KaiSchaller.com

Microsoft recently released the public beta of Windows 7 and given my inability to resist trying new (free) software, I bit the bullet and gave it a shot. Here are my thoughts thus far:

Fresh Install is faster
By this point I consider myself a veteran XP installer, mostly because of voluntary formats. Operating system installations (not just Windows) usually take a while, but this one was relatively fast — right around the 10 minute mark, as opposed to the usual 20 or 30.

Windows Update is just as slow
I’m not sure if this is something Microsoft is trying to improve in this iteration, but Windows Update is as slow as ever. Installing optional drivers took almost as long as the OS install. On a more positive note Update was very good about finding drivers for my monitor, network card, and sound card.

Anti-virus and Windows Defender
The first thing I was asked to do after installing and updating Windows was to find an anti-virus program. A link was provided to a Microsoft page with a list of supported programs. While the lists for each Windows OS is incomplete (my current favorite, avast!, is missing) there were several options listed. I opted for Kaspersky, and the installation and subsequent scan was painless; Windows was very quick to recognize that I had installed an anti-virus program and also when the program had been updated.

The suggested Windows Defender scan was surprisingly quick — even though it’s a fresh install and there aren’t many files on the system yet, it still seemed faster than a scan on Vista.

Desktop Personalization
The dreaded gadget bar seems to be hidden by default. Windows 7 includes some pre-packaged “Windows Themes” that apply quickly and are fun to use — some include multiple backgrounds, so if you get sick of looking at one of the backgrounds in the “Landscape” theme you can right-click on the desktop and choose “Next Desktop Background Picture” from the context menu.

Windows 7 - Next Desktop Background Picture

Paint
Paint has been greatly improved, now offering things like cropping and even free-form selections. Equally impressive is that the default format when saving was PNG. All of the screenshots in this post were edited with Paint.

Taskbar
I thought it would take longer to get used to the new taskbar, but the transition has been less painful than expected. It does seem to take a little longer to identify programs due to the lack of a text description, but at the same time this provides more room. I thought I might not like the extra space the new taskbar occupies, but it’s really not that much larger and still smaller than your average OS X dock.

System Tray
The system tray (or “Notification Area” as it’s called in the Control Panel) sports a very sharp redesign with simple and attractive system icons:

Windows 7 - System Tray

There are also some nice customization features available, including the ability to hide an an icon’s notifications and being able to turn off system icons.

“Snap To”
A really nice feature is the ability to “snap” an open window to either the left or right side of the screen. This makes it easy to compare two documents or websites by having each of them take up half of the screen. In a related feature you can drag a window to the very top of the screen to maximize it. Each of these actions comes with a nice window-outline animation that shows what will happen when you release the mouse button, and the window will return to its original size when it is dragged away from the screen edge.

Conclusion
I honestly didn’t expect my first impression to be so positive (or to be using the words “quick” and “fast” so often!), but I must say that Microsoft has pleasantly surprised me. I came in expecting to see a lot of ideas stolen from Apple, but there are a lot of original concepts that are actually intuitive and fun. Assuming Microsoft can continue to make improvements and stop itself from making any major bad code and design decisions this might actually be a decent operating system. I’d be happy to finally ween my PC off of the now very dated Windows XP and move to something more modern — let’s just hope it doesn’t turn into another Vista.

I was all geared up to write a post about how it is a poor idea to have Firefox save your passwords since there is plenty of password field “unmasking” software floating around out there. In theory all a malicious user would need to do is go to the login page of one of your saved password sites, load up the unmasking software, unmask the password field (which has been auto-populated by the browser) and be on their way.

I figured it would be wise to make sure this actually worked before ranting about security flaws; imagine my surprise to discover Firefox (v3) seems to have taken this tactic into account. The unmasking software I was trying had no effect on stored password fields. I was curious to see what the mechanism for this was, so I downloaded the FF3 source code. I didn’t dig in too deeply, but was nevertheless amused to see the XML namespace they were using was “there.is.only.xul”. Clever.

Also, I went to the Obama rally on Saturday. It was amazing to see 100,000 people come together like that. Go-bama!

I’m giving the WordPress iPhone/iPod touch app a try. Not the easiest thing in the world to type on a touchscreen keyboard…

In other news I can apparently type 101 WPM (on an ergonomic keyboard.) I’m a happy camper.

I’m officially writing my first post of WordPress 2.5. Happy Cog definitely helped tighten the admin interface, and gave it that “clean” look. I haven’t noticed much difference in functionality, but then again, I don’t usually go past the usual simple write-and-post process.

The reason for writing this post is that I wanted to share with you something incredible that happened over the weekend. Don’t get too excited; it’s not that great, but made my jaw drop nonetheless.

I went home to St. Joseph to give my mom her birthday present — a new MacBook. She’s been putting up with a clumsy Gateway laptop for a while now, and the problems were starting to mount. After continually singing the praises of OS X, my dad and I both chipped in to buy her a Mac to alleviate these problems.

One recurring theme was that her printer would just stop working for her with the Gateway. Lo and behold, we plug it into the MacBook and it’s ready to go in 3 seconds flat; printed a test page and it worked great.

Since she still needed to use the Gateway for her office, it was time to figure out what was going wrong. After some basic troubleshooting I uninstalled the printer software and drivers in order to start from scratch. We plugged the printer in to the USB port and the New Hardware Wizard appeared, as expected. Also expected was the “No drivers were found” message that appeared on the next screen as well as the “Would you like to search online for drivers?” prompt.

Now get ready…

For the first time in my many, many years of using Windows XP, the internet search for drivers actually worked. Printed a test page and all was well.

Mind blown. The end.

You’ll notice that all of the pictures that were previously in various posts are now missing. This is because of an FTP anomaly when I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. For some reason Transmit (an FTP program for OS X) defaults to “Overwrite” instead of “Merge” when uploading files and directories that already exist on the server. As a result, it first deletes your existing data, then replaces it with the new files.

Fail.

You know it’s bad when having to wait for an operating system to load prompts me to boot up my laptop so I can write about how I’m waiting.

It is taking Windows Vista (Business edition, by the way) an inordinate amount of time to load. It’s been displaying the boot screen for over 2 minutes now….

Ah, finally.

But it doesn’t end there. Once I actually get into the operating system I’ll have to deal with the horribly slow update system. The update process for Windows Defender is so slow that it comes close to causing me physical pain. On top of that, I am forced to click through several “permission” screens because Vista has to double-check every single little action with me before it runs. Even from within the control panel!

In contrast, OS X seems to perform its intended tasks with much more grace. Besides actually doing a convincing job of looking pretty (although I suppose that’s more a matter of taste than anything), it doesn’t bother me with inane messages, or annoying bubbles that pop up from the system tray. It handles security beautifully without me having to do anything. And it boots in a matter of seconds, not minutes.

As a final point, consider this: I’m running Vista on a high-end desktop PC. Some specs:

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.14 GHz
• Memory: 2 GB DDR2 RAM

Compared to my Mac laptop:

• Processor: IBM PowerPC G4 @ 1.67 GHz
• Memory: 512 MB DDR2 RAM

I find it odd that the PC (with a dual-core processor!) has to labor through Vista, while the dated Mactop just cruises right along. I think you dropped the ball on this one, Microsoft.

For the longest time I’ve been baffled as to why the scrolling text in Winamp would sometimes mysteriously change font on me. Today I finally opened my eyes and saw that it was because of the special characters that sometimes appear in songs. In my case the phenomenon is predominantly caused by umlauts. Example follows.

I’ve been using Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 to write most of my web-related code because of the nice code-highlighting and uploading capabilities. When I found out today that I could check out Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 (essentially Dreamweaver 9, if you were to follow the previous version numbering scheme) I figured I’d give it a shot.

The feature that has me really excited is the integrated validator and especially the “Browser Compatibility Check.” This thing is awesome, although I can’t say for sure yet how thorough it is. Essentially it checks the current document (or whole site) for any problems that might arise in certain browsers. What’s even more brilliant is that it gives a detailed description of what the problem is. I tested it out on one of the sites I’ve created and it found the IE6 3px text jog bug. This piece of software definitely has potential…

I’m currently working with the university’s web development team, as it is one of the only jobs I’ve found outside of freelance work that actively uses the knowledge I’m trying to gain. There are, however, some minor annoyances that come with not being my own boss.

The biggest of these is the team’s complete dedication to Microsoft FrontPage. I’ve never liked MSFP, not because it’s a bad piece of software, but rather because of its complete lack of support for things like web standards and PHP syntax highlighting. Oh if I could only count the number of FrontPage-generated pages I’ve had to correct on the university domain… You’ve never seen code like this! While I understand that Microsoft often must invent its own way of doing things because they are almost always one of the few big developers involved in new technologies, I just don’t get where they pull some of these ideas. On a somewhat related note, I find ASP (using VBScript) to be a complete nightmare, but this could be because I dove into PHP much earlier and am thus simply used to a different syntax.

Dreamweaver, on the other hand, handles things quite well, and as such I don’t have much to complain about. I’d say that completes the short rant.