Vista: Setting Some Boundaries

One of the biggest mistakes that most Windows XP users make is to always login as an administrator. (And by most, I mean 99%.) That basically means that you, and any other piece of software running, have unresticted access to the entire computer. It also means that your children are probably using the same account and can install whatever software they want and do whatever they want.

Windows Vista has a couple of features to help address these issues. First, Vista has User Account Control (UAC) which means that even when logged in as an administrator, Windows runs as a normal user and when it needs to do something limited to an Admin, it will prompt you for permission to continue. Vista also makes it easier to run as a standard user. Well, that may not be so much of Vista’s doing and more that software makers now must make it easier or else UAC dialogs will annoy the user.

For the typical home user with children one of the most compelling features will be the built in Parental Controls. You can setup a standard user account for your kids and enable the parental controls for that account. It can filter their internet content that they look at and block things you don’t want them to be able to access like mature content, pornography, drugs, hatespeech, and weapons. (That right there would have gotten this page blocked.) Its a similar concept to a V-chip in your TV, which you should give a try as well. Its pretty configurable too and lets you customize the categories that it filters for and lets you allow specific sites. I couldn’t resist giving it a test and I have to say that it works pretty well. Some pages it will block completely and other pages it will just block part of the content. Just like UAC, when something is blocked, you have the option to ask the administrator for permission and the Admin can enter their password and allow the content. The parental controls include activity reports of the websites the user accessed (including which ones were blocked). The activity reports are pretty comprehensive and will even show you account logins, failed logins, instant messaging activity, and more. You can also specify which programs they can use and you can limit games based on their rating. I think it really will enable parents to keep their kids safe, which is a concern for a lot of parents.

How’s the Vista?

By Vista, I mean Windows Vista, the new operating system from Microsoft which is expected to release in early 2007. They currently have it available for people to beta test and I decided that I’d give it a spin on my laptop. I installed it last weekend and so far so good. Windows Vista has a lot of new features, which makes sense if you consider that Windows XP was first released in 2001. There are a lot of sites which describe and discuss the new features, so I won’t be going into all of the features in great detail. But I’m planning on blogging on some of the features that I think would be interesting to the typical home user in upcoming posts. Future topics will include: Parental Controls, User Access Control, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Movie Maker DVD, Windows Mail, Windows Calendar, and more.

But before I dig into Vista itself, I’ve got a little commentary on some interesting trends in computing in general that merit discussion. A computer’s operating system is its foundation, which allows it to do all of the basics like running programs and accessing the hardware like the hard drive. The two main operating systems are Microsoft Windows, Vista being the latest, and Apple Mac OS X. There are a lot of similarities between features in both. Beyond the basic tasks generally associated with an operating system, they seem to be incorporating typical tasks that users expect of their computer. For example, most home users use their computer for email, calendar, contacts, music, photos, videos, making slideshows and DVDs, and surfing the web. Microsoft and Apple have both figured out that people expect those things to be "a part" of the computer. Now Vista incorporates all of those things into the OS or applications that come as part of the OS. So for a typical home user, there would be very little additional software that you would need to install. Looking forward, for things that aren’t built into the operating system, a lot of these additional tasks will be handled by web-based applications which you access through your web browser. These type of applications are known as Web 2.0 and include sites like www.writely.com which I’ve posted on here. So I’m betting that in the near future things will either be built into the computer’s operating system or you’ll use an online application.

Incorporating more things into the operating system isn’t new. Bundling Internet Explorer too closely into Windows got Microsoft into anti-trust trouble before. Now critics complain that Vista doesn’t include virus protection, while security related software companies complain that Vista’s security features aren’t open enough. There is a need for a balance between useful features and anti-trust, but for now you just can’t please everyone.

Another Google Tool

I’ve posted on a few tools from Google, like Picasa, Picasa Web Albums, and SketchUp. Well, www.writely.com is another tool which Google has acquired. It is an online word processing tool and much more. You can log in and create text documents or upload existing documents that you’ve made on your computer in Word, or another similar program. It’s a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get) and has all of the common features of a word processor like spell checking, fonts, hyperlinks, inserting pictures, printing, creating PDFs, and more. It also has more advanced features like adding comments and keeping a revision history so you can go back to previous versions. Having this as a web application opens up some interesting use cases.

Blogging – A lot of blogging software already has a built in WYSIWYG editor, although if you are running your own blog it might take some work to get it all set up. Writely.com lets you write blog posts in their nice friendly editor and then post it directly to your blog. I’m doing that with this post right now to test it out.

Online Collaboration – You can share your documents with others and even work on them at the same time. This sounds like an ideal system for a group of students who have to work on a group paper. Everyone in the group can work on the same document at the same time. They can leave comments for others. And if someone makes changes which the group later decides they don’t like, they can go back into the revision history and compare it to the previously saved versions. No one has to worry about who has the "master" file, integrating changes, tracking revisions, or worrying about losing it. Since it is web based, it also doesn’t matter if members of the group are using Windows, Mac, or Linux. I’d be interested to hear how it starts getting used by students. It also provides RSS feeds for groups of documents and individual documents. So members could "watch" their documents via RSS to know when someone else in the group updates it.

Will it replace desktop word processing software. No, but I think it does open up some cool uses. And it is open to using it with desktop software so it doesn’t have to be a choice between the two.