Alright, that isn’t entirely true. I installed Vista on my new MacBook Pro with Ubuntu and SuSE at the same time. I only did so because Fry’s no longer stocks XP. This is the first time I have honestly used it (with SP1). It feels like XP except for a little more annoying (I had trouble finding display settings in the control panel, the new start menu being embedded with a scroll pane was annoying at first until I figured it out, etc.) I still see a lot of the same in many places though. One thing is the all to famous common color picker dialog (same since Windows 3.1). Other then that, nothing to special with it from my view (except getting to play with .NET 3.5 but its still slow even on this brand new 2.6ghz macbook, Nvidia Geforce 8600 with 4g of ram running in bootcamp).

The biggest reason for installing it is to test an application that runs in Vista that I’m maintaining in my free time that has a bug running on Vista. One of my friends told he had a bug and after investigating I blame the DRM in Windows sound. (His older Creative card has horrible support on Vista.) I gave him a copy of Ubuntu and he is running like a champ (he complained about not having I haven’t iTunes to play his DRM encoded music but I showed him Wine and he was good to go. Thanks to Mono, my app runs on Linux (in fact I developed it on Linux and thats the only place I’ve ever tested it and it worked for everyone on Windows that used it until I heard this bug on Vista happening). (I’ve mentioned DRM twice so far so that can’t be good).

I’m putting together a public release of that program later and a making some cool YouTube videos on the topic on what is to come (hoping to generate some excitement). I have to admit that its mainly written in C but it embeds Mono on the Linux and Mac versions. It’s little but its big at the same time. :-) That’s all the details you get. No planned release date yet. (don’t you wish you knew what it was yet?).