As one of the benefit of participating ImagineCup Web Development Competition, I was entitled to download the free Windows Vista off the web, coming with an appropriate license. With an adequately good Video Card and a 1.5G of DDR memory, it barely meets the minimum requirement running Vista. Here are a little feelings I’ve got during the first few days of use.

Compatibility

I recall the Vista was built from ground-up over the last four years by the team. But it does provide sufficient backward compatibility that many programs running on XP can successfully run on Vista without an upgrade. In fact, when Vista gets an installation request from a program that has known incompatibility issues, it will give you a warning. My bloody experience told me that, don’t take it as a joke. It’s really going to mess it up.

I was installing Nero Essential 7 on the Vista before I get a message saying that I better upgrade before continue. But I wanted to risk it. So I pressed continue, after which the installation halted and it took me about 2 hours to figure out how to back out the halted installation. Fortunately the Nero.com has a cleaner that was designed to remove such zombie installation from the OS, but seems like the tool only works when I sign in as “Administrator”. (i.e. I must be using the Administrator account, not another account that is also an administrator).

But the whole process is overwhelmingly complex for any non-professionals I believe. Vista system recovery staff might be an emerging career. (hehehe…just joking).

Performance

Like 4 years ago, when I first installed Windows XP on my Pentium 2, although better than that, the vista gives me the feeling that it’s occupying all of my machine’s resources. Occupying 500-600 M of physically memory by itself, I really feel sorry for the 1G memory I bought during last Christmas, for it being “abused” by Windows and couldn’t devote itself to other “projects”.

When the CPU gauge stays stable, (on startup, it freezes at 100% for quite a while and eventually becomes normal), I tried to open some large programs and count the seconds they take to open. The speed, in fact, is acceptable. But I didn’t test operating them. I bet those memory intense ones would suffer since there is less “pizza” left for them.

…Vista is ready to be an ultimate platform for the Internet centric world…

Hardware Support

The hardware support looks to perform better than Windows XP. It recognizes my graphics card and installed it properly. But after I manually re-installed the driver so the nVidia control center can be accessed from display dialog, Vista detected my hardware change and automatically shut my Aero theme on next start up, until I found the cause and upgraded the driver again.

General User Experience

I would keep saying “where is my stuff” for the first 10 hours using it. Every common task in XP is now separated into one or more drill-down levels. There is always a list of common tasks comes first as oppose to advanced settings which can usually be found on the left side bar of the window. I found the advanced options are more clear to me as they retain a similar organization as they were in XP.

Another concern I found was the file moving and deletion. It was extremely slow. I guess it has things to do with updating the windows file indexing feature. Although not really clear if there is such a thing, I am guessing that Vista is keeping track of all the folders and files in it to optimize searching of files. So each file moving and deletion operation will affect the structure of the index file, if it works similarly like the ones in a database system. The consequence of this can be severe and even catastrophic. “If user can’t even get the very basic tasks done efficiently”, what’s the point of having everything else?

Final Notes

Like I always believed, the value of Vista is not Vista itself, but the .NET framework 3.0 bundled in the back scene. With that strategy, Vista is ready to be an ultimate platform for the Internet centric world, and could potentially beat Linux and Unix like it did decades ago with its Text Editor.

Last week was definitely a remarkable one in the IT geeks’ world. Immediately followed by hundreds of comments and trackbacks, the TechCrunch’s coverage on iPhone’s announcement have shown people’s great interests in it, no matter it’s positive, negative…or hybrid.

Out of those people commented, there are essentially two types of them: those who want one right when it’s available, and those who are the same but pretending not to.

To me it’s an absolutely fancy and yet usable piece. I definitely will get one someday if not on the first day of release…as I am still not as rich…

Apple kept up people’s expectation and respect to truly push technology and usability forward to next generation. I call them “making fictions real”.

Yet the border was quite clear on TechCrunch. People either like it or “hate” it.

“Consumers’ behaviors cannot be measured directly from the price differences”

Some of the concerns are

• The thing is way too expensive. Not for average American to afford.
• The thing is bundled with Cingular. Cannot be used more broadly.
• The thing is announced too early. Competitors will get time to breathe.
• The thing is fancy but too entertaining. Users won’t be sponsored by their companies.
• The storage is a bit too small.

My Takes on these

• There is one guy who listed three reasons but are essentially one thing - the sky high price.Honestly for $600 bucks I’d rather buy a PS3, or 2 Wii. At least they are bigger in size. But first of all, the US doesn’t lack of riches. If I don’t need to worry about my tuition, I don’t think $600 is too much of a big deal, given that it’s a real PDA + iPod + CellPhone, not to mention its full-body touch screen. It’s a hundred times better than Nokia 8801 which is still selling at $500. Consumers’ behaviors cannot be measured directly from the price differences.Just an example, I’ve been struggling for whether I should buy a $300+ graphics card for years, but I don’t feel any problems buying a $300+ trench for my GF. Same rule here, something is expensive doesn’t mean it won’t be sold well. It really depends on whether people think it worths it.
• There are still 5 months before the release, these kind of promotion related limitations, as analyzed by someone, are going to be removed quite soon, before the second release. It’s hard to imagine how it can be sold world-widely if it is really a bundle with Cingular.
• This is really fun to think about. Some criticized how stupid Steve Jobs is announcing this so early. And some others suggested a different standpoint.iPhone has been developed for 2.5 years, and so for the competitors to really catch up, 5 months is apparently not enough. Now the most interesting part came. It’s analyzed that Jobs announced the product 5 months early, with a bunch of highly polished model demos on Apple’s website, is intended to cease other similar products sales completely in next 5 months. Many users who wanted to buy a Blackberry soon now need to re-consider their purchase plans. It is like selling it to the future. He’s got “brilliant” strategy and great ambition. And of course this move is strongly backed up with the stunning features that iPhone uniquely offers.
• I agree. But I just care about I can get a good toy and there are plenty of people like me.
• It’s quite small. But even stupid people like me can think of a solution…use a cable to connect iPhone with iPod’s massive storage.

CASCON 2006 had spanned 4 days of last week and I was able to attend two workshops, out of some dozens.

Like any conferences, I found it not that a fascinating event, but yet there is always something new you would find useful or inspirational to hear about. I did.

Workshop 1 - Writing for the web

The workshop introduced audience some “facts” about online user behaviours and I found those are good matches of myself.

Some examples/facts from the workshop hand-out

Characteristics of Web Readers

• Impatience
• Lack of time and leisure
• Purposefulness/Goal Orientation

Web users like

• Facts
• Well Designed sites

…dislike

• Marketing/overly hyped language
• Scrolling

How user approaches Web pages

1. Flit from page to page, scan for content they found informative
2. Scan in the page for microcontent (headers, titles, linktext, highlights, etc)
3. Users scan in “E”/”F” patterns (focus on first few lines, eyeballing from left to right, then scroll down a bit and scan from left to right again)

A brief note

From these examples, we should have been able to summarize some useful techniques to facilitate readers’ scanning works.
For example I put a section title for each few paragraphs so that readers can briefly get an idea of what I’ve been covered. It’s not 100% effective but it would help.

Why should writers allow users to scan their articles (i.e. allowing users to bypass the “great entry I’ve written”)?

If you don’t provide readers a good scanning mechanism, they will skip the entire entry all together and move along. Again, users are “time-starved” (Gerry McGovern) and would not be loyal to every single entry you wrote.

User can “sniff out” the Scent of Information (Jared Pool)

This is the single most interesting term I’ve heard from the workshop. As user scan, they will stop at certain pages that they think has the “scent” they expected. Then as they drill down into each candidate pages, the pages that have “stronger scents” will be picked. However, if they lose the scent, they will go backwards (or quit).
It’s an abstract analog of how users find their information out of billions of pages, but you know what he is talking about once you hear it.

Some Sources

• K. McCaskill and L. Strbling
• Gerry McGovern
• Jonathan Follett
• Mary Knittl
• Jared Spool
• Jakob Neilson

-End of Part 1-

See the dummy paragraph below. It’s been divided into two columns displayed side-by-side, just like the columns you see on newspapers. One general problem with blog articles is that the lines are too wide in width. Human eyes cannot cover a “screenful” of information, so it’s neccessary to separate an article into approporiate columns. That’s also why you don’t see a page of news without columns on any newspaper or magzine.

Right now I need to specify how should it be divided explicitly when I am composing the entry, because analyzing the post structure, could be really exhausting and before I can prove it could be done in P time, I’d not touch it. God knows where should I set the break mark and it’s not breaking any p elements, lists, specialized divs, so just keep my life easier.

A dummy Paragraph

Bloggers’ve been used to the fact that blogs only allow us to write for the time being and future, but not the past, unless you change date from database. So, based on that assumption, blog systems provide all kinds of post categorization and visualization, tag cloud say.

But when I open this site(Dandelife), in 1 second I was greatly inspired. The timeline concept perfectly fit in here! Comparing to my post cloud, which looks quite messy, this thing is well-organized, clear, and interesting! They proved that time can go backwards! :P

Function-wise, there is a public timeline, where the stories are randomly chosen from users and each one has his/her own timeline. The timelines shown are from about 1970 to 2010, but you can drill down to year level, in which stories in that year are broken down into months.

So now:

• If you find an old photo of you under your coach, you can post your memory on and you can never lose it.
• If you have some really fun stories of your childhood that you suddenly remember, no hesitate should you save it.
• Unless you are 2 years old and start to write a blog, all the way till you are 70, you might find creating a lifetime long story timeline, especially when you can catch up from the past, is really interesting. Passing them on to your children. (That’s a bit too far to forsee, but it’s not a bad idea, is it?)

As well, they integrated flickr with the edit page. It might look like nothing special, but when I was planning my next project, I realized that I will face the image storage problem, if I would like users to be able to add images. I definitely cannot offer image storage, and I came up with the work-around, use flickrs! Then I recalled these guys’ work. Smart move!