Every Flavour Beans

Not being in the habit of playing a lot with the Windows beta products, I have been giving a miss to the different, incomplete versions of Windows Vista that were being released regularly(for MSDN subscribers and the members of Vista Beta Program). My experience with testing a very early version of Longhorn weren’t very enjoyable either. But yesterday I decided to give the public release of the Beta 2 of Windows Vista operating system a go - and I am not regretting the decision at all!

We have been reading the major technical differences between ’soon to be released’ Windows Vista and the earlier Windows operating systems for some time now. Many of the interesting new features though have been removed from Windows Vista in an attempt to release it as early as possible. But I won’t be discussing the real meat behind the new Vista operating system in this post; rather, I would just concentrate on showing what an eye candy of an interface Windows Vista is, even in a Beta 2 form, and it should only be improving from here. This doesn’t need too much of talking though, just a handful of screenshots would do the trick :) . If you have already installed Windows Vista then this post is not for you. If you have not, browse through the screenshots to decide if it is worth to test out this beta or not. And once it is released, whether to consider buying it or not.

Windows Vista - A Visual Tour

This is how Windows Vista looks like when you first boot into it.

Let us start with my favourite application in Windows Vista: Windows Media Player 11. It looks gorgeous in the black theme to match the default theme of Windows Vista and provides many improvements over the earlier version of the Media Player. I loved the support it provides to the Media Players that use MTP protocol(like Creative MP3 players).

The main window now looks attractive with Album art nicely organised providing a good visual interface for the users to select their favourite albums to play.

If you try to minimize the player, you are offered to minimize it and keep playing the music in the taskbar. Nothing new really. This is how it looks in the toolbar. Cuter than before.

Burning audio cds is easier with a noob-friendly drag-n-drop right-pane.

Windows Vista detects my iPod as a USB device…

…though it prompts to open the files in the file browser giving a hint that the operating system does identify it as a storage device(iPods are just FAT formatted USB devices on Microsoft Windows)…

…but shows no music files/folders or plays anything. Just lets browsing the ‘Contact’, ‘Notes’ etc folders in it; for the rest, install and use iTunes :)

But the support for the Creative MP3 players is excellent. I am more than happy for it as I possess two Creative Media Players(Creative Zen Sleek which you can see in the screenshot below and the Creative Portable Media Center) that are MTP devices.

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