I’ve just spent a couple of hours at Microsoft in Reading, learning about the home-centric fun features of Vista. Things like Volume Shadow Copy and how it protects us from oursleves, the control-scroll trick to zoom in and out when viewing pictures in explorer and just how much photo tweaking you can do with Photo Gallery before ever needing to fire-up the Gimp. I was planning to install Picasa this week but I’m convinced otherwise. I will have to work out how to upload pictures to my Google photo gallery however.
We also got to see Microsoft’s answer to Google Earth. Take a trip there yourself to make up your own mind.
From the demos, Movie Maker and DVD Maker combined can turn any photo set into a polished DVD whilst adding an Xbox and/or TV Tuner begins to make the Sky box, video recorder and stereo look a bit ancient.
Trouble is, I don’t want an XBox to play games and the promise of other media extenders at lower prices hasn’t bourne fruit. I’ll keep waiting. In the meantime, I’ll also dream of being able to sync my iPod to Windows Media Player and not have to use iTunes whilst considering if the Microsoft Zune will do a better job – doubt it.
The impending arrival of Home Server will be welcomed in this house as it helps backups, seems to give us back Remote Desktop for Vista Home Premium and moves us one step closer to doing the file storage thing properly. If it let me load Apache and Mercury on it too, it would be perfect. I’m sure it won’t though.
I’m on the beta list but have not surfaced enough to be given a test pack. The nice chaps today have said they’ll pass our details on to the Product Manager and ask him if we can shuffle up the stack a bit. So who knows…
One last point. The people at Microsoft UK seem a contented bunch, even when assualted with some really dumb-ass questions. I know MS are an easy target for assault but let’s be honest, other than the occasional bit of over-the-top bloatware (MS Office), they are not a bad bunch. That’s my view anyway. Even if we didn’t get a goody bag at the event. Not event a new pen.
