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Implementing Leopard features for Vista?

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MrCrispy:
I'm quite impressed with Leopard's usability features such as QuickLook and TimeMachine. Yet, I am also dissapointed that all of these are possible today in Windows (and specifically Vista), yet Microsoft and 3rd party vendors seem to lack the ability/desire to use them.

TimeMachine
.. is one of Leopard's most hyped features, and with good reason. It finally offers normal users a simple, consistent and powerful way to do backup and system recovery. But if you look under the hood, Vista has had this technology since long, ever since the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) debuted in Windows 2003 server.

VSS is technically better and much more powerful than TimeMachine - it can offload the copies to hardware if present, it works on a block rather than file level, its districubted and extensible. But in typical Microsoft fashion, the UI (previous versions tab and System restore) is not nearly as easy to use, and much of the features are hidden since apps don't make use of them. e.g. in Leopard AddreessBook is aware of system snapshots and can search them. In Windows the only apps that seem to use VSS are imaging and backup programs.

I don't care for the starry backgrounds, but why can't this be implemented on Windows fairly quickly?


QuickLook
More than anything else, this is the one thing that stands out most in daily use. Yet most reviews never mention that Vista already has this too! Its called the preview pane and any app can register handlers for it, much like in OSX. So why don't we use it more - because the UI is clunky, its only in explorer and and once again, other apps don't take advantage of it.

Stacks, Spotlight etc
To me, these are not sufficiently different from the equivalent in Windows or that useful, so I won't discuss them.

nontroppo:
Time machine was built to solve a very real problem:
Eighty percent of Mac users said they knew they should backup their data. (This is scary already. Only 80 percent?) Twenty-six percent said they do backup their data. That actually doesn't sound too bad until you get to the next question. Only four percent backup regularly.
--- End quote ---
source
This is not some weird geek issue for sysadmins, but a profound fracture in how people use computers. With that user focus (4% regular backups!), Engineers worked to do something about it. Windows users probably have similar backup rates, and yet the technology developed was never exposed to the majority of its users. Power users often ignore the UI as irrelevant (bah its just eye-candy) but the way features are presented to users is critical, as VSS so clearly demonstrates. Apple engineers worked both on the underlying details, but also a UI that works. I don't think VSS had any such user focus, it was probably built as an IS feature. No one at Redmond had the bright spark to allow normal users a clean way to use it too.

So why don't we use it more - because the UI is clunky, its only in explorer and and once again, other apps don't take advantage of it.
--- End quote ---

OS X is cleanly built around the idea of unified interoperable thin frameworks. Services are offered by the OS and used by applications. Applications are encouraged to allow interoperability by offering exposed dictionaries of things they can do to any application that asks. Developers are encouraged to use such unified services. Tom Yager expresses it this way:
Windows and Linux are designed from the core out, which is to say that they are all about layered kernels, system calls, and APIs, with each layer's purpose being to abstract the layers below it. The layers grow thicker; when a layer gets unmanageably thick, a pretty new abstraction layer is created so that people don't have to deal with the ugly one. ... Everyone plugs into OS X through the frameworks, and below that lies a stable, thin, simple, and well-documented system stack. It is not the frameworks' job to abstract lower levels of software. From a developer's point of view, the frameworks are OS X. When developers write to Apple's frameworks, they inherit cross-application integration and operational and interface consistency with no effort.
--- End quote ---
source

Even before Leopard came out, the main apps I use had added support for Quicklook! I think quicklook is more clearly thought out in UI terms than the various preview mechanisms available in several versions of windows back to 95. The proof is in the pudding; and that is that Quicklook will be a core UI feature for most users whereas Preview has been available but woefully underused on windows.

Spotlight *is* a good example of this. I used X1 / GDS on my Windows machines before my forced move to OS X. So I was fine with a windows equivalent and it was a useful tool. Yet because Spotlight is a core OS service, and cleanly exposed in a framework, many of my applications use it. That makes spotlight far more useful for me as a user. Developers can all build on it and it just becomes more valuable to users as a result. Vista now has a search mechanism (though a much less robust metadata framework), but what is a developer to do when there are so many other possible search services to support (and most users are still on XP)?

In conclusion, the two examples you give are fairly clear cases where an attention to interoperability, user focus, and cleanly exposed frameworks benefits both developers and users.

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EDIT:
As I've not installed Leopard yet I've not been able to compare its functionality, but just reading through the Ars Technica review, Time Machine is actually more advanced than VSS as far as I understand. One can recover individual items within a file store, for example a deleted entry in an address book, or individual mail. VSS would force the user first to know what the file name that stored the info was, but then restore would lose all changes made subsequently. It would require manual hacking to get the data out. Selective item revisions without data loss is a critical feature of a backup system, and thus technically VSS could not provide such complete functionality even if the UI was reworked IIUC.

MrCrispy:
nontroppo, I believe you misunderstood my post. My entire point was that even though Windows has very similar (and in some cases maybe better) technology under the hood, the implementation and the UI leaves a lot to be desired and is not as useful and easy to use as Leopard. And I was hoping that there are some apps that fix this.

The consistent design of apps and the system itself in the OSX ecosystem is one reason why everything works so well together. In Windows there are a million different API's and frameworks, and even though Microsoft is very clear (most of the time) about what they want you to use, developers (both inside and outside MS) don't always follow it.

nontroppo:
I may not have been clear enough  :-[; VSS cannot implement a system like Time Machine technically — rolling back to specific items not just data stores. VSS neither integrates into search indexes (ala Spotlight), and so cannot support the ability to search through past items *within* individual applications (i.e. you find old mails within Mail.app, not needing to open Time Machine etc.). Time machine is not just a pretty RCS, it locks into the file system and core OS services like Spotlight. VSS could probably be glitzed up to something more useful than it is now, but it may need core plumbing changes to do what Time Machine does. I suspect there are some versioning file systems additions to NTFS that can do that for windows, but again this is bolt-on to the OS, thus won't be universally supported.

The point that some kind of preview system has been available since Win95 but largely unused suggests the windows ecosystem cannot yet sustain a useful quicklook-type feature. I think Vista is probably close though (though someone suggested it can't generate previews for Office Docs unless Office 2007 is installed?), and they just need to rethink the UI. They should ditch the preview pane and use a pop-up window, and push the API harder. One caveat though is how previews are stored and where, HFS+ has pretty solid metadata mechanism (and many files are actally bundles thus store Quicklook info there), how does Vista handle this?

Carol Haynes:
Acronis TrueImage uses VSS and allows incremental images to be built and 'mounted' into the filesystem as virtual drives (you can assign the drive letter). Those drives can be read only or opened as writable dives. I see no reason why they should not be indexed too using your favourite desktop search engine and/or Locate32 so that multiple versions of files can be accessed.

Also if you want versioning of files that are indexable and searchable why not just use something like FileHamster to keep versioned copies. Your desktop search tool would then potentially include all versions and be continuously updated. You could then use FileHamster to revert to the desired copy as required.

OK it isn't the same as Leopard function but if I understand what you are both writing it would be functionally equivalent or at least a simple and servicable solution. The only thing that would need to be thought about is the amount of disk space required and potential system hit if you want to apply version control to more than just your data files. Is there any real point in going beyond data files anyway - just keep them separated from your system partition and use incremental or differential backups to maintain backward system mobility.

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