Anyway, let’s get back to Vista. One nice feature users looked forward to was the Windows Sidebar, which allows us to place gadgets or widgets onto a dockable panel, which can be placed on either side of your windows desktop. These gadgets can be dragged off the sidebar onto the desktop if you wish. Users can design and create their own sidebar gadgets too, which allows for a huge userbase of sidebar gadgets in future. However, I found Windows Sidebar a complete waste of time in general use, somewhat surprising given that I was hugely looking forward to using this feature as I intended to write my own gadgets.
The sidebar just is not customisable enough, in fact I have seen a lot better third party sidebars on Windows XP then this poor Microsoft effort. Some of the included gadgets are a rather neat Calendar, which I must admit is quite useful, a rather pointless analogue clock, which seems to have become a pointless defacto standard amongst sidebars, a RSS feed reader, which is useless as it displays partially truncated headlines because the sidebar cannot even be resized. I ended up removing the sidebar as a startup item in no less than three days after I installed Vista. Each gadget just adds to the Sidebar’s already high RAM usage figures, and some poorly written user created ones can literally gobble up precious CPU cycles.
Luckily, my Samurize Sidebar, which I have spent years designing and tweaking is, in my opinion a much more effective solution. Yet it is not fair to compare the two, as Samurize itself has a rather steep learning curve to use, yet rewards you with the most flexible approach to designing and writing hugely customisable information meters. My sidebar is written specifically for my needs and displays what I want in the most efficient manner possible. It manages all that in just 4MB of ram, and new features can be coded in at any time by me.
What about the much vaunted Windows Aero experience? The most recognisable and hyped feature of Vista has been its Aero Glass interface, which is meant to give us an experience Mac OSX users have had for a while now. I wasn’t really too impressed with this interface in the Vista Beta, and I am still not too impressed with it now. Yes, it does look great but its novelty factor is already starting to wear off on me. The transparency effects are quite neat but I have yet to experience them actually benefitting my productivity.
Let’s take Flip3D for instance - does anyone really use this? I would if it could be assigned to ALT+Tab, but instead its assigned to Winkey+Tab. For old school users who have used Windows since its very first incarnation, it is extremely difficult to stray away from the standard ALT+Tab routine when it comes to task switching. Since Vista still supports the old ALT+Tab task switcher as well as Flip3D, users will obviously decide to stick to an older routine instead of learning another. I have Flip3D assigned to a special button on my mouse but I never use it, as the old ALT+Tab method of task switching is more or less ‘hard coded’ into my head.
