Vista is inching along and Jim Allchin announced this week that Microsoft will be leveraging CTP builds instead of the more traditional major beta builds during the remaining development of Vista.
Sounds like an excellent way to stay flexible.
Most interestingly, Jim Allchin met with a small group of Bay Area bloggers. Thomas Hawk attended and blogged what was discussed.
The one part I latched onto right away was the discussion around handling photos on Vista:
“We talked a bit about Vista’s features for your pictures. Vista will ship with a whole suite of super cool new features for all of us photobugs. In addition to some slick new slide shows that Microsoft demoed, you will be able to do much of the basic photo editing directly from the OS. This to me would seem well positioned to take a bite out of Adobe’s business as well as compete with free editing software similar to Google’s Picasa. One of the feature advantages that Microsoft will have with Vista though will be that even as you edit your photos (which you can see take place live right in the Windows Explorer folder) a preserved backup original copy of the image will be kept on your PC. This way if you edit a photo and then decide later that you want that photo back you can go back and get it. This will happen automatically and is a great feature for them to build into the OS.”
Sounds like a wonderful idea for simple image manipulation and management. I wonder though if Vista image handling will address the problems like my friend Bryan keeps running into. He often deals with very, very large images and currently thumbnail browsing a folder with large images can bring Windows to its knees. Yes, you can tell Explorer not to generate thumbnails, but he’d really like Windows to be smarter and realize there’s no practical way to be generating thumbnails given his hardware for such large images.