Bill Bither's Insights

This weekend, I bought a new Sony Vaio SZ330P and took that opportunity to install Vista RC1.  Don't even bother upgrading, just go with a fresh install.  I wanted to  upgrade to keep all those Sony applications and drivers, but after a long upgrade process, many features (including access to the Internet) would not work.  A fresh install worked great and was much faster.  Although I had to install each driver manually.

I've been keeping my eye on Vista since PDC '03, and even played with it a little in the office on dedicated Vista machines and at various technical sessions I've been to.  We even have a product for Vista called DotImageFX which is a library of BitmapEffects for Vista's .NET 3.0.   My first impression actually using the OS was unimpressive.  I've already seen those fancy demos many times over, and have "played" with Vista here and there.  I've been using XP for so long now that I was having trouble navigating in the new UI.  However after forcing myself not to revert the start menu back to the XP look, I started to get the hang of it, and in a couple hours noticed some productivity improvements.  The first thing to get used to is opening a program from the start menu.  I've found that typing in the new "Start Search" textbox brings up the application much faster than navigating through the maze of programs.  For example, "visual" brings up Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to the top of the list.

The other feature I really like is the Windows Photo Gallery.  Photos can easily be tagged with keywords, ratings and the like.  It's very easy to find photos based on tags, date taken, etc.  It feels a lot like a more responsive, desktop version of Flickr, but without the power of photos being online.   I have over 2000 photos hosted by Flickr which costs only $24.99/yr for nearly unlimited photo archiving, and I can share these photos with family and friends.  Plus I don't have to worry about backing up my photos (as long as Yahoo remains in business).  Vista does not replace this need for me, however it would be a lot easier to tag my photos in Vista, then upload them to Flickr.  Unfortunately Flickr does not yet support Vista tags, which are XMP based.  Maybe I'll race Yahoo and write this app for myself.  If anything it will be a good exercise using the metadata capabilities built into .NET 3.0 so I can compare our metadata functionality with Microsoft's new support in .NET 3.0.  I'll post the source here if I do actually get around to it before Yahoo does.