I finally had time to install Windows Vista beta 2 at home, and play a little bit with it. Now I understand why many of you have complained about the User Account Control always (ok, often) complaining about actions I deliberately made a few seconds ago.
For example, Vista recognizes my media card reader and suggests installing new drivers via a nice balloon message, and a second message box showing me three choices with the new message box guidelines. Then why the
<beep> is it following up with this prompt?
Can't Vista determine that everything's under control here? Obviously, this little popup will become the next "Sure, sure, sure" message box people won't even read anymore. Can't certificates be used more efficiently? I understand this is a necessary evil, but I have a feeling it's still falling short of the objective.
Another piece of Vista I'm having a love-hate relationship with is the new Explorer. I like the idea with the address bar letting me click on any parent folder name to navigate to it. That's a step forward. But Explorer is now completely useless through the keyboard. You're forced to revert to the mouse every time you travel into a subfolder. Try it. Using the keyboard, move to a folder and press
Enter. The focus ends up who knows where, and you have to power-tab to finally move the focus to the list (where it was in the first place when you pressed
Enter) and move around with the arrows. Nonsense! Why move the focus away from the listview?
At least, Vista looks good. And Windows XP got it away thanks to its new look. My wife likes the Alt-Tab and Explorer bar hovering view of active applications. I like the gadget bar, and most important, the search feature in the Start Menu. Ctrl-Esc, type a few letters, and you can select the application or document you want, just like
AppRocket or
Colibri. Sure, this kind of search lacks the features found in AppRocket, but it's currently enough for me, and
slimKEYS will replace all this soon anyway, I hope.