Vista: Out of the box
Ross Burridge
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Jan 29, 2007 4:54 PM
Microsoft has always included a number of bundled applications with Windows, but Vista takes it further than ever. Here’s a look at the main attractions.
Photo gallery
Available in: Vista Home, Vista Home Premium, Vista Ultimate (TBC)
While Windows XP has basic photo-management tools built in, Vista goes a step further by bringing in a dedicated application. It’s a slightly awkward split into three modules (a gallery, preview and editor), but it does add significant new features.
The main gallery screen provides an Explorer-style tree view on the left, allowing you to sort photos in a variety of different ways, with the ever-present Vista search box available at the top. The middle section shows scalable thumbnails of your photo library, while the optional detail pane on the right displays the file’s key metadata, such as when the picture was taken. You can also add captions and metadata tags to pictures here, all of which are indexed in Vista’s search engine, as well as shown in the Gallery’s tree view.
Double clicking on any picture will take you to a larger preview screen (essentially the same as the one in XP), but click on the Fix button and you’ll be taken to an editor, where you can auto-fix the colour balance and brightness/contrast (with mixed results), or make a series of finer, manual adjustments. Most useful of all, though, is the effective, red-eye removal tool, which will suffice for the needs of most casual photographers.
Windows Media Player 11
Available in: All versions (TBC), except ‘N’ editions.
Though the European Union has forced Microsoft to produce a Media Player free version of Vista, it’s still bundled in all the regular versions of the operating system. Version 11 brings some major changes, both visually and behind the scenes, primarily aimed at ease of use. The most obvious change is the generous use of album art throughout the program, rather than the text-based tree view found in previous versions.
You can now browse by artist, album title, song, genre, year, rating or folder, and the search box once again makes an appearance. It’s much, much faster too, with both keyword searches and scrolling through even large collections feeling responsive.
As before, you can rip music from CDs, burn your own compilations and synchronise with media players, and there’s also the promise of new online music stores integrated into the interface — including MTV and Microsoft’s fledging Urge. Windows Media Connect server is also now built in, making light work of sharing your library with other computers or Universal Plug ‘n’ Play devices across a network.
Windows Media Center
Available in: Vista Home Premium, Vista Ultimate (TBC)
Until Vista, you had to get the specific Media Center Edition to take advantage of Microsoft’s home entertainment suite. Even then, it was never officially sold without accompanying hardware, and still needed specific video codecs installed to work properly. But that’s all changed in Vista: not only is there an MPEGII codec installed (so it will play DVDs out of the box), but the Media Center interface will be included with both Home Premium and Ultimate versions.
The headline features remain the same — you can access photo, video and music galleries using a remote control (or your mouse and keyboard) — but the interface has been given a good polish. Configurable thumbnail previews are used throughout each section, and there are new ways of sorting through libraries — music can be organised by album artist, composer or year, for example, and the photo gallery supports Vista’s ability to add tags to your pictures.
The interface is now much more discreet: if you’re watching TV, most menus will be smoothly overlaid on top, including the electronic program guide, which now comes in a more compact version. The cable TV CableCARD format is also supported, although there’s currently no hardware around to take advantage of it. There’s support for up to four analog / DVB-T TV tuners (two of which can be HD), although you’ll still need the requisite hardware.
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 beenWindows Movie Maker/DVD Maker
Available in: Vista Home, Vista Home Premium, Vista Ultimate (TBC)
Despite jumping four versions since the latest release for Windows XP, Windows Movie Maker 6 isn’t actually a huge upgrade in itself: aside from minor cosmetic changes, there’s a small increase in the number of effects, plus a handful of new transitions. It now also supports the recorded TV (DVR-MS) files that Windows Media Center Edition produces, so you’ll be able to trim down recordings, remove adverts or downscale their resolution.
If you’re running Home Premium or Ultimate Editions, there’s also support for importing, editing and burning Windows Media HD format, although you’ll need a fairly powerful PC to handle it. The embedded video preview window will also take advantage of any graphics hardware you have, so is no longer necessarily restricted to 320 x 240 pixels.
As well as popping up when you author DVDs from within Movie Maker, DVD Maker is a standalone application in itself. It’s basic, but could prove handy as a quick and dirty way of producing photo and video slideshows, complete with soundtracks and automatically produced DVD menus.
Windows Mail, Calendar and Contacts
Available in: All versions (TBC)
We’ve had Outlook Express since Windows 95, but Vista’s built-in email client comes with a brand new name: Windows Mail. It’s an almost identical program, with a few added extras bringing it up to date. Most significantly, there’s now a configurable junk mail folder, which also provides a degree of phishing protection, and Vista’s instant search engine to make finding previous correspondence substantially faster. Support for Internet newsgroups remains, with the addition of “community ratings”, allowing users to vote on the usefulness of posts.
Windows Contacts, rather than being a standard application, curiously presents each contact as a file in a Contacts folder sat in a user’s home directory. It’s a big step forward from the previous Windows Address Book though; more accessible and supporting more fields. You can also import and export contacts using vCards or Comma Separated Value (CSV) files.
Most significant of all, though, is the Calendar application, entirely new to Windows Vista. Supporting the popular vCal and iCal formats, much of the interface is a simplified version of Office Outlook, but you can still set up complex appointments or recurring events, and generally all from one screen. You can have multiple calendars, publish them online or subscribe to other people’s. Aside from the lack of Exchange integration, there’s surprisingly little missing, and these three applications should cater for most people’s day-to-day needs.
Internet Explorer 7
Available in: All versions
Microsoft’s much-maligned Web browser still retains the lion’s share of the market, yet it’s remained largely unchanged since the release of Windows XP. On the surface, Internet Explorer 7 brings in a number of usability changes, removing much of the toolbar clutter of previous versions and adding tabbed browsing — albeit some years after the competition.
Like much of Vista, the menu bar is hidden by default, with common tasks accessed via drop-down icons and arrows. The history and favourites features have been combined into a drop-down “Favorites center” on the left, which also incorporates quick access to the new support for RSS — navigate to a page with an RSS feed, and an icon in the toolbar will turn orange to indicate it. A search box is once again present at the top right, which you can customise to a search engine of your choice.
Security has also been a prime concern and, in Vista, IE7 runs what Microsoft calls Protected Mode. This effectively sandboxes the application, denying it access to any of your machine’s local resources without explicit user permission — a feature that won’t be available in the XP version. There’s also a phishing filter which checks against a regularly updated blacklist of known fraudulent sites, and all windows (including pop-ups) have their own address bars, so you’ll always know where they come from.
Warning: Please note that the software bundled with each version of Vista is subject to change.