Despite what the recent "Get a Mac" commercials would have you believe, Vista is not some money-grubbing scheme by Bill Gates to collect enough money to make a boat out of gold-plated Benjamins so he can get to his private island in millionaire style.
However, Vista is not the end-all-be-all Windows OS Microsoft hoped it would be. In fact, Vista was not even supposed to exist.
Windows XP was originally envisioned to be the last Windows iteration for almost a decade, hence the "XP" and not a numeric subtitle of the year that would indicate a mere OS sequel. In spite of these lofty goals, XP only received mixed reviews.
The updated interface was a nice touch, but hindered processing efficiency, especially on older and slower machines where the OS would run at a near crawl. The OS has been subject to criticisms regarding a plethora of vulnerabilities, including buffer overflows and an incredible amount of malware. Service packs fixed these issues as they came, but were also months or even years too late for some.
When Vista cropped up, things looked better at first.
Unfortunately, the same issues that plagued XP also hindered Vista. The Aero interface, though admittedly very pretty, functioned worse than XP's Luna, because it had even more complicated transparency layers and superfluous animations, which led to more extreme system requirements.
While an improvement over XP's administrator system and mildly tended to in SP1, the User Account Control has enough prompts that even the most minute actions cause users to load drive bays with small explosives in a futile attempt to end the clicking madness.
However, Vista also brought some necessary changes, including a near complete overhaul of the Windows architecture with security as the number one goal. This would ostensibly keep the OS up-to-date in the coming years with new technologies and the like.
The result, though, was not totally what Microsoft envisioned. Applications ran poorly compared to XP benchmarks, and drivers that once worked fine were no longer useful and rendered an incredible amount of hardware ineffective.
Microsoft's new solution is to release the officially named Windows 7. Quite the unoriginal title, but the public demonstration at this year's Professional Developers Conference proved to yield positive results for the simplistically titled OS. Bill Gates said in an interview with Newsweek, the OS has been reworked and is decidedly more "user-centric."
A significantly high-profile development involves the taskbar. In lieu of an icon and text for a window, this new taskbar uses only oversized icons as the buttons, which are also (finally) able to be dragged and reorganized. The icons operate as a simple two-level hierarchy. One icon button will represent all the windows open for a particular application. Moving the mouse over one of these icons will open a thumbnail strip, previewing available windows for that particular application so the user can get a visual reminder of what window is what.
Moving the mouse over one of these thumbnails allows "peeking," meaning every window except the one focused on in the thumbnails will go Aero transparent and allow quick reviews over said window. This provides pretty slick usability of windows without necessarily switching around layers, but this could lead to heavy processing requirements, a problem Windows 7 is supposed to be dealing with.
These taskbar icons pave the way for a new UI device called jump lists. These are really just application specific menus easily accessed through the taskbar. At the conference, a jump list for Windows Media Player was demoed and allowed for quick playlist access, recently played tracks and genre management. This seems like a promising feature for applications that don't have or have little use for hotkeys.
Microsoft will also provide APIs for application developers to implement custom jump lists and taskbar organization.
Through data collected by Customer Experience Improvement Program, Microsoft has determined that, in general, users actively use only two windows at a time. Taking this into consideration, Windows 7 will implement a quick, automatic window organizer. Dragging a window to the left or right edge of the screen will automatically reduce the window to 50 percent of the total screen. This allows for simple and easy dual window management to reduce the amount of window switching and Alt+Tabbing of which users have likely grown weary.
Microsoft also has completely gotten rid of the Vista sidebar and anchored all the widgets to the desktop in the name of simplicity and clutter reduction.
Along the same simplified lines, the system tray now only includes icons the user explicitly told it to display. Certain icons also open optimized jump list-esque panels that allow easier use of tasks like network management.
Explorer also has been reworked to include "libraries" of files as opposed to directories, though directory organization ostensibly will be available. These libraries are simply optimized organization methods for common file types, such as organizing photos by year.
Windows 7 appears to be taking a step in the right direction (i.e., away from Vista). Microsoft has finally gotten the notion into its engineering hive-like mind that the user experience is paramount.
But don't expect the "Get a Mac" vs. "I'm a PC" battle to end any time soon.
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