In the third part of my Vista review series I want to present two major changes that I find neither great nor bad. They're just different from XP and the positive changes pretty much make up for the negative changes. You'll have to build your own opinion for these, but I hope it can give you an overview of what to expect.

File copying

Have you ever tried to copy a directory that contained a Visual Studio project that was still open on Windows XP? If so, you probably know what I'm talking about. As soon as Explorer hits the first locked .ncb file (and only then, which is usually half-way through the process!), it aborts with a simple error message and no way to retry or skip.

Well, that's finally fixed. If the Vista file copying algorithm encounters such a file, it offers you to skip it, leaving the rest of the process unaffected:

I wouldn't want to miss that feature anymore. In a similar manner, the dialog that is shown when a copy process is about to overwrite a file was improved:

You can see that there is a lot more information than in the old dialog, including a preview and the number of remaining conflicts. The option to keep both files is also a long overdue improvement that other operating systems have had for a while. However, after a while I found the dialog to be a little annoying. The XP ways of saying "Yes to all" and "No to all" were just easier to select than the check box at the bottom, especially with Vista hiding the underlined mnemonics until you press the Alt key.

The copy progress dialog mostly went through optical changes (nothing like a 3D animation to make file copying more entertaining ...) and they've changed the way that Windows estimates the time remaining. It doesn't seem to display completely absurd guesses like "2,194,984 minutes left" anymore, but I did get the impression, on several occasions when copying files from or to a slow medium, that Windows spends a lot of time just guessing the time, when it could already be copying the files.

Task switching

Microsoft not only implemented a fancy new 3D way of flipping through the currently open windows, they've also modified the good old Alt+Tab way. The icons were replaced by thumbnails of the application in question and it is now possible to navigate within the window list by using keyboard and mouse. That's quite an improvement as it's often a lot faster than the old bidirectional navigation with Alt+Tab and Shift+Alt+Tab.

There's one problem I have with this view: It's not easy to spot the window you want to switch to among the thumbnails. At least for me, when I look for a window, I do so by application. I think "I want Opera" or "I want the MSN chat window". I don't think "I want the rectangular white window", cause most of them look very much alike in the thumbnail format due to their scaling. So, I turn to the icon in the lower right, which, more often than not, is not very clearly discernible from its background.

What I would really want to be able to work efficiently with many windows is a list of application icons together with their window title, all visible at once. And if there have to be thumbnails, they should be to scale and represent the position of the window. Cause that's how I picture the windows in my head and recognize them.

By the way: This is the exact reason why I don't consider the Exposé feature of Mac OS X very useful. But from what I've seen it seems that Apple's implementation is very well done from a technical perspective.

Another thing that would help a lot is decent support for virtual desktops. There is no built-in support for that (although I heard the API does make it a little easier to develop such tools than in XP). Last time I tried one tool that promises to do just that (Vista Virtual Desktop Manager), it was extemely unstable and slow and the author doesn't seem very keen on accepting help or improving the situation himself. Too bad.

The 3D view sometimes does make it easier to find a window, and the live preview (if you're watching a video, you can follow the live picture in the 3D view) sure looks cool, but the first time you use it, it can take a few seconds to open. Even though successive attempts are a lot faster, I've noticed that it scares me off and I rarely use the feature during work.

Bottom line

All in all, both file copying and task switching have improved for Vista. But they're still a long way from being perfect. Compared to other systems (that aren't perfect either), it seems that it would be possible to pick the best features and integrate them into a consistent and efficient interface. I just can't get rid of the impression that the Windows marketing people keep picking eye candy over usability in some cases.

This article pretty much concludes the user interface chapter. In the next articles, I'll go into more details on topics like stability, power management, and other more system related topics.

For reference, here's a list of links to the other parts of my Vista review:

• Windows Vista: User interface (Part 1: The Good)
• Windows Vista: User interface (Part 2: The Bad)
• Windows Vista (Part 4: Explorer)
• Windows Vista (Part 5: Power management)