Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Windows Vista Beta 1 vs. Mac OS X "Tiger" (Part 1)

Here's part 1 of a comparison between Windows Vista Beta 1 vs. Mac OS X "Tiger". There are a number of screen shots and it seems a pretty balanced view. It covers three areas.

In Look and Feel Tiger is still prettier but Vista is an improvement for Windows. In Search both are very similar. In what he calls Data Visualization and organization he likes some of the Vista features. It comes with predefined "saved searches", which doesn't seem like a big deal to me. He likes that there are more obvious ways to add meta data to files, particular in the Save dialog, which sounds nice, but the problem with meta data as always is getting people to actually add it. Maybe the vista features will help.

He also likes Vista's eye candy of use an image of the first page of a doc as the icon, saying it's easier to find things. He says "there's nothing like it, per se, in Tiger". But that's not true. Tiger does this for images and when minimizing a document to the Dock. I find it useful in those contexts, images are different enough, something comes through at that small size. Same with the different apps you might have open. But for a lot of Office files in a folder, particularly if they all use the same corporate template, I'm not sure much will be helpful.

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