Most of Vista features unadulterated ripoffs from Apple Mac OS X.
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/te ... cuits.htmlThe best part was a demonstration of Windows Vista, the next version of Windows, which Microsoft still says it will ship before the end of 2006. The audience in the standing-room-only auditorium was treated to a show of some features that hadn't been previously demonstrated. Here's an annotated blow-by-blow:
* Transparent window edges. Well, it's true that Vista looks nicer than any previous version of Windows. But I'm just not sure about the value of transparent window edges. They're cool, sure; but exactly how many times, in your work life, have you muttered, "Darn! If only I could see just the part of the background window that's currently obscured by the 1/3-inch margin of the foreground window"?
* Widgets. Vista will let you summon, at the right edge of the screen, widgets: single-purpose, single-window little programs. One's an egg timer, one's a news ticker, and so on. It's a lot like the Dashboard in Mac OS X (or the shareware Konfabulator that came before it), except that apparently, you can't put the widgets anywhere on the screen you like.
* 3-D application switcher. With a keystroke, Vista can present you with a stacked deck of every window that's open on your machine, making it easier to hunt through them for one particular window. It's a lot like the Exposé feature in Mac OS X, except that you don't get to see all of the windows simultaneously; you have to walk through them one at a time with the mouse or keyboard.
* Global, fast search. Vista can now find words in any of your files, quickly and easily, just like the Spotlight feature of Mac OS X.
* Photo organization. Some limited photo editing is now built into Vista's photo browser, which couldn't look more like Apple's iPhoto program if you ran it through a copying machine.
If I seem to be laying on the "stolen from Apple" language a bit thick, you're darned right. Ordinarily, I'm careful about making accusations like this, because I know I'll get hammered by Apple bashers. But in this case, there's not a shred of doubt: most of the features Microsoft demonstrated last night were pure, unadulterated ripoffs from Mac OS X. I could hear actual whispers of recognition from the audience around me.
Does it matter? Not really. The courts have established that you can't copyright a software idea (only its code); besides, Apple occasionally helps itself to Microsoft's ideas, too. Truth is, I use both Mac OS X and Windows, and I'll be happy to have these features on both platforms.
Besides, there were a few Vista features that Microsoft apparently dreamed up all by itself:
* Sideshow. This ("sideshow," not "slideshow") is an optional feature of future, Vista-compatible laptops: an external L.C.D. screen that lets you look up, for example, your calendar without actually having to boot the thing up. Sideshow was displayed only briefly and without much explanation, so that's about all we know.
* Slideshows with movies. The new Vista photo browser won't just show still photos; it will also integrate your camera's video clips into the slideshows.
* Stacks. In the new Windows Media Player, when you sort by Genre, your albums' icons appear as piles of album covers, neatly grouped by kind of music.
* Thumbnail tabbed browsing. Internet Explorer will finally get tabbed browsing (a feature that Firefox, Safari and other browsers have had for years), in which you can keep multiple Web pages open at once, all in the same window; you switch from one to the next by clicking little file-folder tabs at the top. But in the Vista browser, you can also view all your tabbed Web pages as window miniatures, so that you can jump to one according to what it looks like (rather than just its name). A great idea.