Today, instead of work, or better yet, in lieu of work, I went to the launch of Windows Vista. I went to the developer seminars.
It was held at the Shaw conference center. I parked for free next to Diamond Park in the valley. Then I climbed the stairs to downtown, made my way to the conference center, where I promptly took the inside stairs down to the base of the valley again.
I could have planned that better.
I can’t say it was interesting, but I did learn some things.
I don’t think the OS is ready for primetime. I mean, the presenters seemed to be in mortal fear of rebooting their computers when something went wrong. Maybe they get fired if they reboot because it shows how slow the OS is. One of presenters found that the clipboard service had died, so he couldn’t copy/paste anymore. Rather than reboot, he went to a fair amount of trouble to manually type the code in.
One of the more amusing moments was when the developer was describing Windows gadgets. He accidentally called them widgets.
It was actually creepy how much of the new version of Windows was stealing from the Mac.
The Microsoft Office was also covered a lot. Microsoft seems to want people to develop their applications so that they use Office. Which I suppose is a good way to require people to buy that bloatware.
Office’s new document type is supposedly an open standard that uses XML. But I don’t really believe them. They did enough so that they could get a checkmark that says they are an open standard. But look closely and you’ll see it is so complicated and hard to follow, that only Microsoft will be able to support it.
Must be nice to be a monopoly.