John Topley’s Weblog

I just don’t understand Paul Thurrott. Although I now prefer Apple’s products, I occasionally visit his site because I’m still vaguely interested in the latest news from Microsoft. Much of what Paul writes is balanced and fair, but sometimes he comes out with some complete tosh! The latest being this gem from his preview of Apple’s new MobileMe service:

“I’m not interested in covering every single product that comes out of Redmond, and I am not a Microsoft fan-boy. What I’m interested is products and technologies that affect you, the Windows user. You’ve made a decision to use the world’s best operating system as the center of your computing experience, and I endorse and support that decision.”

—Does anybody seriously think that Windows is the world’s best operating system? It’s the world’s most commercially successful OS, certainly. It has the most number of applications available for it, granted. But the best? Get real, Paul! Mac OS X Leopard wipes the floor with Windows Vista or Windows XP, as more and more people are discovering. Sure, it doesn’t have the shear glut of software that Windows has, but the software is does have covers all the bases and is of a uniformly high quality.

I can only think of one version of Windows that might have been a contender for the title of the world’s best operating system and that was Windows 2000. It was mature and stable and its Windows NT architecture was far in advance of the tired old classic MacOS that was Apple’s offering at the time. I really liked it, even though it had a tendency of switching the focus away from the active window which sometimes drove me nuts.

Sadly Windows 2000 was so late that it barely had time to take off before its successor was announced. Windows XP was too rough around the edges for my liking. Although there was much to like, it did feel unfinished to me; it felt like it was rushed out of the door. Now here we are seven years later and Windows Vista is much the same. That’s quite an achievement considering that over five years elapsed between the two versions.

Going back to Windows after using Leopard is like a Windows 2000 user stepping back in time to Windows 95 or even Windows 3.1. It just doesn’t work as well and feels less polished. Perhaps Windows 7 will be a contender for the title of the world’s best operating system, but I doubt it somehow given Microsoft’s recent track record. Windows is crippled by the burden of its own past, whereas Apple are free to keep moving forward. Sorry Paul.

Joel Spolsky is bang on the money when he writes about the confusing new Windows Vista Start menu controls for controlling your login session. The Power icon is particularly problematic. I’ve been running Windows Vista in a Parallels VM on OS X lately and I used to shut it down by clicking that icon. I’d always be puzzled as to why Parallels gave me a warning message that the OS was still running:

—I previously put it down to ACPI issues in the RC1 build of Windows Vista that I’m using. After all, Windows has always been plagued by shut down issues. However, it turns out that for Vista they changed it so that a click on that icon actually puts the computer to sleep. All I needed to do was go to the fly-out menu and select Shut Down and all was well.

I think the metaphor behind that icon is ambiguous at best. If I press a power button on a real piece of hardware then I might reasonably expect it just to switch off. The exception is for anything media-related such as televisions, audio equipment etc. and of course, computers. Pressing the power button on the back of my iMac puts it to sleep; do the same with my PowerBook and I get asked what I want to do (although to be fair the PowerBook has an alternative way of going straight to sleep—by closing the lid). I guess Windows Vista is taking the least “dangerous” option by going to sleep because it’s quicker to undo than switching the power off. However, I shouldn’t have to even think about the rationale behind it, its function should be obvious and this piece of UI fails that test for me.

I learned something new about Windows today. “So what?” you may ask, but I thought it was slightly interesting because if I had to categorise what sort of Windows user I was then I’d probably plump for the expert category. And that means that learning something I didn’t know about using Windows is noteworthy for me.

I’ve been using Windows for about thirteen years, starting with Windows 3.0 through to Windows 95/98/Me and also all versions of the NT line from 3.5 onwards (I was hardcore, I used to run Windows NT 3.5 on a PC with 16 MB of memory—it may have finished booting by now). I’ve seen some massive changes over the years, not least of which is an exponential increase in reliability. I don’t miss those blue text mode screens you used to get when a virtual device driver spilled its guts in Windows 9x. I’ve also rolled with the punches and kept up with the numerous user interface changes, from the Incredible Expanding Start Menu to the work in progress that we’ve been stuck with for five years now.

After all that time I thought I pretty much knew all there was to know when it comes to power user stuff like using keyboard shortcuts to get around. Oh yes, no more mousing for me—windows minimize and restore and switch around in the blink of an eye when I’m in the driving seat!

In what’s perhaps the ultimate evolutionary step for a Windows’ user, Mac OS X is now my preferred operating system. And it was whilst hitting the space bar to advance through some man pages in the OS X terminal—very un-Mac like, I know—that I discovered that I could do the same thing in Windows with a read-only screen full of text, probably like the one you’re using to view this. Now before you hit the Comment button in disgust at the obviousness of the using-space-to-scroll manoeuvre, I should explain that that’s not actually what I learned today. No sir, for it was already at the back of my mind somewhere.

You see, hitting the spacebar scrolls the page downwards, but what I wanted to do was scroll upwards. I told you I was a power user. This was where I was going to put the UI consistency and logic of Windows to the ultimate test, because I know that pressing the Shift key reverses the operation. For example, Shift + Alt + Tab coolswitches—I told you I’ve used Windows 3.x—backwards through your running programs. So I hit Shift + Space, Windows behaved exactly as I expected it to, my document scrolled upwards and all was well with the world. In other news, Bush announced today that he wants to close Guantanamo Bay, so I guess he’s learning too.