Scoble’s Vista Demo at MasterMaq's Blog

By Mack D. Male | February 10, 2006 at 5:43 pm

So the icon is a little different, but we’re still at Northern Voice. This session is a demo – Robert Scoble is going to be sharing Windows Vista (hence the graphic!). Here are my notes:

Scoble’s just getting things setup now, looks pretty sexy so far, people are watching and chatting. I can hear a few people in the audience saying “that’s just expose” or something – the Mac bunch is out in full force!

This is not a scripted demo! Chris Pirillo is helping out. The build used in this demo is only two nights old!

They are starting by showing a video of two machines, XP against Vista, to see the stress on the system. Windows XP is failing under the stress – essentially they simulate 100% CPU usage with different levels of priority. Now for Vista: much, much better!

Underneath the covers, things are quite a bit different.

Chris has been talking with the UI team to make sure all of the artwork, icons, etc. are updated.

Aero is supposed to evoke a feeling of “more space” on the desktop.

Scoble is not showing the tablet, media, or any of the other custom versions.

You now have the ability to do per-application volume levels!

Entire networking stack has been rewritten, and the performance is about 40 times better between Vista and Vista compared to what it was with XP. There is a 2-10 times performance between Vista and Linux machines.

Customization for colors and that sort of thing is much, much improved. No more Blue, Silver and Green – you can choose anything! Chris says he’s been hammering away at making sure that the fit and polish makes it into the product.

Apparently when it crashes in the beta builds, a dialog box appears that says “Blue Screen”

Search really is everywhere, in every window.

When you edit photos, the original and the edit are both saved, so you can always go back to the original photo. And RAW is handled by default.

The new IE7 is “open search compliant” – something created by A9. Chris says this is basically RSS search.

Printing has been completely revamped, so printing is easier and much more accurate.

IE7 converts everything to RSS 2.0 and uses a transform to display it in the browser. When you subscribe, the feed is pushed to a central store. Windows Mail is the aggregator by default, though IE does save the feeds and stuff. Outlook 12 has an RSS aggregator using the same feed store.

The RSS rendering in IE7 also strips out anything that might be a security concern.

Apparently the Gadgets will be Firefox compatible.

Beta 2 is coming in the next month or so, release sometime in August with a release candidate sometime in the middle, which means users should have it around Christmas time.

The concept of tagging and stacking files is definitely in the product. People using the product so far are losing the concept of hierarchies, which is good for everyone!

Vista looks awesome!

To end, Chris announces that he has OS X running on his ThinkPad (the developer build). And now we better leave before the Apple lawyers descend…

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