Work While Drunk

Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves for Windows Vista

I’ve been using Windows Vista for about 4 months now, on my home desktop. Unfortunately, it’s not proving an easy ride. As a frequent early adopter, I’m used to teething problems in hardware and software, but my experience so far is that its just simply poor. It’s a horrible user experience, brings little real benefit over Windows XP right now. Windows is (or should be) all about the interface, usability and accessibility – and it fails on all 3.

Not to be completely negative…

OK, that sounds pretty harsh, and to be fair Windows vista does have some goodness in it. The new look is, largely, quite nice – but perhaps too much of an attempt to visually retaliate against OSX – which many consider to be too much form over function itself. The security is (reportedly) much improved – and I can say it certainly appears to a user that it’s very much a focus with this Operating System. Plus I’m sure there are a number of behind-the-scenes technological improvements. The setup process is undoubtedly much simpler now.

… but it’s not good.

However it doesn’t take long to get frustrated with Vista. The control panel is now like an ant’s nest of interconnected menus. Some things, like networking, are spread across multiple screens of options, within different sections. The control panel is the first call of anyone wanting to setup the OS experience to suit them, so it should be simple to use. Instead it’s actually quite daunting. Of particular note is the much discussed UAC – an awful ‘necessary security’ experience you soon get used to dealing with. I also got completely bemused by the disk manager when trying to create my partitions, and I’m still not convinced its right. I don’t mind if Microsoft has changed something in their OS for the better, so long as the process tells me why (if I want to know) and explains the new process – but it never does, and this makes the user experience learning curve mighty steep.

Inelegant transitions: blackouts

This has always been an inelegance with Windows, but with Vista’s UAC, its now becoming annoying. Whenever the UAC appears or you start a setup application, the screen goes black first, then low-contrast, and pops up a normal contrast window until you make a choice, then it all goes back to normal, via a fade-in. When setting up all my apps when I first installed Windows Vista, I was seeing this effect a few times a minute. It started to make me feel a bit queasy, and I was worried I was going to have an epileptic fit (I’m not epileptic, fortunately for me).

Inelegant Transitions: things don’t stay put

Some games and applications that I use just don’t support my screens preferred resolution, or for some inexplicable reason decide to try and set it again (and thus this has the same effect as changing it). This often causes the blackouts I just described, but is somewhat more understandable (still poor however), but it also has another side effect. Undocked sidebar items and desktop icons, that might have appeared outside of the screen get (perhaps sensibly, so at least you can get to them) pushed inwards or reshuffled, and left in this new position on the return to the desktop. This is completely annoying, especially with sidebar gadgets, as they end up overlapping desktop items on a busy desktop.

Sidebar: worst in class?

In the early days for desktop widget/gadget systems, I found them to be pretty useless and gimmicky. Over time they got prettier, neater and more useful. Now we have such systems built into browsers (Opera), operating systems (Vista and OSX), and of course a plethora of stand-alone systems (Yahoo! Widgets, Samurize and many Sidebar clones). Unfortunately the quality and reliability of gadgets being produced for Vista’s own sidebar is patchy at best – and I don’t know if this is due to the Vista sidebar itself being a limited platform for this kind of development, or just lack of interest from developers. Its early days admittedly, but I’ve not been truly impressed yet. One feature I find it lacking is that when I have undocked a gadget, why can’t I pin it to the desktop? It would help with the issue above for starters.

Stop stealing! Start stealing!

I’ve been getting very frustrated at the seemingly random stealing of focus. I’m not sure what I’m doing to cause it, but some applications (like Opera, Messenger and Outlook) sometime randomly loose focus. As I finger type, I spend periods of time looking solely at the keyboard, so don’t realise that I’m not actually typing into the correct window. It’s incredibly annoying. However, sometimes I want something to steal focus and it doesn’t – like when launching an application that required a UAC action, but instead it sits on my taskbar flashing until I click on it. If I’ve just launched an application, surely I want to see any actions it requires of me to open?

Shut down not the default

The default ‘off’ state in windows vista is sleep (standby) mode. Here in the UK there have been many TV and print ad campaigns by energy companies telling us not to leave our technology on standby, because it’s unnecessary and still uses electricity (and thus costs money). So the clever boys over in Redmond have done the complete opposite, they have changed the default ‘off’ state from an almost no-power usage ‘shut-down’ in XP to a fairly low (but still some) power usage state of ‘sleep’ for Vista. Why? Well as far as I can see it’s just to save face. With Windows XP, Microsoft shot themselves in the foot on this issue. They said they would aim to make the start-up times faster with XP and faster still with Vista – except it’s quite clear that from cold start, Vista isn’t exactly a fast loading OS, it actually tends to be slower than XP. Their solution seems to be to cheat the issue and not actually shut-down the machine, or even hibernate it for than matter (which is missing for me), but instead to merely put it in standby. So it’s essentially still (partially) on.

Wi-fi lost when resuming from sleep (standby)

Many users probably wouldn’t notice, or care, that their PC was in a sleep mode rather than a stone cold shut-down - until they got they electricity bill anyway. Well, except if they are using Wi-fi, because resuming from sleep, quick though it is, seems to play Russian roulette with the Wifi connection. Sometimes it reconnects, sometimes it says it has limited connectivity (a misleading term, it effectively means none at all) and I’ve even had it loose the Wifi adapter altogether on a few occasions.

Start-up: ‘black box’ process

Why does the Windows start-up process have to be like a dark art? I’d like to see what’s actually going on. Like with other operating systems I’ve always thought Windows needs an ‘iconified’ progress system, showing that various components and services are being initialized. It’d be useful for fault and performance diagnosis purposes too, would allow for error and warning messages, and it would actually look quite interesting. Instead, what do we get? - An ugly chunky looking low-res fake progress bar.

In closing…

I’ve not written one of these long ‘rants’ for some time, the last one was while I was still writing for Zombienexus.com, but my continual frustration is getting the better of me. I hope Microsoft can turn it around somewhat with the forthcoming service pack, but my faith is low. Windows XP was rough around the edges at first, but the experience wasn’t so much the problem – it was the security and hardware support in some areas that was lacking. Fixing the experience of Vista with a service pack seems like a lot to expect.

I’m looking to by a laptop in the near future and this will undoubtedly come with Vista pre-installed. I usually want the latest and greatest, but I now feel a bit trapped into the situation. Windows still offers me the best environment for the type of usage I need from a computer, but I’m no longer happy about using it.

Silly lifestyle, getting in the way of all the things I want to do.

I made a reasonable degree of progress on a personal design to this site (although many of you possibly don’t realise I’m using one of the pre-packaged templates right now). But then I was being targeted by spammers so had to update the software that powers this blog, so now I’m back to square one.

I have great plans for the code, but I never seem to have the time to implement my ideas. The largest wasted lump of my day is travelling. Not only do I spend 3+ hours commuting (to a part of London that I don’t consider real London BTW, and is completely uninspiring) but by the time I’ve done that and a days work, its 7pm and dark. I get home tired and hungry and all I want to do is eat, rest then go to bed. It kind of sucks, but then its always worse at this time of year. I do miss working in the real city though - it was just so much more fulfilling.

Maybe if I just stopped being such a perfectionist and just ‘did’ something and put it out there, I might actually make more overall progress… nah that’s just not me.

Last night was my work Christmas party, at a Cuban themed bar called Floridita in Soho. A pretty nice venue all in all. I had a handful of mojito’s and a beer or two, but my current unbeatable cold seemed to stop me from getting anything other than tired and bloated, but I still enjoyed myself… until I came to leave.

I was collecting my bag when I got wind of a commotion outside, so hurriedly took my coat and bag and went to see what was going on. Outside I found the security staff with one of my colleagues in a sleeper hold. I couldn’t see which colleague through the mass of bouncers, but I could see he was quite drunk but fairly passive and clearly bleeding. The Security staff seemed to be being unnecessarily aggressive, even towards me whom wasn’t drunk and was just trying to calm the situation to understand what was going on.

Turns out it was one of my very close colleagues, whom is generally a very passive and laid back individual, of a slim build and unthreatening demeanour, so it really made no sense that they were going to such extreme lengths and they weren’t calmly trying to pacify the situation. They seemed to be aggressively trying to control the situation, even forcefully ejecting subsequent leavers from the party in an angry fashion.

I managed to calm my colleague down, whom was very confused, and had only become agitated when he was injured by the bouncers - an understandable response in my eyes. All this commotion had made me very late and I now only had one last train home which I couldn’t miss. So after I was content that it had calmed down and people were moving off home, I set out at a brisk walking pace towards the nearest main street and hailed a black cab, which was driven a really nice bloke who really put his foot down (thankfully). I then briskly trotted up to the platform and just got on my train before it left. The train even had a toilet which I desperately needed, so it looked like I was in the clear.

That was until I went to get my MP3 player out of my bag. It wasn’t there. Oh dear. I checked all the pockets (all zipped closed including the one which was supposed to contain my beloved iAudio X5L)… no dice. Then I realised there were other items missing. I put my earphones in a separate pocket to protect them better, they were also gone. Another pocket was completely empty, but I can’t for the life of me remember what I had in there. I’m sure it will hit me next time I realise I need the thing that was in there.

So far I’ve called the bar to ask if they have seen it, and if not to report a theft from their cloak room. If that’s the case, I’ll be calling the police too. I know you pretty much do everything at your own risk these days, but it still sucks none the less, and those events really put a downer on my evening. Thankfully Emma was still up writing Christmas cards at 3am, so I got to rant out my frustration before going to bed - I probably would have stewed all night otherwise.

Looks like some child is currently mass spamming, as I've had over 100 bogus comments in the last 24 hours. They kindly point out how nice my site is then leave me with a lovely URL for mini-golf or Barbie's site, or some such. How Kind.

To me this kind of SPAM is cross between graffiti tagging and advertising. Someone must pay them to advertise their product, thus if I were sufficiently inclined I'd offer to take legal action said people for employing someone to SPAM for them - but I just can't be bothered right now. Many get angry at the spammers themselves, but in all fairness, on this point anyway, they are simply providing a service that's clearly in demand - plus they seem to be fairly creative in their scripting - even if often viewed as on of the lowest caste's of hacker.

Tagging, on the other hand, is something I find incredibly offensive. Living in a city like London you see a lot of it, especially in commuting areas. I've actually seen someone tag a wall. When they saw me, quite probably looking disapprovingly at them, they said something which I didn't understand - something along the lines of "stick it to the man" or "hack the planet" but with a lot less actual meaning and a lot more profanity. Said person was clearly abusing alcohol (had a can of Special Brew) and quite possibly other substances - so they didn't in any way project the image of any sort of righteousness.

Anyway, getting to my point, I've had to disable commenting on this site, temporarily. I'll hopefully get time to either bolster the anti-SPAM functionality, or (more likely) replace this software with a much newer version and finally perhaps get round to creating my own design... but it depends on how much time I find since I'm currently moving house.

Its a pretty good service all in all, and mostly this is a rant about my not realising its limitations, rather than directly about the service they provide. Firstly, and this is clearly stated - but I managed to miss it - it has a measly limit of 3 photo-sets for the free account. Me being an organised person on the whole, wanting more than 3 seats to organise my photo's, means buying a pro account for $25 a year. Now I wouldn't be so bothered about paying that if:

• I was bad at keeping my own backups - which I'm normally not
• It worked properly with my own choice of browser - Opera - which is doesn't always
• It allowed me to print/interface with a UK photo-printing service - I use Photobox for example
• It was a bit cheaper - at ~£15 a year seems a tad pricey for the amount I use it

So, as those things considered, I won't be uploading many pics until I know what I'm going to do. :(