Your Future Windows - 1

A peek at Vista, Windows next avatar.

The ability to do more than one thing well is often the difference between competence and excellence. But this quest for excellence also means delays. Especially if you are the Code Almighty--er, I mean Microsoft--trying to stuff a lot of niceties into an operating system called Windows Vista.

Though originally scheduled for birth in 2003, Planet Earth’s next alleged killer OS from the software giant won’t arrive before the O-N-D quarter of 2006. (And you thought Indian Railways was the supreme authority on running late?) Well, Beta 1 of Vista is out and Beta 2-- which was priming for boot up in this November--will now be released “early next year”. And as always, Microsoft is promising that working with Windows Vista is all about reliability and “seeing, finding, organizing, and confidently controlling your information and your computer desktop.” Wishful thinking? Mebbe. But it’s high time we took a quick peek at what the next level Windows computing will offer.

Aero
The code name for Vista’s re-designed user interface. AERO is an acronym (some say “backronym”) for Authentic, Energetic, Reflective, and Open. It promises to be spiffier and more aesthetically gratifying than previous Windows. It will feature new animations, transparencies, bells, whistles and eye candy.

Aero will come in graphics flavors: Aero Express, the skinny fella, for mainstream or lower-end graphics cards that will support just the basic visual improvements over WinXP--like composition-based DPI scaling. And Aero Glass, the sumo. This will be for mainstream and high-end 128-258MB graphics cards supports 3D graphics, 3D hardware acceleration, animation and visual special effects in addition to the features offered by Aero Express.

XML Paper Specification (XPS)
This is Microsoft's new XML-based document format. Bollywood-ishtyle “inspired” by Adobe Acrobat’s PDF format, XPS allow users to view, print, and archive files without running the parent program. A step up, documents can stay in the same format from the instance of their creation to the time they are printed. In actuality, XPS will incorporate rich vector-graphic elements in XML documents, with necessary fonts embedded, to allow for portability across platforms.

Vista Search: WinXP’s current search tool is almost like molasses trying to run uphill. Vista Search promises to produces jiffy-results--like those of Google Desktop, Apple’s Spotlight, or Microsoft's own Windows Desktop Search. Multiple filters will be available to continually refine your search results. And saved searches will act as virtual folders, where opening a folder will trigger a specific search automatically and display the results as a regular folder.

Shell
A paradigm change from its ancestors, Vista’s shell provides you the ability to find and organise your files in new ways. The typical file organisation funda of using folders to contain files aside, a new collection known as Lists will now let you arrange and organise files--from multiple locations in a single place. And something called Shadow

Folders will let you revert (undo?) the contents of folder to any previous point in time. The visualisation of files has also been upgraded. Drawing from the current picture thumbnails concept to show what a file contains, Vista now helps you identify even what each file contains.

Undoubtedly, Windows Vista is maha overhaul from the Edison of the 20th Century, Mr. Bill Gates. So there a lot more to talk about. So watch this space next week for the rest of what lies beneath.