Scoble's Vista Demo

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…