Hands On: A Hard Look at Windows Vista

Aero has often been dismissed as so much eye candy, as frivolously non-functional adornment, as pretty things to dress up the user interface. The same people who rant endlessly about whether the graphical menu should move vertically or horizontally are the ones who dismiss the power Avalon represents to transform Windows applications of the future. It's not about what Microsoft is doing with the Vista interface, it's about what all that power in the hands of application designers and developers could mean with your software.

The Aero interface, and the application user interfaces that take full advantage of WPF in the future, can take advantage of these graphical effects: 2-D, 3-D, 3-D animation, effortless scaling, vector-based text and shape rendering and motion, transparency, blurring, shadows in motion, object movements and a lot more. Put in simpler terms, Microsoft is borrowing heavily on the graphics horsepower previously only found on high-end gaming machines and enabling it as part of the operating system's core.

It's about the applications. And since we don't have many of those yet, it's hard to see the advantage. But make no mistake, Windows Presentation Foundation is a powerful reason to prefer Vista.

For more information about WPF, see this book excerpt, written by Paul McFedries.

Vista's upgraded user interface
The Aero user interface is a minimalist showcase of some of the things application makers might take advantage of with WPF. It appears that Microsoft purposely held back its designers to keep from turning the operating system into a theme park. The use of transparency in Windows Sidebar, though, gives you some insight into what might be possible. Windows Explorer's scaling icons are another hint. The Windows Photo Gallery is an excellent tool for managing images, thanks in large measure to the power of WPF.

Transparency opens up a cluttered desktop. HGTV addicts will note that it's the same idea as adding a mirror, windows, or a skylight to a room. There's nothing like that annoying feeling of trying to find another app window amidst the mess of 20 open windows. And yet many power users work that way.

Microsoft's use of transparency in Vista is subtle, not glaringly obvious. It isn't so much something you see when you look at Vista -- it's something you feel when you use it. The more aesthetically oriented you are, the more you feel it. It's the back-of-the-mind knowledge that does the trick. You know that window is there in the back. You can see it. It's not lost.

The Vista desktop, featuring Aero's transparent windows.

The Vista desktop, Start menu, Quick Launch toolbar (beside the Start button), taskbar, and notification area are more or less reprised from earlier versions of Windows. They have minor changes to their controls. The Start menu does a much better job of handling long submenus, but the change is mostly evolutionary.

One important change to the Start menu, however, is the introduction of text-based searching as an interface convention. Torn from the Web, this idea is just a slam dunk. When you're trying to launch a program and you don't know where it is on the Start menu, just type the program name into the Start menu's integrated search. Control Panel has almost 50 applets on some machines. It's far easier to type the name of the applet you want in Control Panel's integrated search field than go hunting for it.