Moving to Ultimate pt 2
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I can't believe I'm going to say that one of the things I get best about this upgrade is the screen saver. But bear with me. I have a post in draft with the working title "the death of order" about how good search means we don't need folder hierarchies any more. I've talked about meta-data tagging in Vista several times on this blog, and how one of the major places this makes a difference is with pictures. I haven't abandoned folders completely: my "My Pictures" folder still has some - generally based on where they were taken, but with Tags which let me pull together "aircraft", "Lisa" (my daughter), "Cartoons", "Panoramas" and so on. If I use a lot of cartoons in presentations, a saved-search folder will pull together those I've saved from the Internet (in my "Downloads" folder) and those I drew myself (in my "Scans" folder), giving me a "Cartoons" Virtual folder when inserting a picture. Virtual folders works for anything which uses Windows common dialogs - even my version of Paintshop pro, which pre-dates Windows-2000 never mind Vista. |
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Now it seems to me that a business user might well want to keep personal photos on their PC, (Family pictures are a popular wall paper) and they might also have product photos as well. Both Enterprise and Ultimate have the Photo gallery. So it would seem quite reasonable that a photo screen saver should filter pictures by tags. In fact when I was running Vista Ultimate in the betas I tagged all my best pictures "Portfolio". So I was a bit disappointed to find the Vista Enterprise, has a less functional photos screen saver. You can see screen shots of the two on the left. The Ultimate version has a clever selection (instead of tagging "portfolio" I could use Star rating), and I can exclude anything which is portfolio standard but not suitable to show in the office. Some of the themes are really pretty nice too. The Enterprise version won't use a search folder, doesn't have filtering and has no themes. Shame. |
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While I'm on these differences, enterprise doesn't have Media center - that's a "home" feature - it only has the normal Windows Media Player. It doesn't have the DVD burning program either, Media Center burns CDs and DVDs (functionality which I seem to remember I couldn't find in the beta) - but Media player only burns CDs and data DVDs. I think the logic of that one is that there is no video DVD burning in Enterprise, business or home basic but we want to use one version of Windows Media player... That would make sense if it wasn't for movie maker. I would have thought movie maker would be left out of business and enterprise but since it was there for all versions of XP it seems to have been carried over. The odd thing is that the user of enterprise can make movies, but can't burn them to DVD. The other odd thing is why is Media player the same between versions and Movie player different ? If the presence of the DVD burring program "lights up" the function in Movie maker, why not in Media player ? The whole media thing will be the subject of another post.
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Technorati tags: Microsoft, Windows, Vista, Utlimate, upgrade