I’ve just been looking at Windows Vista with a colleague. He installed it on a virtual machine to play with (virtual machines allow you to create “pretend” computers - kind of like a computer inside your computer - so you can play with software with no risk of wrecking your computer - check out VMWare to see what I mean).
Here’s a screenshot of the Windows Vista desktop…
Doesn’t look familiar, does it. The panel on the right side is a docking area for “widgets” - similar to Konfabulator I guess. The “Start Button” has gone from the Taskbar too - which was always a little strange anyway; having to click on “Start” to shut a computer down. The “Start Menu” itself has been completely re-designed. It’s a dynamic list of everything runnable, categorized into groups - as you move the mouse they light up and fan out.
To give you an idea how other things look, here is the view of the available games…
It’s worth pointing out that this view is how all explorer views look. This would be the equivalent of the “tile” view in XP. The icons dynamically glow as the mouse moves over them, and they can be scaled smoothly up and down - I suspect the icons are vector based this time around; you can scale them to several hundred pixels across.
The next screenshot shows Microsoft Word in it’s new suit of clothes in Office 12…
There are a few things to notice about Office 12 - notice that the menus have gone. That’s right - there are no drop-down menus in Office 12. Everything you want to do is arranged into “command tabs” across the top of the window. Most of the content of the command tabs is dynamic - meaning it changes to suit what you are doing.
It’s not just Word that looks so different either - the entire office suite is the same. Just flicking through the new command tabs made us laugh out loud - at how markedly different the entire experience is.
Make no mistake - when Office 12 arrives, everybody is going to need to go on courses to re-learn how to use the applications.
The biggest shock is the installation footprint for Vista and Office 12. Are you ready for this? Are you sure? Try 7.5 Gigabytes. That’s pretty much eight times bigger than XP and Office 2003. How? Why? We’re pretty dumbstruck by it.
Perhaps it’s time to think about moving to Linux at home.