Incremental Blogger

Joe Wilcox posts a list of 10 things he warned Microsoft about Vista–I think many of us could write a list like this. Some similar points. Some different. When you think about it, with all the feedback Microsoft was getting then and now, it’s a wonder they can really keep their heading right.

Anyway, this list got me thinking about the 10 things I like about Vista. In no particular order, they are:

1. Windows XP was getting old and it was showing. With age comes service packs that become a total pain to manage–especially when installing the OS fresh.
2. Vista Updates seem to work quite nicely.
3. Connecting to a wireless network is easier now than in XP.
4. This isn’t Vista-specific per se, but it was developed in the time frame with Vista in mind: I really like the WPF programming model. Lots of power. Easy to use. Silverlight 2 is taking this even further–to the browser.
5. It’s more secure than XP–particularly in IE. I haven’t had a meltdown yet, knock on wood.
6. The battery meter seems a lot more accurate in Vista. When I’m on battery power with my Tablet PC I rely on it more.
7. I like the quieter boot up and shutdown “music.” Less annoying–and sometimes embarrassing–than XP’s.
8. ALT-tab for switching between apps is much nicer.
9. I’m a huge fan of being able to type names or partial names of apps in the “Start | Run” edit field to get to them. If I want to get to Notepad, for instance, sometimes I click on the icon in the Start menu if I see it. Other times I just type “Notepad.” I usually type the names of infrequently used apps to launch them rather than search the Start menu for them or directory.
10. Vista locks up more for me than XP–because of lingering driver problems–but it gives me much better feedback than XP in terms of where the problem lies. Very useful–even if there’s nothing I can do about the drivers.
11. Better support for the Tablet PC, such as the checkboxes in the shell which make it much easier to select files.

OK. That’s 11, not 10 things I like. Consider the 11th one padding, just in case you don’t like one of the other 10.

Now I guess I could write a “10 things I warned Microsoft about” list too–but what’s the point? We are where we are. Now it’s time to look forward and help Microsoft focus even more on the things that are important to me as a user, such as better notebook support, better touch features (including multi-touch), improving speech recognition and synthesis, working with the OEMs to build better devices, and taking the DWM (desktop windows manager), even further (I want to be able to rotate WPF apps, for instance). I can think of tons of more things, which why this industry is so great. There’s always more and better things to create. Can’t wait.

If you’re pulling out your hair trying to get file associations to work in Vista, but you can’t get the file association to work no matter how hard you try, you may want to check out this thread. Seems the path in the registry to the executable might be incorrect–which can occur if you’ve moved (during a re-install) a program. Here’s the steps to fix it:

1. Open regedit.exe
2. In the left window pane, expand the tree view to:

Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\<your application executable name>\shell\open\command

<your application name> should be replaced with the name of your application. For me it was xemacs.exe

3. In the right window pane, double click (Default). Where you see the path to your program, you’ll notice that the path is wrong. It will be the old path, where your program USED to be.
4. Open Windows Explorer, and go to where the executable of your program is located. Copy the path in the Windows Explorer address bar
5. Back in regedit, paste over the incorrect path using the path you copied from Windows Explorer. Make sure you only replace the path, and not anything extra that happens to be in the Value data text box. (ie. be careful not to erase any quotation marks, or “%1″, or anything else you see there)
6. Press OK, close regedit, and you should be done!

Not sure if this issue appears in all versions of Vista or if it’s something that’s part of some beta issues. But I see online that others are running into this, so I thought I’d post the answer here.

I see from the “conversation tracker” for Microsoft developers that Windows Vista SP1 has made it to RTM (release to manufacturing). It’s the third entry in the list.

Mike Nash has more details here on the Windows Vista News blog.

Microsoft announced today that it is extending the sales availability of Windows XP another five months–until June 30, 2008. If I were Microsoft I’d add another six months to that date. Maybe even another year.

No matter, extending the availability of XP is a good idea.

Why am I bullish on XP? In large part because of what Intel is doing. Especially with Silverthorne we’re going to see lots of low power, resource light, computers over the coming couple years and XP is a better match for them than Vista–from what I see now.

And as mobility keeps ramping up, Vista is in the wrong place at the wrong time. It needs more mobility features. Sleep and hibernate have to work. I don’t care if it’s the fault of the drivers or the OS. If it doesnt work, I can’t recommend it. Boot and shutdown times ought to be more mobile friendly too. And then there’s battery life. Some have suggested that Vista only lugs the battery life by a mere 4%. It could be, but that’s going in the wrong direction. An OS well-timed for today’s increasingly mobile market would have longer battery life–not less.

And then there’s my concern about connectivity. There’s no doubt that Vista’s connectivity support trumps XP’’s. However, I still can’t seamlessly move between EVDO and WiFi with the ease that I think you should be able to. When WiMax hits the streets next year, Vista better be ready.

Finally, about the driver issues in general. The next iteration of Windows better get this right. This is particularly true for mobile users where devices can’t be swapped in and out. Everything in a notebook has to work. Period. External devices I’ll give some time to. But if it’s built-in it better work. Period. XP does so much better here–even with its SATA installation challenges.

My suggestion to Microsoft is still the same: Take a version of XP that exists now and clean up its shell for mobile users. Call it Windows XP Mobile or whatever. With the above issues addressed I’d switch to it in an instant. I’ll leave Vista on my desktop.

Oh, and one more suggestion: I’d give a bonus to every developer that moves their development from a desktop to a notebook. Yes, it would be painful, but short of that I don’t see how the developers can really understand the issues and really believe that they are developing the best mobile code—except maybe if they get an iPhone, iPod Touch, or a MacBook or MacBook Pro. Get it? I do. Yes, I expect more from my OS than I used to. That’s the nature of the marketplace.

I’d really like to see the engineers keep pushing the envelope with Vista. I assume Microsoft is well along the way to creating the next iteration of Windows and I can’t wait to see what the engineers come up with–I just hope it won’t take 5, 4, or even 3 years.

So far Microsoft has mentioned that a Service Pack for Vista is on its way and that it will include some stability and performance enhancements, but it won’t contain lots of new features. That makes lots of sense. Stability first, then worry about new features.

I can’t help but be concerned though that the next iteration of Windows is going to come too late for most of us that thrive on the edge. Already almost everyone I know that’s an early adopter has purchased a Mac within the last year or is thoroughly thinking about it. They may run Vista or XP on the Mac, but the Windows slipping sound is hard not to notice.

The reality is that time is going to fly. From past experience, let’s say that there’s a beta of the next version of Windows available right now. If it were, I’d estimate a shipping date 18 months out or so. So we’re talking 2009. And that’s if the beta existed now. Which it doesn’t. So it does seem reasonable to guess that by the end of 2009 or more likely 2010 we’ll see a noticeable update to Vista. Do I want to wait that long for significant enhancements to the OS? Nope.

Vista still needs to catch up in some low-level areas, such as with boot and shutdown, but these are going to be things that I’m sure we’ll have to wait on. There’s no easy fix I’m guessing.

However, there are probably features that are more orthogonal, more independent of the core operating system that I’m thinking Microsoft should focus on until the next version of Windows makes its way to the marketplace.

Of course, if Microsoft isn’t keen on adding features to service packs, then what? Well, it’s game time, I presume. Time to game the system. What about pushing new features through the Ultimate SKU? Or what about channeling them through developer builds? Just say they are for developers. Give everyone a Go Live license when ready, but let everyone know that this is new stuff that only works in certain configurations.

In this way, Microsoft has a better chance to keep up with the competition. The IT industry can look the other way and ignore this kind of stuff. It’s not in Vista out of the box. No worries. The consumer market will love the injection of new thinking however.

What types of things would I like to see? Well, new APIs would be welcome. I’d still like to see a good SDK for apps sharing ink or whatever. It should take 15 minutes to build a whiteboarding app. Same goes for hooking or extending Messenger. Why isn’t Messenger embrassing Silverlight with a vengance? I also wouldn’t mind working with an alternate shell, if there was something worthwhile in it. No ideas here–just saying I’m open to some major changes too. Another idea? Integrate desktop capture and live stream sharing and recording. Talk about a game changer. What about adding meta data to the clipboard? Or while supporting easier SDKs for machine-to-machine communication, come out with apps that leverage it? And then what about multi-touch? Is this a feature that Microsoft can wait 3 or more years to integrate into their products? I bet there are dozens of these kinds of things that people are already doing wtihin Microsoft and could be released as great “ad ons” which someday might get folded into the OS proper.

Anyway, if it takes 3 years for the next version of Windows, so be it. But here’s hoping that innovation will win out and someone will fgure out how to get it to the marketplace sooner than later.

I just uploaded a screencast that shows handwriting recognition being performed by Mac’s InkWell technology as well as that provided on Tablet PCs and in Vista. In this video, the demo is all done on an iMac within Firefox. The recognition on the Mac side simply uses InkWell. For the Microsoft side, I used the Silverlight-based SearchTIP I described the other day, which uses server side recognition.

Here’s the video:

The video is a little longer than 8 minutes. Enjoy.

I’ve always wanted to do a side-by-side comparison of InkWell and Microsoft’s handwriting recognition engines. You see so much banter on the Internet about Apple’s handwriting recognition being better or that Microsoft’s doesn’t perform up to expectations. I hope this screencast gives people a better idea of how the two technologies compare. Personally, I believe the Microsoft recognition performs better, but that’s me. Others may have differing opinions. No problem.

A couple things that are worthy of pointing out in the video:

* InkWell handles printed text fairly well and does OK with a little bit of cursive text mixed in. However, when all or most of the letters are cursive, it doesn’t do very well. The Microsoft recognizer wins hands down with cursive handwriting.
* The first generation recognizer from Microsoft didn’t recognize all caps text that well. The new recognizer does much, much better.
* The InkWell recognizer appears to leverage stroke order over spatial relationships between the strokes. The Microsoft recognizer does much better at taking spatial information into account which means you can write letters “out of order.”
* The Microsoft recognizer leverages a word dictionary which is easy enough to add words too, however, if the word is a name or something unusual and the words not in the dictionary, sometimes the recognizer doesn’t get the word right. I’ve found if I print the word carefully, the recognition goes up. Same with InkWell’s handling of proper names–although in practice I seem to be able to write names better with InkWell.
* The Silverlight app used in the screencast doesn’t capture the ink as fast as that captured on a Tablet PC, so the quality isn’t as great. This is particularly noticeable in Safari. Because the screencast was performed on a Mac, the InkWell ink looks a bit smoother, but on a Tablet PC you could say the same thing. Silverlight’s ink is good, but the Tablet PC’s ink is even better.
* Editing gestures are supported by both InkWell and Microsoft’s ink recognition, however, the Write Anywhere feature supports the gestures directly. On a Tablet PC there’s no longer a built-in Write Anywhere feature, although there is programmatic support for gestures as well as Flicks gestures (for window navigation) as well as a correction UI built into the Tablet Input Panel (TIP). Is Write Anywhere better than the TIP? It’s probably a matter of choice. The TIP definitely provides more editing control over the ink. InkWell’s Write Anywhere may seem more natural in a greater variety of apps.
* Both recognizers do well with simple math expressions, however, the Microsoft recognizer can recognize bullet lists, simple shapes, and more. Unfortunately, in this simple demo there isn’t a good way to illustrate this. I’ll have to see if I can come up with a better demo.

You can try out the handwriting recognition yourself–even if you don’t have a Tablet PC–by visiting http://www.TabletPCPost.com/Search. You do need a browser that is capable of running Silverlight, however.

I think I down-sampled the video too much so it’s kind of hard to see what’s going on. Fortunately, I wrote large most of the time. I’ll see if I can fix the video.

Update: Want to learn more about InkWell? Check out this blog post on SkinYourScreen.com about InkWell. It does a pretty good job of walking through InkWell’s capabilities.

The other day I was adding some numbers up in my head and it didn’t take too long before I realized I needed some good old fashion digital help. But I was too lazy to fire up Calculator. The app’s somewhere buried in my menus. Actually with Vista it’s not that bad to launch Calculator, just type the “calculator” (or some portion of it) in the Search Box which appears when you click on the Start Button. But this time I was extra lazy. I didn’t want to go that far. I could have switched over to IE and typed in the equation to Google or Live Search and they would have given me the answer. But I didn’t even do that. And then it struck me: Why can’t the live results from the Search Box give me the answer directly?

Here’s what I mean. Why I’m typing some equation in the Search Box, why doesn’t the search results report a calculated answer? It can keep searching the index for matches, but in the meantime how hard and resource intensive would it be to report back the answer to let’s say 3+4*18+2?

Here’s a quick mockup of what I’m thinking:

It might be interesting give access to the Calculator app with the equation already “entered,” but I don’t know. My guess is getting the value to the clipboard is probably more useful. Whatever is done, it ought to make sense with other “answers” too, such as retrieving definitions, asking for unit conversion, requesting a word or phrase to be pronounced in a specific language–or even translated for that matter.

Is the textual Search Box the place for all this? To begin with I think so, but if more “quick” answers become more and more available it probably shakes the very question of what the best UI should be. Should you be able to copy/paste a handwritten equation from OneNote into the Search Box and get an answer? Is this merely one more access point to applications (whether on the machine itself or remote services) that might make sense? Food for thought.

There’s is an issue about purity of design here. Some argue that “search” should remain all about search. I argue that “search” isn’t the only goal here that makes sense. There are times when I want to graze. There are times when I want to compare different possibilities. And then there are times I just want an answer. Google and Live Search have been providing quick access to calculations, definitions, and the like for awhile. But why do I have to go to the browser to get them?

Actually, after thinking about this for awhile I realized I could get to a calculated answer (or definition or whatever) without too much pain through the Start Menu. All I need to do is type what I want in the Vista Search Box–as if I were typing it in the Google or Live search box and then click on “Search the Internet.” The query will then be sent to the search engine of choice and the browser will appear with the answer. It’s one extra click and a bit of an indirect solution, but I’ll see if I can get used to it. I might be too lazy

I installed these two Windows Vista updates last night. I haven’t noticed any differences yet. That’s a good thing. I wasn’t sure if I should take the plunge so quickly or not, however, after a reboot everything seems to still be working fine. I’m most interested in whether these updates fix some Sleep and Hibernate issues. It looks like it’s supposed to, which if so, will make my Vista expreience so much better.

Oh, and by the way, the Vista printer driver for the HP Color LaserJet 3550N is online now and appears to be working well. You can’t use Windows Update to install it. It’s not there yet. You’ll need to download the driver from HP directly and then select the “Have Disk” option when installing.

Now that I have access to my printer again in Vista and I can rely on Hibernate (hopefullly) working, I’m feeling even better about Vista right now. Oh, and on the developer side, Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 has made huge improvements too. I’m feeling like the ducks are getting in a row again at Microsoft.

Neowin is reporting that Microsoft will soon be making available several hotfixes for Vista. Their site has a whole list so I won’t reproduce it here, however, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Some of the items are about “improved reliability and compatibility.” It’s hard to say whether they will impact you or me. It’ll depend on the situation.

Other items have my attention. For instance, there’s a bullet item that indicates there will be improvements in the speed of transferring or moving large amounts of data. Cool. And there will also be improvements in the dialogs that display estimated copy/move times. No more reporting of 45 seconds for the next three minutes I hope.
I also see that there are expected to be improvements to going into and out of sleep mode. I have only had a few issues here–hibernate has been the real pain for me–my Toshiba M400 seems to wake up by itself when unplugged and in hibernate. Believe me that’s a sure fire way to start a fire. Can you say one hot computer when the Tablet is folded up into a carrying case? I’ve been blaming this on a driver issue. Maybe it’s a Vista one. Hmmm. I’m hoping that this problem will go away with these updates. If not, I’ll continue with my workaround: either I keep the Tablet plugged in at all times when hibernated or I do a full shutdown otherwise. I’m too chicken to use sleep. It’s too hot here in Phoenix to rely on computers staying cool enough when stowed away.

Anyway, I’m eagerly looking forward to these updates. Good news.

Update: I missed the obvious here: These are unnoficial (leaked) updates that Neowin is talking about. This tells me that all this chatter at this point doesn’t mean much. We’ll have to wait and see what Microsoft has to say. Who knows what an official set of hotfixes will have in them.

PC World has an article quoting Acer president Gianfranco Lanci that “The whole industry is disappointed with Windows Vista.”

This article gets to me. Why? Because in my experience, it’s not simply “Vista” that’s at issue here. For me, I’ve had the greatest issue with Vista drivers. I’d place this issue squarely at the hands of the manufacturers. I have no first hand experience with Acer and Vista in this case, but I’ve had “issues” with several others. Take my Toshiba Tablet, for instance. It runs terribly on battery. My Samsung Q1 which has a lot less horsepower handles Vista just fine on and off battery. Sure the hardware is different, but my guess is that the drivers are the issues. Blue screens tell the story. The drivers have been getting better from what I’ve seen, which is a good sign. It’s not up to the level which I would have liked. The one thing I’d say is that next go round, Microsoft needs to look at drivers differently–particularly because more and more computing devices are not all that expandable. I expect things to just work. Drivers and all. If Microsoft has to limit which hardware future, first-iteration versions of Windows runs on, fine by me.

Now in terms of performance. This can be an issue, especially for great mobile experiences. Generally, I’ve turned off as much extra stuff as I can to improve things. Yeah, I miss the gadgets. I’ve disabled indexing. I don’t use the UAC–it gets in the way. I don’t find the mail, calendar, Meeting space, and so on that much useful–I want more in terms of ink and mobility in all of these apps. In addition, I turned off IE 7’s extra pop messages. And, yes, if you can’t guess, sometimes I wonder if XP isn’t just fine. Then I go back to XP and I realize that overall Vista is just a better experience. It’s an improvement. The shell is better–particularly on a Tablet. The handwriting support is better. The fact that I can move windows around that have embedded video in them and the video window doesn’t stay behind or turn to black—oh, how I hated that in XP. There are lots of things I like much better in Vista.

Now if someone could merge the performance efficiencies of XP with the things I really like in Vista, then maybe I’d stay with XP. Without that, I’m content in moving on to Vista and I imagine more and more people will be doing the same too. It may just take time. Time for the drivers to catch up. Time for people to be ready to upgrade. Time for the hardware to catch up.

My concern though is that so many people are becoming mobile that Vista has a challenge ahead of it: Windows needs to become even more mobile friendly. Moving between WiFi and WLAN needs to be better. It’s still not easy enough to just work in small ad-hoc groups with others that are running Vista. Whereas I can use OneNote to talk over ideas with someone remotely, I don’t understand why a feature like this shouldn’t be more native. The shell is generally fine, but try running Media Center on a small screen with just touch. And IE needs some rethinking in one critical area–it needs to support much better offline experiences.

I’ll put it another way. There’s been lots of talk about the growth of the industry and “the next billion users.” I’m guessing most of them will be “mobile, heavily networked” users. For most, desktops are not as competitively efficient in either regards. If I’m correct in my prediction that the next billion users will become “mobiley connected,” then this will have a huge impact on what people expect in Windows. As a developer this is what I’m watching for.

Michael Parekh is thinking about purchasing a copy of XP while it’s still available this year and then waiting until the release of the next version of Windows–which Microsoft is indicating might be three or so years from now. His plan is to skip Vista–or at least hold out until the drivers are better.

I can appreciate his master plan, however, three plus years can be a long time in the tech world. By then XP can look mighty old and feature incomplete.

Now I’m presuming in all this that Vista will have a couple of refreshes along the way which will make it even more palatable. For me, XP already looks tired. I really like the way Vista manages WiFi connections, for instance. (Although there’s more to do here in terms of transparent transitioning between WiFi and WLAN networks…hint, hint.)

A side point to all of this is whether XP is worth keeping around. In some ways it is. Just look at the OEMs and what they are favoring now for small, mobile devices. Quite often they pick XP. I’m not sure if this is because customers are demanding it or because XP makes their products “look” the best. Either way, it seems like Microsoft may want to rethink its idea of dropping XP soon–or at least might I suggest that eBayers start stocking up on XP boxes, because there very well may be strong demand for them post 2008.

I’m getting very discouraged.

My key HP printer still does not have a Vista printer driver for it–Vista first came out at the end of last year and it’s July already. HP’s support page says “soon” and that “HP expects to complete the certification process for applicable drivers by July 2007,” but who knows. The site has said the same thing since Vista’s launch.

“HP Color LaserJet 3550 Your product will be supported soon 3”

This is getting old.

There is one workaround that seems to work OK for the types of files I’m printing anyway: Try installing the Vista Printer driver for the HP Color LaserJet 3600.

Here’s what you can do:

* Download the Vista printer driver here for the 3600 and unzip the compressed driver to your local drive. Remember the location.
* In Control Panel, select “Hardware and Sound”, then “Add Printer” under the “Printers” section.
* I have a network printer (3550N), so I selected “Add a network, wireless or Bluetooth printer”
* A window will appear with a list of the printers on your network. Select the item “hp color LaserJet 3550 (Hewlett-Packard) and click Next
* Give it a printer name or leave the name as it is. Click Next.
* Select “Have a disk” and then browse to the location where you uncompressed the driver for the 3600 and click Next.
* The driver should install–or at least it did for me. Now you’ll be able to print on the Color LaserJet 3550N.

Mary Jo Foley is saying that the beta for Vista SP1 will be out soon.

“Word (from various sources who asked not to be named) is Microsoft is gearing up to drop Vista SP1 some time the week of July 16.”

Nick White, from Microsoft, joins the discussion about battery life under Vista.

Some people have been arguing that the decrease in battery performance that some are seeing with Vista (my Toshiba M400 has become noticeably battery unfriendly, for instance) is due to Aero. Nick says that the Aero features actually consume “only about 1-4% more of battery life.” For a battery that previously lasted 200 minutes, that would yield a loss of 2-8 minutes due to Aero which would be acceptable–and I’d add, probably not noticeable.

I’m not sure if Nick is saying that the whole Vista Aero system consumes 1-4% more battery life or that if Aero is disabled in the OS by the user that you’ll only see the 1-4% difference. I’m guessing he’s saying the latter. This doesn’t mean that the core Aero system itself doesn’t consume 10+% more battery life–even when it’s not composing anything on the display using Aero technology.

The problem is that many people are noticing significant battery drops on some machines–although not all. My Samsung Q1 (which has a 915 chipset and therefore doesn’t run Aero and the sidebar is turned off)–runs Vista just fine. Others are seeing that their UMPCs are doing just fine too.

Could it be that the UMPCs run just fine because they have a 915 chipset which has drivers that were not optimized for Vista? More speculation.

I’d like to hear someone from Intel or Microsoft break down the battery issue further. If there’s no hope, just tell us there’s no hope. I’ll pick up a new Tablet if that’s what I have to do to get acceptable battery life. I just want to know that the next Tablet I get can last a couple hour flight. In the meantime, I’ve been moving much of my critical travel software to my UMPC. Sorry Tablet, you’ll be travelling no farther than the end of your power cord from now on.

Bob was wondering which OS would give him longer use of his battery on a MacBook Pro (MBP). So he ran a test. Starting with a fully-charged battery, he booted once into Mac OS X and once into Vista (via Bootcamp) and during each session he surfed the Internet using a WiFi connection for as long as his battery would allow him.

Which OS gave him the longer battery life? Mac OS X. The Mac OS lasted slightly longer than 2:15 minutes whereas Vista ran for 1:40. That gives OS X about a 35% edge over Vista using the same hardware.

Of course, this is a completely informal, non-scientific test. Bob wasn’t trying to duplicate his actions in each case and so there were definitely differences along the way. How much his actions influenced the time is unknown.

What was the hardware that he was using: MacBook Pro, 2.13GHz, Core 2 Duo, 2GB memory, 120GB 5400RPM harddrive, 15.4″ display, 802.11G and Firefox browser while surfing the Net.

Personally, both times don’t sound that great to me, but I can see where the large display and CPU could eat up milliwatts pretty fast.