Settling in now. Already starting to take Vista for granted, and noticing fewer differences. That's a good thing, in my opinion: technology should just be there, not demand you to think about it.

A lot of little things that didn't seem to work before are now working. A lot of my task notification icons seemed to disappear under XP. No, not hide, using the hide feature. They were just gone: the power icon, the volume control, the safely remove hardware icon, and some custom icons I had installed. Sometimes I could make them appear by activating them in their respective Control Panel applets; but then, in no time at all, they would be gone again. It wasn't annoying enough for me to spend time hunting down a fix, but it was annoyong. Now they're all there, right where I expect them. I'm learning to rely on them again. That's a good thing.

To go with the theme of discoverability: search functions in Vista are drastically expanded. I mentioned that it was hard to find admin tools that had moved again; but the easy way to find anything is just go to the Start menu and select Search. I type in Computer Management, for example, and it pulls up related items, including the Computer Management icon. I double-click it, and there it is! Now I could get to it a lot faster if I knew where it was; but I can certainly find it faster with Search than by hunting through all the different places settings might hide.

I'm looking at downloadable gadgets for the Side Bar. So far, I haven't found any must-haves; but I can see where some people could find some of them useful. One, for example, is an eBay auction watcher, which can alert you when bidding happens on auctions you're watching. Another is a prayer-time calculator for Muslims, which can be a complex calculation. There are lots and lots of different news headline gadgets for general news or specific fields. There are game gadgets and joke gadgets. There's a piano gadget. There are a bunch of different radio gadgets. And more, and more, and more!

The Down Side

Just as I'm starting to take the features for granted, I'm starting to get used to the limitations, and so notice them less.

Probably the biggest problem I'm having right now is that under XP, I had a very full, very complex Programs menu. It ran to three columns, even with stuff organized into folders as much as made sense. Well, under Vista, those all became one long, dense, scrolling column. That means almost anything I need requires scrolling. I need to find a way to split it into columns.

Goodbye, Acrobat! There's a downloadable free add-in that allows you to save documents as PDF files. I'll try it a few times; and if I can trust it, Acrobat Writer is gone!

There's more of that discoverability principle at work. The biggest change is the Ribbon:



Essentially, they've converted all of the old menus and toolbars into tool pallettes, with icons and previews to help the user understand what options are available. The menus appear as tabs, which are a very common UI metaphor on the Web these days and so should be comfortable to a lot of users. Now with a lot of Windows apps, I consider myself very much an expert, and so discoverability doesn't help me much; but even though I'm very good with Office, the suite has so many features that I can never remember where to find them all. There's just too much in there. So I'm liking the Ribbon. It's a lot easier to find the reference and review features, for example; and I've found some that may be new, but I may simply never have been able to find before.

I haven't had a chance to use it yet, but the exclusion dictionary sounds like the end results of what I discussed here.

OneNote now supports hyperlinks.

The OneNote search function now does text recognition and searching within embedded pictures!

The OneNote UI has been reorganized. It seems like the major goal has been to increase the space available for notes.

I'm not familiar with Groove yet. It looks like a tool for easy document collaboration. Since I'm a one-man shop, and since most people I know don't have Groove, it will be a while before I find a use for this.

The Down Side

With more discoverability comes more move-it-itis. In traditional Windows apps, the box/button in the upper right opens a simple system menu: Restore, Move, Size, Minimize, Maximize, Restore, Close. Oh, programmers could always add to those; but we seldom did, because it's not a very common place for users to look. In fact, I'll bet most users never even know there's a menu up there. Well, in Office 2007, it has been replaced with the Office Button. And guess where File Open, Save, Print, etc., and the Most Recently Used File list are hidden? Yep, on a button that experienced Windows users might never notice. If it weren't for the fact that they changed the appearance, I would've never looked there. They also moved Save, Undo, and Redo into a customizable Quick Access Toolbar next to the Office Button.

The Ribbon could be used more consistently. OneNote and Outlook don't have it, for example. Now arguably they don't need it, since they're less complex. But if I were the product manager for an integrated suite like this, I would want a more consistent UI.

There's a lot of space wasted on the Ribbon. My Gateway CX200X only goes up to 1280x768, so vertical space is limited. Now you can minimize the Ribbon, but it's a little tricky. You'll be tempted to right-click on the tool pallette, and nothing will happen. Instead, you have to right-click on the tab strip to get a context menu, which includes the minimize command.

The activation mechanism is annoying. Oh, I don't begrudge Microsoft the basic idea of activation. What bugs me is that I have to separately activate each of the optional components: OneNote, Project, etc. They don't get automatically activated when you activate the suite. And even that wouldn't have bugged me, except that when I wanted to download the PDF/XPS AddIn, the site wanted to validate that I had Genuine Windows and legitimate activations for every Office product that would use the AddIn. And to activate these optional components, I had to open each one and go through with the activation dialogs. Just a lot of time spent in Panera when I wanted to get on the road.

I'm liking how Vista handles WiFi hotspots. When it sees a new hotspot, it asks you how you want it treated: Home, Office, or Public. It then sets security settings appropriately. You could always do this manually before, but you had to know to do it, and know how. Now Vista educates you on the concept, and does the bulk of it for you.

Did I say the window switcher was merely pretty? Maybe it is, but I'm starting to rely on it. Being able to see the screens makes it just a little easier to find the right one.

Oh, and on that note: the thumbnails in ALT+TAB and the taskbar are dynamic. As the window redraws, so do the thumbnails. Way cool!

I'm starting to get used to the Windows Sidebar, a little pop-up overlay that can show various gadgets. By default, it includes a clock and an RSS headline reader. This will make me use RSS a lot more! It also has a "sticky notes" Gadget that you can add, as well as a calendar and some others. And you can download more gadgets. And of course, we .NET programmers can write our own!

Did I mention that Aero is pretty? Honestly, I never thought pretty was a feature; but I keep noticing little ways in which the pretty also conveys information (like the dynamic thumbnails above).

I'm still trying to get used to Pen Flicks, the new Tablet feature that lets you scroll and navigate with flicks of the pen. So far, I'm a lousy flick hitter. (All the fencers just groaned at a bad pun that the rest of you missed.) That's not good, because a failed flick hit can select and possibly drag text. I have to decide whether flicks are worth my trouble or not. They might be good in Web browsing, but not in editable fields.

There are new games: Chess, and also Purble Place, a kids game that looks amusing.

There's a new "printer": XPS, a portable document format, sorta like PDF but not. I look forward to this getting widely adopted, because I think every version of Adobe Acrobat Writer I've ever paid good money for ($500!) has sucked. When enough places start supporting XPS, I can stop paying Adobe money for such awful junk. Heck, if Kinko's would just start supporting it, I could probably uninstall Acrobat Writer now, since most of my Acrobat files are for printing at Kinko's. Update: There's a PDF writer in Office 2007! Goodbye, Acrobat Writer!

The Tablet PC Input Panel (TIP) and the TIP button have new looks. No big change there, just more prettiness. But the TIP now docks along the screen edge, with just an edge showing, so it's more discoverable for new users.

There seems to be a lot of thought given to discoverabiliy: a lot of things that experts could always do are now more readily available to regular users. But that also takes us to today's edition of...

The Down Side

It's not like Microsoft just discovered this idea of discoverability. In every version of Windows, they have tried to make the powerful, useful tools more available to more users. But this has also meant that they suffer from a severe case of move-it-itis: the tendency to move stuff to where the experts can no longer find it, since they already "know" where to look but are wrong in the new version. This has been especially true for administrative tools, which seem to have migrated into and out of Control Panel and Administrative Tools and machine administration and various menus more or less at random. Well, Vista has plenty of move-it-itis. Once again, I've had to learn all over again how to find and modify user accounts. Once more, I've had to learn all over again where to change screen settings. But it's more than that:

• My Pictures and My Music are no longer under My Documents. In fact, My Documents is now just called "Documents", and "Music" and "Pictures" appear at the same hierarchical "level" as "Documents".


• The Games folder has also moved to the same hierarchical "level" as "Documents".


• The Start menu has been reorganized in lots of little ways.

There's more move-it-itis; but ironically, I'm still discovering it.

Some apps will shut down that pretty Aero interface. For instance, I'm still using JASC Paint Shop Pro 9, because I haven't had the money for 10 yet. (Maybe they're up to 11 now?) Well, whenever I start PSP, Aero politely shuts down, and tells me why; and then when I close PSP, it restarts. (For those who don't know, Paint Shop Pro is a $100 competitor to the far more expensive PhotoShop. I find it as powerful as PhotoShop and easier to use, at one-sixth the price. The only thing PhotoShop has going for it as far as I can tell is a Mac version. How quaint.)

If anyone can help me on this one, I'll be eternally grateful. My Gateway CX200X, like many Tablet PCs and laptops, has a touchpad. In this case, it's a Synaptics touchpad. And it has a feature some people seem to like, but I hate: if you tap it, you're tapping the mouse button. I just do too many random finger movements as I think, and end up with way too many extraneous taps. I turned it off under XP, and was happy. Well, so far, I have turned it off half a dozen times under Vista, and it just keeps coming back.

Tap.

Tap. Tap.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Taptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptap.

ARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

Pretty...

Now I'm always the first one to say that pretty doesn't matter, function does. But still: Aero is an exceptionally pretty user interface. My Gateway looks like a whole new machine. And I'm loving the window switcher, which is absolutely nothing but unnecessary prettiness:



You click a button, and up pops a "stacked" view of your open windows — including your desktop. Click on a window, and it pops to the top.

Now does that do anything you couldn't do with good old ALT+TAB? Nope. It just does it in a very pretty fashion. Of course, that also takes more machine and video power, and a little more time, so some people will just turn it off. Fine. But still, it's pretty.

Then again, good old ALT+TAB has also gotten something of a facelift:



The windows now appear as thumbnail sketches of the actual window contents. This is pretty, but more: it can make it easier to choose between different windows of the same type, by looking at the thumbnail contents.

And even the task bar is prettied up:



When you hover over a task bar item, a thumbnail appears to remind you what its contents are.

I've also seen a lot more security features, and a lot more visible ones. There's a lot more here, and I'm still learning. I'll post more as I learn it. But now it's time for...

The Down Side

Honestly, there wasn't much. I had to remove some printer drivers, and my old version of MacAfee. It took a long time. But the biggest headache I had was this:

If you log into your machine as Administrator — a bad habit that a lot of us have — be ready for Vista to disable your Administrator account. Working under the Administrator account has a lot of risks, and Microsoft is now strongly discouraging it. In my case, the upgrade removed my Administrator account, while leaving me with two accounts to which I had granted Administrator privileges. The problem is, I couldn't remember the password for either of those accounts, and all of my vital data was locked up under Administrator! I remembered the password eventually, and found the trick for enabling the Administrator account. But for a while there, I was afraid I would have to restore the old image, set new passwords, and install again.

And that reminds me of the most important Vista upgrade advice: make a complete disk image first! Symantec Ghost did the trick for me.

In a complete lack of political correctness, they're called "booth babes": women with model-quality looks, hired to stand in your trade show booth and draw attention to your products that might otherwise get overlooked. They're usually well-endowed, and they're usually dressed on the thin line between business casual and vamp. Sometimes they cross that line. It's a crass technique, but it works, especially in the tech world, where men still outnumber women by quite a bit. Just ask my marketing friend Lauren, who has never worked as a booth babe herself (at least not that she has admitted), but who won't hesitate to hire them. (She once told of meeting the official West Coast spokesmodel for Barbie, who was working as a booth babe at one of our shows. Apparently, there's big money in booth babing.)