Vista: An open-minded, Windows-using Mac fan’s perspective

Windows Vista is out, and there’s a lot to see. Much is pleasantly new, much is frustratingly old, but most of all, Microsoft’s hopes and fears are splayed out for all to see with this latest update to Windows. You see, Vista is Microsoft’s answer to the dual challenges posed by Apple and Google, and it shows; Windows Photo Gallery is an unabashed clone of Apple’s iPhoto, and offers to get you started with Windows Live are sprinkled juicily throughout the OS as an alternative to Google’s own web-based services. For what it’s worth, Windows Photo Gallery and its ilk are pretty good. Windows Live is not.

The most immediately obvious change in Vista is that it’s, well, no longer ugly; in fact, Vista is quite appealing. The new hardware-accelerated transparency and glass effects get the most press, but I’m most impressed by the use of subtle gradients, appealing high-resolution icons, and the general polish of the interface widgets. Buttons pulse and glow, windows fade in and out at the presence of the mouse, and work areas smoothly cross-fade into one another when you change categories. The overall effect is quite dramatic compared to the drab utilitarian look of Windows XP’s “Classic” look–itself a throwback to Windows NT–or the clownishness of XP’s standard plasticky bright blue theme. It’s obvious that a lot of graphic designers worked on Vista.

Pretty huge icons

Alas, the same cannot be said of interface designers. While Vista is certainly glamorously pretty, it’s still Windows under the hood. It still relies on wizards and cascading modal dialog boxes, still blurs the lines between applications and windows, still opens two instances of an application if you mistakenly double-click on it, still includes close buttons in every window’s titlebar regardless of how many other ways there are to get rid of it, and still jabbers to you with little balloons about anything that happens, ever.

As chatty as always

If the above traits or behaviors annoy you, you’re probably not a happy Windows user (if you’re even one at all), and Vista won’t do much to make you one. Like a fresh stab at a failing marriage, for these people Vista will be terribly appealing at first, but it hasn’t shed a single bad habit since last time. Though Vista dazzles you with lovingly crafted prettiness, it doesn’t hesitate to vomit modal dialog boxes all over the screen, ruining the effect. You can almost hear the graphic designers sobbing into their Wacom tablets every time you go to the Control panel to change something and wind up with three or four tiny cascading windows, transparently blending into each other and producing blurry visual mud.

Blurry visual mud

In many ways, Vista’s beauty displays Microsoft’s desperation. Vista almost seems too pretty; for example, in the bottom-right corner of new Explorer windows sits a strange cure-for-breast-cancer-inspired ribbon that shines and shimmers for a second for absolutely no reason. Why is this little thing there? What is its purpose? Who knows? It’s not part of Microsoft’s branding efforts, and it adds nothing whatsoever except perhaps to balance out the visual weighting of the bottom of the window (an icon always sits opposite it on the left side), but this ribbon thingy is pointless. Adding an appealing gradient to a flat-shaded title bar or a huge descriptive icon to a window is one thing; going around inserting random ribbons willy-nilly speaks of a lack of purpose and focus in the design.

Random ribbon

It’s almost as if Microsoft was trying to emulate Apple’s sense of beauty, all the while oblivious to the fact that so much of it comes from the spareness and simplicity of the design that Windows has always lacked. Microsoft’s ethos has always been to add on more features; Apple removes extraneous ones. Vista simply continues this trend; Microsoft layers on hardware-accelerated transparency that irks business users who must purchase more expensive computers to use it, and gamers whose games it slows down in a match of one-upmanship with Apple, trying to prove that it can make sexy things too.

Windows Branding Authority Enhanced
Microsoft liberally continues its extensive branding efforts in Vista by splashing the word “Windows” over everything it can get its hands on, winding up with “Windows Calendar,” “Windows Photo Gallery,” “Windows Mobility Center,” and, more awkwardly, “Windows Live OneCare.” This is nothing new; in 1996, the buzzword was “active,” producing nuggets such as “Active Directory,” “Active Desktop,” “and “Active Movie.” In 98, “Direct” was king of the hill, and “DirectX” and “Direct3D” reigned supreme. “MSN” wheezed its way through the early 2000s before being finally slain by “Windows” in the last couple of years in the grueling battle for the mindshare of a captive audience. One wonders what the next buzzword will be, or if we will simply have to live with those two extra syllables in the form of the word “Windows” appended to everything that comes out of Redmond in the near future. It’s already playing hell with alphebatized lists.

Menu bar, schmenu bar
Back in the present, Microsoft is trying to kill the menu bar. Arguments can be made that the menu is dated and obsolete, that visual metaphors are better at communicating related concepts and binding them to the content they affect, and a legitimate usability discussion on this subject exists. Apple, for example, has pioneered menu-less desktop modes with Dashboard and soon-to-be Time Machine. Apple has not, however, pioneered menu-less applications. Why? Because most applications need their menu bars! Especially complex ones, such as, for example, Windows Explorer, whose menu bar is strangely nowhere in sight when you first fire it up. Instead, you get a glassy bar with drop-down menu buttons labeled “Organize,” and “Views.” Depending on which folder you happen to be exploring and what happens to be selected, other buttons can appear as well, such as Explore, e-mail, Share, and Burn. The Organize menu button is a mishmosh of some commands typically found in old-school File, Edit, and Window menus, and the Views menu button lets you switch between six window views, two of which–List and Details– are almost identical.

The usability problems with this setup are immense; the easiest way to discover this is by revealing the hidden menu bar itself and seeing how much functionality had to be left out in order to accommodate those visually pleasing context-sensitive buttons. Scads of commands such as Map Network Drive, Copy to Folder, Invert Selection, and Create Shortcut are all hidden and generally inaccessible unless you know how to reveal the menus they reside in, or happen to have memorized their keyboard shortcut when the menus were visible.

However, in a bizarre twist of fate, those hidden menus themselves are context-sensitive, dynamically gaining and losing items depending on what’s selected–but get this: they can still contain grayed-out menu items! Isn’t the whole point of context-sensitivity that only what’s relevant is shown at a given time? Furthermore, what’s the point of having two interface conventions for the same tasks that are both context-sensitive? Shouldn’t the point of offering menus in addition to context-sensitive task buttons be to provide solid footing and comforting familiarity if you don’t like the constantly changing buttons? Making the menus themselves context-sensitive absolutely defeats this approach, and provides two redundant methods of doing the same thing with minimal differences in accessibility and efficiency.

Sometimes, toolbar buttons themselves are sometimes exceptionally menu-like. In the case of Windows Media Player, a series of glassy blue buttons with drop-down menu buttons replaces the menu bar. Clicking on the button itself changes the mode of the player, or drops down a menu if you click on the button of the current mode. If you want a drop-down menu for one of the other buttons, you have to click on the teensy-weensy arrow at the bottom of the button. The menus that drop down when you do one of these things are functionally identical to a real menu bar in that their commands are not context-sensitive like those of Windows Explorer are.

Sound confusing? It is, primarily since this new system duplicates about 75% of what goes into traditional menus, but with a pointless new visual style that ignores many of the improvements made to menus over the years, such as the ability to slide the mouse horizontally over to reveal a different menu. The end result is a strange mishmosh, a blending of toolbars, menu bars, and mode switchers, winding up with a bizarre hybrid that does all three in unfamiliar, unpredictable ways. As with Windows Explorer, you can opt to display the classic menus, which duplicates the functionality offered by the blue buttons. However, Windows Media Player’s menus are not context-sensitive like Explorer’s are!

WMP’s bizarre menu-button-thingies

This seemingly random inconsistency is maddening to me, and it calls into question just what kind of usability testing goes on at Microsoft and who’s doing it. Menus are time-tested for their efficiency and consistency. At the very least, all computer users in the last 12 to 15 years have used them extensively, building up vast unconscious reserves of knowledge about their workings and use. Overcoming this brick wall of experience would be difficult even with a superior alternative, and Microsoft hasn’t found one. Reinventing the wheel is bad enough. Trying to reinvent the rocket ship by replacing it with a wheel is quite another thing.

Okay, so Windows can’t match Mac OS X in consistency and interface efficiency. But it can try to compete on features and applications–especially some of the ones that have traditionally made Macs special. Windows Photo Gallery, DVD Maker and Movie Maker are all obvious shots at iLife, and the Windows Search is decidedly Spotlight-esque. But these are all defensive measures; they’re Microsoft pleading, “Aww, c’mon, I can make movies too! Honest! And look! I can find your files as fast as that Mac tramp can!” Some of these efforts do a good job of patching obvious holes in Windows’ capabilities; some do not.

Windows Search is an example of one that tries and almost succeeds. For everyday searches, it’s plenty fast–at least as fast as Spotlight, if not faster. But it’s nowhere near as comprehensive. Example: I create an RTF document on my desktop named Fungus.rtf and type a sentence inside it that contains the word “jello.” Searching for “jello” fails to find the file, so I search for “fungus”; that reveals it. I again search for “jello” and the file shows up; Windows Search only finds the file after it’s previously been found by Windows Search before–how useful is that bound to be? Indexing the contents of files is still iffy for Windows Search. Contrast this with Spotlight which uses kernel hooks to index files as soon as they’re created, in addition to several other advantages. In particular, the inability to search inside PDF documents is a real heartbreaker for me.

It’s Mac-y
Vista also includes some interface features that are clearly Mac-like in their aesthetic, such as Flip 3D. Flip 3D is a shiny new window management effect that shows 3D representations of all currently open windows (as well as the desktop) floating in mid-air above the desktop background, offset at around a 45 degree angle so you can see the windows behind the ones in front of them. You use the mouse wheel or arrow keys to move through the stack until you find the one you want by bringing it to the front and hitting return, clicking, or releasing the Windows key (depending on how you invoked it to begin with). In addition, you can also zoom right to the window you want by clicking on it.

Flip 3D is probably supposed to be Microsoft’s take on Apple’s Exposé–at least visually (“Look, my windows are flying around!”), if not in usability. Exposé is an effect that temporarily scales down currently open windows so they all fit on the screen, allowing you to click on the one you want. Unlike Exposé, Flip 3D displays all windows in a static line, making distant windows all but indistinguishable, and none of the windows are ever labeled, and the transparency only muddies things up even more. Basically, more windows makes the system difficult to use–a charge that can also be leveled at Exposé, as when a sufficient amount of windows are present, they’re all scaled down so far that their contents become similarly indistinguishable. But at least Exposé works well with under 12 windows–something that cannot be said of Flip 3D, and at least Exposé has the decency to label the window your mouse is hovering over; Flip 3D’s windows are never labeled at all.

In addition, the order of windows in Flip 3D isn’t even necessarily representative of their actual depths relative to each other. For example, just because a Firefox window is located directly in front of a Control Panel window in Flip 3D, that doesn’t mean that Firefox will be directly in front of the Control Panel outside of it. There may well be several intervening windows between them that were shown in completely different positions in Flip 3D. The non-representational nature of Flip 3D’s window display further hampers its usability.

In the end, though, it’s not these minor quirks that does in Flip 3D–Exposé has its share of them as well. Philosophically, Flip 3D is a disappointment because it’s really nothing new except a visual spruicing-up of an existing window organization system that’s still present: alt-tab. For those unfamiliar with it, when you hit alt-tab and hold down alt, thumbnails of the currently open windows appear on the screen, letting you choose which window you want by repeatedly hitting tab until the one you want is selected, and then releasing the alt key. If this sounds familiar to Flip 3D, that’s because it is; Flip 3D is, like alt-tab, a window-centric organization system–that is, it thinks in terms of windows and nothing else, such as applications.

On OS X, Exposé became a success because it was a window-centric organization system that complemented existing application-centric ones (The Dock and Apple-tab), rather than duplicating them. Flip 3D would have been a perfect opportunity for Microsoft to add an application switcher to complement the window-centric nature of the taskbar and alt-tab. Instead, it disappointingly offers yet another way to accomplish the same task without really rethinking the ideas of window management or window-centricity. Flip 3D is pretty, but I suspect most people will ignore it in favor of its faster and more discoverable colleague: the ever-present alt-tab of yesterwindows.

Windows Photo Gallery
Windows Photo Gallery, on the other hand, is a marvelous success. Though it’s transparently a Windows iPhoto clone (pun sadly intended), it’s really quite excellent. Unlike iPhoto, it’s sleek and light–it opens quickly, and it’s the default image viewer and editor–no more Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. Microsoft has finally come around to the merits of a library-based approach to organizing masses of files, but, unlike iPhoto, it’s pleasantly optional: you can do all your image viewing and editing without ever having to add a single photo to its library.

I like Windows Photo Gallery. It’s clean, intuitive, easy to use, and visually appealing. It has decent tools for editing and organizing photos, and I even prefer its tag system of metadata to iPhoto’s non-discoverable method for assigning keywords, as well as its “Tiles” view. Still, it’s no iPhoto in terms of raw power: it has fewer image correction options, no way to batch-change pictures, no smart albums, and can’t even save or export images in anything other than their native file format (you have to use the venerable MS Paint, amusingly/embarrasingly enough). As seems to be the trend, it’s menu-less, relying on context-sensitive drop-down buttons instead. Unlike Windows Explorer’s context-sensitive buttons, however, Windows Photo Gallery’s are always visible, just grayed out if they can’t be used. And there isn’t even an option to “show classic menus” like there is with Explorer. Sigh. Another blow to consistency.

Nevertheless, despite these limitations, I suspect that Windows Photo gallery will be just fine for the overwhelming majority of users who come into contact with it–which will be a proportion greater than those who use iPhoto on a Mac, I’d wager, due to the fact that it’s the default editor and viewer. Windows Photo Gallery has the makings of a success through and through–and Microsoft ought to be congratulated on it. Well done.

Gadgets/Widgets/Google Desktop
Some history is necessary before I talk about Microsoft’s Gadgets. It’s easy to yell, “They copied Apple!”, and “Apple stole the idea offa Konfabulator!”, and “It was Apple’s to begin with; they invented it in 1984 with Desk Accessories!” But this banter obfuscates a lot of the nuances of the issue. The history:

1984: Desk Accessories

The original Macintosh released in 1984 included little mini-applications called “Desk Accessories” that duplicated the functionality of desktop applications, but were lightweight and constantly available. Desk Accessories were created primarily to bypass the irritating hardware restriction of only being able to run one full desktop application at once; an unlimited number of Desk Accessories could run at the same time as your allotted one desktop application churned away at its 128K of RAM.

2003: Konfabulator

In 2003, Arlo Rose, Perry Clarke, and Ed Voas created a software environment dedicated to running visually appealing single-purpose mini-applications. Rose put a great deal of work into the artistic presentation of the Widgets, in particular achieving them a very “Apple” aesthetic by giving them rounded corners, photorealistic icons and glassy transparency.

2005: Dashboard

Apple released its implementation in 2005 to mixed praise and many charges of the theft of Konfabulator’s ideas, due probably to the degree to which Arlo Rose succeeded in duplicating the Apple aesthetic; when Apple itself released widgets that looked very similar, it pretty much appeared that digital plagiarism had occurred. Apple’s Widgets live in a summonable overlay that’s either invisible or taking up the whole screen; the difficulty in getting Widgets to seamlessly inhabit the desktop is frustrating to me.

2006: Google Desktop

Google Desktop tried their hand at the concept in 2006, but relegated its widgets to a customizable sidebar that pushed windows and icons over so they didn’t cover it up. This design worked very well due to the fact that since the sidebar is always active, information stored there is truly at-a-glance; all you have to do is look over a bit. The downside is that the screen can get extremely cramped if you don’t have a large or widescreen display.

2007: Windows Sidebar

The Windows sidebar is Microsoft’s take on mini-applications, and it looks about as identical to Google Desktop as Dashboard does to Konfabulator. As a clone of Google Desktop, it inherits all the advantages and disadvantages of Google’s product.

But just because the Sidebar is an obvious clone of its competitors’ products, that doesn’t mean that it’s a failure. On the contrary, it’s quite excellent. Both Dashboard and Google Desktop have limitations and downsides, and Gadgets take the good from both. While Gadgets are really nothing new, Microsoft implemented them in a way that I find to be more efficient than Apple’s and more integrated and widespread than Google’s. I’ve been itching for the Mac version of Google Desktop to imitate the Windows version, and, truth be told, I actually prefer Gadgets to Widgets. I like the idea of being able to keep working while Gadgets are open and visible; Microsoft’s approach offers more flexibility and doesn’t interrupt your workflow, and I approve of that.

The fact of the matter is that lightweight, single-purpose mini-applications are not new, and sidebars where you put things you want constantly visible are also not new. Heck, applications that combine both aren’t even new. But that doesn’t stop the Windows Sidebar from being really good.

The remaining kitchen sinks
Vista also ships with several other applications that appear to be heavily inspired by OS X, such as Windows Movie Maker, Windows Calendar, and Windows Mail. They’re all pretty good. They all have prominent limitations compared to OS X’s offerings, but also offer some advantages to compensate. However, none of them is sufficiently interesting to merit more than the acknowledgment that Microsoft finally recognizes the importance of bundling quality software with their operating system.

All in all, Microsoft’s response to Apple is well-thought-out, cleanly executed, and generally pretty good. Vista isn’t going to make any Mac users jump ship, but it will probably help retain some people who were envious of some of the Mac’s features and advantages. Dashboard, iLife, and Spotlight are no longer as tempting as they once were now that Vista has its own implementations of the basic ideas behind them.

And now for Google
On the other hand, Microsoft’s response to Google in the form of Windows Live is clumsy and uncoordinated. The main difficulty is that no one–Microsoft included–seems to know just what Windows Live actually is. Plenty of applications bundled with Vista have references or links to Windows Live services, but many of said services seem to be what could be perfectly viable desktop applications that have been clumsily pushed onto the internet to fill some marketing brochure. For example, Live’s Safety Center deals with securing and cleaning up Windows PCs and attempts to sell Windows Live OneCare, Microsoft’s pay-per-year security suite. There is no immediately obvious reason that the Safety Center could not be a desktop application as it involves the internet no more than any malware scanner does when it checks for updates to its virus list.

In many other cases, Live services seem to be Microsoft-branded carbon copies of pre-existing Google services. For example, on the Windows Live main page you will find services such as Search, Image Search, Video Search, Maps, Mobile, and Toolbar: add the word “Google” to the beginning of each, and that pretty much describes the innovation level present in Windows Live. The only problem in duplicating what the market leader does is that they do it better than you and they will win, simply because they’re bigger. This is a lesson Microsoft should have learned ages ago, because size is the company’s greatest advantage and one it’s used time and time again to push its technologies and products. Linux has for years and years been steadily trying to duplicate the functionality, features, and interface of Windows, not even making a dent in the battle for desktop market share, and it’s even free! How can Microsoft hope to do the same to Google with so awkward an effort?

In order to compete with a market leader, you have to offer something new. This is what Apple has been doing in response to Windows: Exposé, Dashboard, and Spotlight were all concepts that had never really been successfully commercialized on a large scale before Apple did it, and their inclusion in Mac OS X meaningfully differentiated it from Windows far more than the “look and feel” of OS X ever could to those who think in terms of tangible features.

Somehow, Microsoft fails to grasp this in its war for cyberspace supremacy against Google. It seems to think that merely duplicating and re-branding existing Google services and tying them to Windows will enable it to pull ahead. Microsoft is being proven wrong every step of the way, and the latest re-branding of its previous MSN efforts under the “Live” banner hasn’t helped anything. In fact, the Live home page itself even looks decidedly Googlesque with a search box front and center and offers for related services smattered around. It’s almost as if Microsoft is trying to woo people familiar with Google but looking for an alternative–an audience that I would guess is very small.

Windows Live homepage

Google homepage

Put simply, Microsoft cannot hope to beat Google at its own game because doing so would melt the company’s bedrock of profitability. Google is a company all about getting things off the desktop and onto the internet; Microsoft is a company all about dominating the desktop. This is why Microsoft cannot compete with Google on its own turf. Google’s success stems from its online search and advertising and its ability to compellingly webify bloated desktop applications, such as the desktop email client and office suite that Microsoft makes huge profits selling. To imitate Google would be to cannibalize its own business.

Why does Microsoft even have to beat Google, anyway? Microsoft’s profits stem primarily from licenses of Windows and Office and server products; Google isn’t particularly threatening to any of those–the people who perfer web applications weren’t buying Microsoft’s software suites anyway, and they wouldn’t buy one from Microsoft if it was bundled with the keys to Fort Knox. Why then is it so important to have an offering to match Google’s at all? It isn’t clear, and that’s why Windows Live is failing.

Windows Vista is an interesting beast. In some ways, it’s been totally revamped in pleasing and appropriate ways. In others, it’s just as clunky as ever, and more bloated to boot. It’s a mixture of beauty and shallowness, of great ideas and terrible ones. It’s better than ever and more of the same. I get the sense that Vista is more of a defensive release than an offensive one; it’s very Mac-like in some ways, and it tries to be very Googley in other ways. This is not to say that there isn’t anything innovative, because there’s lots of it. But most of it seems to be aimed at defeating Apple and Google, rather advancing what makes it Windows. It’s become directionless, stabbing out at any large tech company that achieves success, whether or not this threatens Microsoft or comes at its expense. That’s a shame, because it hurts both Microsoft and Windows.