command bar running along the top, similar to XP’s common tasks pane, but the menu bar has completely gone, only appearing when the Alt key is pressed. Also gone is the Up button, leaving just Back and Forward buttons. Folder navigation now uses a breadcrumb trail, allowing you to skip to any part of the file path in a single click, with the Favorite links at its root. Take the time to customise that and it’s a tremendous timesaver.
Seeing what your files contain is much more straightforward; as well as the Preview pane, all icons are now treated as thumbnails, including those on the Desktop. Vista still offers XP’s tile, icon, list and detail views, but you can now resize icons through a wide range of sizes, and live thumbnails are used wherever possible.
The truth about Windows Vista
Under the skin
Security and encryption
Networking, IPv6 and beyond
Out of the box
Versions and requirements
What Vista might have beenInstant Search
Finding files in Windows XP can be a real chore, particularly if you’re not sure roughly where they are or what the file name is. Vista’s Instant Search facility aims to remedy that, and crops up everywhere from Explorer windows and the Start Menu, to bundled applications such as Calendar and Media Player. The good news is that it’s much, much quicker - if not actually instant. As soon as you start typing, results start appearing, theoretically becoming more accurate the more you enter.
Rather than searching your hard disk each time, Vista trawls through your email and user folders in the background and creates a global index. You can configure how thorough this is, choosing not just which folders are searched, but to what degree, such as compressed files or file contents. You can also use it to build an index of files on removable storage. It’s context sensitive, so the results returned are intelligently governed by the window that you’re in: the Start menu prioritises applications, the Music folder audio files.
It isn’t just filenames that are indexed either: every file can contain a number of metatags (information embedded inside a file such as its author, subject matter or category), which can be searched for in the same way. That same index is also used in Explorer windows, with each column attribute having a drop-down box to narrow down your search even further. Once you’ve set up a search, (say, documents created by you containing the words “council tax”), you can save it, creating a saved search in your Searches user folder.
Start Menu
The new search box in Vista’s Start menu (accessed via the orb at the far left of the taskbar) has other benefits. Hitting the Windows key takes the focus straight there, so you can search, launch an application or start a Control Panel applet much more quickly, and all without touching the mouse.
The rest of the menu has been overhauled too. The All programs link now reuses the same space (rather than cascading out), and it’s a fixed size: once any section of it becomes full, it adopts scroll bars rather than simply expanding to the screen-hogging proportions of Windows XP.
Sidebar & Gadgets
Since the earliest betas of Longhorn (Microsoft’s codename for Vista), the sidebar has had many forms. Originally slated as front-end for system notifications, it’s now simply an area to dock gadgets - small XML applications that perform simple tasks, such as a photo viewer or displaying RSS feeds. You can also drag them onto the desktop, exposing more features - the current weather gadget, for example, expanding to a three-day forecast.
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| Sidebar has numerous gadgets available. |
A number of these gadgets are included in Vista (some more useful than others) with more available online. The sidebar and gadgets come into their own if you’re using a widescreen monitor with a high resolution, but we suspect that many people will simply find them a distraction and either use a key gadget or two, or turn it off completely.
Virtually
Rather than worry about where your files are actually stored, the idea of Virtual Folders is to simply show them as if they were all in the same place - any document files, regardless of where they're saved, would show up in a Documents folder. Despite playing a large part in early Longhorn builds (as well as Microsoft's marketing), beta testers found it confusing in practice, and Microsoft gradually relegated them into the wings. They're still there, though - in the form of Saved Searches, so you can create your own if you wish.
Conclusion
Getting used to a new OS is a tricky process, and Vista is no exception. How well and quickly people adapt to the changes will largely depend on their experience and how they work, but for most people, it should be worth the effort.
There’s a lot to get used to: the occasionally obscure windows furniture, the benefits (and limits) of Instant Search, and the baffling number of options for filtering and labelling files for a start. Vista is also immensely configurable, and just as many immediately switched off the animated search companion and common tasks panes in Windows XP, we’re sure many will similarly customise Vista to suit their needs.
Although it’s nowhere near as radical as was originally planned, there’s no doubt that, from an interface point of view at least, Vista’s overall approach is far more mature, pleasant to use and, once you’re used to it, much faster. And while it’s not perfect, we can’t see anyone wanting to go back to the days of Windows XP.