Because geek is cool and clever

Vista by default March 2, 2007

Despite daily promises to myself that I wouldn’t be taking the plunge with Windows Vista any time soon, last week I bought a new laptop computer which, as you would expect, came with it preinstalled.

I’ve already had plenty of experience with the various pre-release beta versions of Vista so on the whole I knew what to expect and the performance has definitely improved with the full release. The bells, whistles and eye candy aplenty certainly do no harm and if you can stop yourself from systematically reverting its functionality to something more akin to a familiar XP style, you’ll eventually find some cool tools and productivity enhancing features, though little that’s truly innovative and doesn’t already exist as third party downloads in XP or in Mac OS X.

That’s the Vista review out the way, probably the least in-depth evaluation you’re ever likely to read, but the web is, of course, full of them so seek greater guidance there, if you must.

I’ll end by saying that I was going to ‘write’ this week’s column using one or both of Vista’s alternative input methods – handwriting and speech recognition. In fairness, the experience wasn’t quite as bad as I was expecting – indeed, once trained, I was occasionally impressed with Vista’s ability to translate my scribbles and mutterings – but I don’t think secretaries and PAs have anything to worry about just yet. Unless your typing sounds like the ticking of a grandfather clock, pecking away at the keyboard is still going to yield faster results for some time still to come, although from a disabled usability perspective, Vista does deliver potentially useful help.

There is always some new online innovation causing a buzz and filling up blog inches and Joost is no exception.

The software aims to merge computer and television experiences by delivering video content over the web using established peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies. It’s no fly-by-night start-up, either. Joost is the collaborative brainchild of the founders of Skype and Kazaa and it has already signed deals with Warner and Viacom for providing content.

Still at the ‘invitation only’ beta testing stage, Joost shows considerable potential and looks likely to push forward considerably the whole IPTV trend of delivering television and film over the internet at very little cost to the provider.