ptek: A 2600Ghz CPU, 1Gb ram and it's slow ?!
Beta builds usually are, as they have debugging enabled. I remember when Win2K public builds came out, they were very slow, and people were complaining left and right. Then, Win2K final came out, and...
WOW, was it fast.
Now, OS X...
that's a serious performance pig. It was completely unhappy running on my mini until I put in 1GB of memory, and it's still slow.
Vincent: Unfortunately you can't really do anything with the toolbars in the explorer shell. Which is a bit of a c***, I liked having things like folder options on the toolbar. You can add the normal file menus though (as I mentioned earlier) and they do appear the same as the menus in 2k and XP.
You still have the back, forward, address bar and search bar, but there's no "up" like before. But that's not really missing as they've improved the address bar.
I suppose that's OK. I never use the folder options button, and I use the Back/Forward buttons on my keyboard to navigate, Stop to close windows and Backspace to go up. I have so many media keys for everything. It actually ticks me off that there still aren't dedicated copy/paste/undo/redo buttons on PC keyboards.
That's actually one thing that really annoyed me about XP. By "simplifying" the taskbar, combining all windows for an application as one button and not giving each window its own button, that made navigation a lot more difficult.
Vincent: if you click the arrow to the right of Computer you'll get a drop down menu with all your drives. If you click the one to the right of (C:) you'll get a list of all the folders on C:. To go up one level, just click on the name of the above folder, eg clicking Computer will take you to Computer. Funny how it's not My Computer anymore, I wonder why
They're getting rid of spaces in folder names, thank God, presumably to make things easier now that Windows will be getting a proper shell. "Documents and Settings", for example, will now be "Home", which is what it should've been in the first place! Less clicking, more typing. That makes me happy.
I sure hope Vista has more action control, though. One thing I love about Windows is that DirectX allows you to remap any control to any other control -- a brilliant design principle that still eludes the Mac and even game consoles. My Microsoft keyboard allows me to remap the media keys to certain buttons on windows, so I can close/resize/move windows by pushing a button. This requires a special driver, though. I hope Vista will have this support built-in.
What would really make my life easier is to assign certain actions to
any DirectInput control. It would be nice if I could draw in Photoshop with my tablet, while using a media trackball with my left hand to zoom. That would be very sweet. There are some devices like that, but they are extremely application-specific. Being able to remap this stuff on the fly would open up a lot of options, including the ability for me to build my own controller from scratch using parts from a USB joystick. I've been wanting to do that for years, but I don't know how to make my own DirectInput driver.
OS X is pathetic in this respect. Everything is done Apple's way, and everything is hard-coded the way
they want you to use it. Expose is a good idea, but, it's useless with the extremely limited remap options Apple gives you. Doesn't anybody understand interface design at all?
Hyperion, please take notes. Don't underestimate how profitable these touches can be, given how easy it is to implement them. Given the choice between decent, expensive 3D support and cheap, fully remappable controls, I choose the controls. Spend months writing 3D drivers, and you'll still always be behind the PC industry. Spend a week or two rethinking the interface controls, and that alone will be a major selling point to power users. It's really not that hard or time-consuming to implement useful features.
Thanks for all the info, Vincent. I'll probably update to XP (so I can actually get drivers) and stick with that.
