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The Lubbock Chamber of Commerce hosted a presentation by Microsoft Technical Specialist Craig Robicheaux this afternoon. Mr. Robicheax’s presentation, “Sneak Preview of Windows Vista”, began with a lot of apologies about being long-winded, time delays on product release, and a reminder that if it crashed during the presentation it was still Beta 1. The last comment resulted in a few chuckles and wry grins from the audience.

After a 35 minute powerpoint presentation, during which the need to shift from “functionality” centered design to “user experience” centered design was stressed, Mr. Robicheax attempted to demo Windows Vista in a VM environment. Unfortunately, few of the features he attempted to demo worked. He explained this by stating that he only had 1 gigabyte of RAM in his laptop and this was the minimum requirement for Vista. It’s too bad that his company can’t provide him with suitable hardware for his presentations.

The Demo

The first feature was a search like tool. Clicking on the start menu produces a search input. He began typing solitaire into the search input. As he typed, results popped up right above…unfortunately solitaire was not installed…and therefore was not found. He attempted to search for something else, but the search results would not display. We were told that you could save your search querys in a clickable link, and then he decided to move on to the next feature.

He then demonstrated Vista’s way of managing and displaying meta data. When you click on a file icon it immediately displays a translucent bar across the bottom of the window with meta data belonging to that file. The attributes and values are all editable!

After moving quickly through that, he decided to play some short video clips showing off some visual effects that Vista will feature, if the user’s hardware has at least a 64 MB video card (which is why he played the video instead of demoing it himself since his laptop only had an 8 MB video card…again, too bad his company can’t provide him with the necessary hardware). It basically was a way to scroll through all your open windows in a rolladex like format and select the one you need.

The Results

My first impression? My Apple computer already does most of that, and has been for about 2 years! The search feature looks a lot like Spotlight and the saved querys feature looks a lot like smart folders; while the Apple OS doesn’t automatically display meta data, that information has always been easier to get to than on Windows (I admit, the ability to create custom attributes is pretty cool though); the video effects were a rendition of Exposé. All in all I was not impressed. Considering all the emphasis on “user experience” at the beginning of the presentation, it is ironic that the presenter was not more prepared to deliver. I hope that Vista is better in the end (projected for holidays - 2006) than the impression I was given today.