The battle between Microsoft and Apple began a new chapter in the summer of 2007 with the launch of Windows Vista. I personally am currently sticking with Windows XP. Why am I doing this? Well, I think it is wise to be patient for service pack 1, just to be certain that all the major glitches have been ironed out.
There’s no question that Vista is a considerable visual improvement over Windows XP. A few have commented that the visual effects of Vista are far superior than XP – just like when consumers switched from Windows 98 to XP. Also there are some fancy looking features like the program toggling feature – comparable to Apple OSX’s exposé feature.
As well as the good looks, there are also some exceedingly cool innovations. Vista now encrypts the data on your hard drive. This means that if you lose your laptop your data will not be accessible to anyone without your password. In XP your data was at risk because there were ways of recovering data from a hard disk without the need for a password.
In response to Vista, Apple have made “Leopard”, the coolest and most feature rich version of OSX to date. One of my favourite features is the Spotlight app, which allows you to quickly browse previews any type of files on your hard drive. The way this is done is similar to the way you can flip through album covers in the iTunes. It’s a very nice looking feature and I was really impressed by the speed in which the previews were created.
Another perhaps must-have feature of Leopard is the Time Machine. If you have ever “saved over” an old version of a document you will know that the old file is more often than not gone forever. Time Machine keeps track of all the changes that you have made to documents allowing you to really quickly revert back to a previous version. The interface represents each version of a document as an individual window amongst hundreds that cascade into the distance. The whole experience is becoming less and less like using a conventional computer and more like a video game. Great work on both sides.
