Many people are posting that other applications provide the functionality that this does, and they do. Sort of.
But trust me when I say that they don’t have the speed and ease of use that this does.
Press the winkey and its there, all loaded and ready to go, type some things and press enter, and you don’t even have to wait for the thing to refresh, it will just go and run the first result it finds. The fact that I can now run programs in less then a second is very important.
It may seem like small thing, but trust me, when you have had it, its hard to live without it.
Windows XP has the “just type what you want to run” interface, too; it’s called Command Prompt. I use it all the time. Its tab-completion isn’t up to Linux/Vista standards, but it’s more than usable.
There’s also something the advocates for the “search everything” misses and that’s the fact that you have to remember something about what you want to find.
You have to remember the names of the programs and you have to type it correctly (type ntpad or xplorer, how stupid is that?)
And I still havent seen how this is supposed to work on for example chinese keyboards when most programs (even made by non english developers) have english names.
It’s just an old way of doing it, like I said, the search is a great complement but should absolutely not replace the folding menu, unfortunately in Vista it has and all we are left with is a scrolling programs menu which is kind of a big sack where everyhting goes, impossible to keep ordered and find anything in.
They could at least have given people a choice to enable the old style XP folding menu (not talking about classic mode).
So, what happens when you end up installing another program that starts with “not”? The next time you attempt to run notepad you may end up running “notathing.exe” when you type “not”.
I love keyboard searching, but basically you say you are installing Vista, an entire operating system, just so you don’t have to install Colibri, SlickRun, Launchy, or one of the many other similar and fully functional tools that give similar results for 10% cost and 1% hassle.
The point stated wasn’t to compare the Vista search capabilities to other OS’s and/or applications, but rather to compare it to previous versions of Windows.
Actually no, when the previous paragraph talks about Vista being criticized compared to other OS’ and the current one suddenly talks about a “killer feature”, the mentioned “killer feature” shouldn’t be available in any other OS, and in previous versions of the target OS through the use of third-party tools.
Well, it’s most for the security at two levels; a copy of the unix system. That gives you a better chance to avoid viruses. You been ask two times and even three before clic on the ok button. Also what do you install is mostly not accepted by the system and the levels of acccess are pretty much like layers where the software is analyse. Also, the installation are made a way that you are severely direct to thoses paths of safe spaces of security. The only thing that will stop me from getting, it is money. I wont pay 500.00 dollars for Ultimate…(I remember Multimate). Sorry Bill… And again, i have already 5 licenses from Microsoft 98, 2000, Visual studio.net 2003. The new Office 2007 does what more? Linux is becoming more userfriendly and you know IT BILL!
You have all the money you need. Microsoft doesn’t need to sell the software anymore. Just invest your actual money. Give us a rest. Who care’s if it looks like OSX; there partners, anyways.
It’s like coke and Pepsy. Vote for democraps(like it)or RepubliCaines. Last night. I was watching Condoleza whith all respect for ascension for a black woman to a higher position(i steelremember what they did to the other black star). By the way i’m not black. And i see that the Congress can’t stop the idiots at the white House.
Notice the ‘All Programs’ button at the bottom. It’s pretty much in the same place that you’ll see it in XP. clicking on it lists all your programs: it displays the same data that was in XP. The fact that it’s displayed in a list instead of a problematic flyout menu is merely cosmetic. you can navigate the list by pointing in ways which are trivially different from XP.
Lanuchy works fine for me, and it didn’t take 6 years and a bagillion dollars. If this is the best feature M$ can come up with after all that investment, we are all truly screwed…
This is awesome. I’ll still need SlickRun for command lines with parameters, but I’m with you - I don’t think I’ll discover any better feature.
The thing is, we’re in the minority. As in 0.0000001% of user’s will care about this even if they know it’s there.
Fact is people associate “point and click” with “computer”. I’m very surprised this is in Vista. Probably only because programmer types at MS could slip it in easily due to the new storage/search model.
I guess I’ve just become so accustomed to keeping one hand on the pointer thingy and one hand the button thingy and work well with my method that this doesn’t really seem that big of a deal for me. I’ll just have to work with Vista for a while and see what I think. I haven’t even looked at many screenshots to even know what it looks like just sitting there.
It may not be compelling, but it looks like it might make productivity improve. Next is GENERAL PUBLIC ACCEPTANCE. Not everyone will use features like this, so power users and geeks will love it. Other people (novices, everyday joes, etc.) will probably never use it. I know my wife, mother and mother-in-law won’t. The mouse is “much easier.”
What would make this better for some of the “everyday joes” is to create a tutorial on this or other features and include aliases for their favorite programs. That one’s been done before, I’m sure with how much success though. Kinda like shortcuts and batch files, just makes a program name something a user can associate with.
typing (command line) - point click (Windows on DOS kernel) - BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH - point click (Windows on NT kernel) - BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH - Now we’re going to being typing commands again - mY pRREDICTION: bLUE sCREEN oF dEATH
So, we have variations of this feature in other OSes and third-party tools. That’s nice, but useless for 90%+ of computer users. Why? They use Windows out of the box because they don’t have the confidence or aren’t allowed by their IT depts to install the apps that supply these features. They will never have this feature if Windows doesn’t provide it. While this might not be an earth-shattering feature in its own right, IMHO it will have far more impact on computer-usability than any of the other solutions mentioned above. That counts for something.
Amazing! Thanks for your time Jeff! Been reading you for a while now and enjoy your insightful comments. I always love the anti Microsoft people out there. Yes, there are other things out there, some better some worse, some can’t even be compared. Who cares who came up with it first? My IT department issues Windows based computers so it isn’t like I have a choice. When they decide to upgrade us to Vista well then I get to learn all the new stuff. I, as previously mentioned by somebody, keep one hand on the button thingy and the other on the pointy clicky thing. I get my work done, my boss signs my paycheck and I get to go pay my creditors. Is OsX better than XP, UNIX, LINUX, BEOWOLFE? I do not care so quit whining about it.
