l-dopa

So Windows Vista has a shiny new, hopefully double-buffered windowing engine ala Mac OS X, and so naturally Microsoft wants to show off what it can do. But this is their take on it? No no no. This is horrid. You can see an awful lot of the first window, but the rest of the windows are still hidden behind it. And this method doesn’t even stairstep/cascade the title bars at the top, so you could read the text to understand which window you want; that is, if you could even read the text in the first place, given that it’s a) transparent and b) skewed needlessly into 3-D space.

Nifty look, and great for demos, but bow-howdy, I hope they work on this idea. I have to admit, though: I love Mac OS X’s Exposé function more in theory than in practice, as I rarely use it when I’m working. I find that the dock, along with OS X’s genie-minimized windows, actually do a pretty decent job of keeping my tasks separated but readily available.

~jeff