You may have heard that Vista SP1 is coming / has come / will destroy you / devour small animals / capture all of your bases. There’s some more news that installing it will likely render even *MORE* programs unusable.

Well, if you could see me now, my eyes have rolled so far back into my head that I am actually seeing my own ear wax (which isn’t that difficult, as I have a prodigious amount, according to unconfirmed sources).

And that groaning that you’re hearing isn’t the enormous effort its taking for my eyes to do this anatomically impossible task.

Nay, its the frustration I am feeling with Microsoft.

I ranted once about Vista, and at the time, my biggest beef were the software incompatibilities. Looks like with this major update, I can look to even *more* of the same problems are likely to incur, and there is a short list over here.

Of course, what Microsoft doesn’t know, is what it cannot know, which is how many *other* programs also break with this new update, which we will of course find out in due course.

Of which I will *not* be party to, because I, for one, probably won’t be downloading SP1 if I can help it in the near future (and that doesn’t even include the “other” problems — like corrupting your hard drive — which have in fact, delayed SP1 from being deployed in a wide enough scale).

But whenever it will be, it’ll definitely be after I figure out how to get my damn eyeballs to stop staring at my ear wax.

Microsoft released Tafiti recently, and its is new “visual” type of search engine that rides on the Silverlight engine.  Hearing that its a slick piece of work (and being the kind of person who likes to try slick pieces of work), I checked out this slick piece of web candy.

Hey, did I mention how slick it is?

Anyway, being based on the Silverlight engine it is able to do a number of things — Flash-type things — that can’t really be done in the same slick way with the usual tools (CSS, PHP, Ajax and so on).  This includes some interesting animations that do serve some functional purpose.

For example, for every search, you can switch to a “tree” view, which populates a tree with different search results, with different branches on the tree representing a different search result.  The “tree” view also has a slider on the bottom which allows you filter out the results somewhat.  While this is an interesting tool, what makes it difficult to use is that there’s nothing which tells you why different terms are different sizes.  Presumably this means that they’re more “important”.  Also, its not entirely clear what it means to have different terms are positioned on the tree.  Do search terms lower down mean that they are less important than ones higher up?

Other interesting functions include the ability to click and drag results onto a sidepane, which allows you to temporarily save results, as well as the ability to change the search “type”, so that you search news, feeds, images and even books.

The biggest problem I have with Tafiti has nothing to do with the actual search results (which are powered by Microsoft Live Search), but an inherent problem with using a rich interface engine like Silverlight.  And that is you can’t really do things that are fairly easy to do when pages are served up like a “normal” W3C compliant page.

You can’t highlight stuff to copy and paste.  You can’t right click on any link to open into a new frame.   You can’t really print results (I get a blank page).

Also?  I like to use Firefox.  Maybe you do too.  Tafiti’s default position is to open up any new search term link into an entirely new window.  Not a new tab.  That in and of itself might be irksome, but in the latest version of Firefox, an error comes up telling me I have to stop blocking popups.  What’s *really* annoying is that it doesn’t actually trip the usual “Do you want to stop popups” error box *in* Firefox.  It just stops and waits for you to do it.

And it won’t let you carry on — because the error box continues to sit in front of you — until you disable pop-ups.

Anyway, Tafiti is slick, but the problems with Tafiti, I find, are really usability problems as they relate to using a product like Silverlight.  These aren’t insurmountable by any means, but they certainly will stop me from using it, even in a recreational sense — no matter how slick it is.

I’d like to think of myself as pro-Microsoft.  I know it has its fair share of detractors amongst the geek community (at last poll: 95% of them, which had an error rate of +/- 5%), but I figure as long as you know what you’re getting into, as I feel I do (most times) it does the trick.  Well, anyway.  Last week I upgraded to Vista.

By “upgrade” I mean, I actually bought a new PC as I was sick and tired of using a five year old piece of hardware.  Elitest to some, I know, but it had just gotten unimaginably slow to use.  I mean, I shuddered every time I right-clicked in explorer because I knew I was in for a 30 second wait.  Or, even worse, trying to create a “new folder” in the windows explorer area.  That’s about a 45 second wait.  As I say, my every day Windows experience, even after defraging and deleting and spyware blasting efforts (and actually much more) had become an abomination.

So, I upgraded my PC, and along with it came Vista Premium.

Now, there are a lot of complaints with Vista, but I think that many of them stem from the fact that its a processor and memory hog.  I thought this wouldn’t be a problem with a new PC (quad core, 3 gigs of ram) and its not.  But there was one thing I heard about but was still unprepared for.  And that was how much stuff — software and hardware — is *not* Vista compatible.

• Some favourite shareware games (have you heard of the Cradle of Rome, perhaps?)
• My new terrabyte external hard drive (I had announced it on Pownce a while back — incidentally I have 5 more invites if you’re interested) from Western Digital.
• My dual VTech Skype phone.
• And — *almost* — the xbox media center.  But I got *that* to work, thank God, because Vista’s Media Center is also an abomination when compared to the sleek awesomeness of the Xbox Media Center.

For me, everything else about Vista is pretty solid.  I don’t quite understand how it cost *billions* to produce, but that’s a post for another time.  I mean, the new “search” function is pretty slick, and so is the aero interface, but this incompatibility thing? Its rendered $600 dollars worth of hardware un-usable, and is actually changing what I have to do and buy because of it.  I can’t talk using my VTech phone for skype conversations, so now I have to buy another headset.   Thank goodness the external hard drive came from Costco, which has an extended return policy on hardware, so I plan to take it back.

But amongst the many things that Vista *doesn’t* have going for it, the incompatibility thing is one thing that cannot, and should not, be ignored for anyone wishing to upgrade themselves out of Windows XP.  Even if you have the latest and greatest hardware running it, incompatibility issues may (as they did for me) change, and make more expensive, your every day computing experience.

[and no, I don’t think upgrading to Vista pre-SP1 will help — although I’m doing that as we speak]