Vista Gadgets...

Now that I've got Vista installed at home, I'll be looking into development of Vista Gadgets (i.e. Widgets) for useful (or not) desktop items.

Here's the practically hidden development site.

Vista Thoughts...

For the first time since Windows 98 I didn’t participate in Microsoft’s beta program for their next big operating system. I figured that I’d get Vista when comes out and not have to deal with buggy software, apps that didn’t work, poor performance, etc. So, the beta came and went (and this time they opened it to pretty much anybody) and I chose to keep plodding away with WindowsXP.

Now, that I’ve upgraded, I’m really surprised how many applications I run on a daily basis that work great in XP but poorly or not at all in Vista. Here’s a short list of what I’ve found so far…

• Quicken
• CD/DVD Burners (Nero or Roxio)
• Audio software (due to a lack of drivers…)

And most of the game software I wrote for Windows 2000 runs with warnings, but anything I wrote using OpenGL (like my rss screensaver for windows) has major issues.

This wouldn’t be so bad, but almost every vendor website that mentions Vista compatibility issues are charging for new releases that are Vista certified. In my case, my DVD drive came with DVD burning software for free, but to simply get my Drive working in Vista I’ll have to spend $40. (Vista, of course has it’s own DVD writing component, but I’ll have to use it more to either condone or condemn it.)

Long story short, if I didn’t have to upgrade Vista so I can support it in my past and future software, I might have waited until I bought a new system.