Previous Versions

I am an organization freak: whatever the size of the hard drive you give me, there will always be some free space after I am done installing everything I need, all the files to do proper work, etc. I clean up things better than a vacuum cleaner, and sometimes faster: Ctrl-Del is my friend.

But a few weeks ago, I Ctrl-Deleted a folder with stuff I needed 5 minutes later. No big deal, I have a backup somewhere on the Internet. But I remembered about Previous Versions, a nice feature of Windows Vista.

Previous Versions just makes a silent backup of all the changes you make to all of the files on your system every time a restore point is created, and once per day. The backups are small, because only the differences between to revisions of each file is taken into account, and the space reserved on your hard drive for those backups is recycled when needed (Previous Versions uses the same space on your hard drive as System Restore).

Not only does this work for changes made to files, but also for changes made to folders (i.e. you can recover deleted files).

Of course, you will only be able to restore changes made on a given day (since the backups are made once per day), and they cannot be too old if many changes were made to your system (as the space gets recycled).

To get the previous versions of a file, right-click that file, select Restore previous versions. This will open the file properties, on the Previous Versions tab. You may do the same for a folder.

The list will show you the available versions neatly organized by date. You may then open the file or folder in the Windows Explorer on a given date (effectively going back in time), copy the previous version to another location, or simply click Restore... to immediately restore the file or folder to the state it was in on the selected date.

If you click Open, you can perform the usual Explorer tasks on that previous version.

If you contrast this with the Time Machine feature in Mac OS X Leopard, you will notice that it serves the same purpose. There are a number of differences though:

• Vista's Previous Versions is not meant to serve for backup, especially since the differences are stored on the same drive. For this, you have the Backup and Restore Center.
• Time Machine can only perform backups on an external drive, and each new version will take up as much space as the previous version. This means that the drive may fill up quite quickly if you back up large files that are subject to change often. It also means that if you are on the road with your laptop and you do not have your external hard drive with you, tough...
• Time Machine is much sexier than Previous Versions, and can work within tools that support it (whereas Previous Versions is only available within the Windows Explorer).

Vista's bad press

My previous post could have been interpreted as me bashing Vista. Let me make this clear: I like Vista a lot, much more than XP. It is especially nice with Service Pack 1, but was fine even before.

In moving to Vista, Microsoft obviously tried to sometimes hide features used by power users (which is fine by me). However, they sometimes got it wrong, and it is not always obvious to tell where things are.

This was already the case for a few things in XP; well, in Vista this is sometimes better, sometimes worse. The UI inconsistencies (remnants from Windows 95 and XP, mixed with the new UI that Vista introduced) certainly do not help.

Instead of making some of the powerful and useful features of the system easily discoverable, they just get relegated to some tab in a dialog (yes, I am again thinking of Previous Versions).

It turns out that if you look at it a bit too quickly, Vista just seems to be XP with a more modern theme and too high requirements to warrant installing.

Could this be one of the reasons it gets such bad press?

Get ready: a few forthcoming posts will try to show you some nice features of Vista.

The most unobvious UI?

More often than not, after some time spent using Windows Vista, you will notice that it provides many features of other OSes, sometimes even more powerful. However they happen to be difficult to discover, or downright hidden (on purpose?).

One feature that comes immediately to mind is Previous Revisions (based on the Shadow Copy service), which in some ways may be compared to Mac OS X Leopard Time Machine. We will get back to that greatly undervalued feature of Windows Vista in a future post.

But here is (so far) the most hidden piece of UI I have seen in Windows Vista. It is so unobvious that I even thought that the feature that previously was available in Windows XP had actually been removed (in XP it was already kind of unobvious already); the feature in question is the Virtual Private Network (VPN) server.

Actually, not that many people know that it is possible to define an incoming connection in Windows XP that uses the PPTP protocol (port 1723). Other computers may then connect to that VPN securely over the Internet (for example, using the built-in PPTP client built into Windows XP or Vista).

So this is how you create a new incoming VPN connection in Vista:

• Go to the Network and Sharing Center
• Click Manage network connections

Now, this is where it should have been obvious. Look at the list of network connections, and at the list of available options. Do you see it?

No.

But it is right there. What you have to do is hit the Alt key to make the menu bar appear (it is hidden by default), and then open the File menu. Do you see it now?

• Click File / New Incoming Connection...

 and there you go! What is really bad in this is that:

1. it should really be possible to create a new incoming connection by clicking Set up a connection or network in the Network and Sharing Center
2. the command to create a new incoming connection should not (only) be a menu item, but should also be available as a text link or a toolbar button.

Why did they hide it so well?

The origin of it all

Someone in the comments section recently asked me to post the link to the inventor of the mouse, hypertext, etc. It is actually a whole team, led by a visionary, Doug Englebart, that came up with the idea of the mouse (and another weird device that did not remain, the chord keyset), cut-copy-paste, computer-assisted team work, a screen that can display graphics, and more.
And all this was demonstrated... in 1968! When you watch his complete demo, you just cannot stop thinking how much all of this still applies to what we have gotten to expect from our computers today.



The YouTube video above is just the first part of the demo (since YouTube limits the size of uploads). You may go to this page on YouTube for to have the other parts shown in succession automatically, or to that one on Google Video for the whole enchilada (but it does not always work).

The story of the Amiga

If you are old enough to remember the Amiga, you might be interested in that very good write-up of the history of that astonishing computer, brought to us by Ars Technica:

• Part 1: Genesis
• Part 2: The birth of Amiga
• Part 3: The first prototype

I am eagerly waiting for more on this...
By the way, if you are interested in what Carl Sassenrath does these days, check out Rebol.

Good series on Leopard features

AppleInsider is currently running a good series of articles on Mac OS X Leopard features (including some bits of history about them, which is what makes them really interesting). The series is called The Road to Mac OS X Leopard:

• Finder 10.5
• Dock 1.6
• Spaces

Drain it, baby!

I had the shivers this week-end: my HP dv6000-series laptop would refuse to charge the battery. I kept begging it, but to no avail: it gave me the blue blinking light. And this is, how should I put it, bad. It means that the battery needs to be replaced.
For heaven's sake, that battery was less than a year old! This is the 21st century! That stuff was invented in the 19th! And they still can't make those work reliably?
That's when I remembered of some obscure procedure one person at HP tech support told me about 9 months ago: The Power Drain (tm). Yes, believe it or not, there is a way to drain whatever power may be left out of your HP laptop...
The draining goes like this: unplug the AC, remove the battery, and then press the power button for 20s or more (the first time HP made me do this, I thought it was a joke!).
I tried it this time. Then I placed the battery back in its compartment, plugged the AC back in, and lo! the battery started charging again. Everything seems to work fine now.
As to why some drainage was necessary...

Mac OS X applications

I used to be a huge fan of Apple stuff. My first Apple system was an Apple II (because the Mac was too expensive at the time). Eventually I got myself a Mac LC, right after that almost-unknown Apple IIGS (which was an Apple II that looked like a Mac --it had a mouse, it had QuickDraw and all). And then, at work, everyone had Macs. There were also a couple of PCs lying around.
Then one day, I needed to compile something on one of those PCs (it was running NT 3.51beta at the time). And, oh my god, the compilation of that C program took just a few seconds. Why did it take 10 minutes on my Mac? It was, at the time, a good-enough reason for a divorce. Windows was going to be my love, and it has been ever since.

Fast-forward to 2007. I still use Windows systems at work (XP SP2). I still use Windows systems at home (we have a Media Center, a laptop running XP, and another running Vista). And life is great. But... for some reason unknown to me (nothing new in the near future? the new iMacs?), I started looking at Macs, and at OS X for the first time in years. I am even thinking of finding good reasons to actually go and buy one.
So here is one thing I discovered recently, after watching a nice demo of Mac OS X Tiger (thanks to Google Video, although for some reason that video is not available anymore today): it is much more natural to deal with applications on the Mac than it is on Windows!

An application is usually installed by launching a package (this is similar to what you have on Windows with the Windows Installer). Once the application has been installed it usually appears in you Applications folder. You may create aliases (shortcuts in the Windows world) that you may put anywhere (including the Dock) to launch that application. Deleting those aliases does not delete the application (exactly as on Windows).
You may also move the application from the Applications folder to any other location, and its aliases will still run properly. Deleting the application only involves putting it in the trash can.
In that description, one thing stands out: the application is just one file.
On Windows, an application usually consists of several files: an executable, a few DLLs, and more (plus a few registry entries). On the Mac, it's just a file. Which means people cannot screw it up.

This is where I started thinking: how can it be just a file? On Windows, with .net, you get to something very similar: no need for registry entries, an executable or a DLL may actually contain resources (i.e. other files, like icons or strings of text), so an installation just means copying those files, and they should presumably be movable without any issue. But you still have a few files though (if only as a packaging convenience for the developers).

How do they do it on the Mac? Either it's the same as .net, but taken to the extreme (one file contains everything), or the Finder fakes it...
This article gave me the solution: indeed, the Finder fakes it. And it's very nicely done.

VS 2005 really wants that update

September 11th, 2007. Go to Windows Update. Install all updates. All updates install successfully. Go back to Windows Update. You will still see "Security Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (KB937061)". Install the update. It installs successfully. Go back to Windows Update. You will still see "Security Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (KB937061)". etc. etc.
You don't need to watch Groundhog Day again.

[Update] See this thread on the Microsoft VS forum. No solution to this yet, except for installing CrystalReports.

[Update 2] September 14th. Microsoft has now fixed the issue.

Apple Expo Paris 2007

Apple Expo Paris will take place on the 25th of September. The fee is 12 €, but here you can get your badge to visit the expo with no limit (and for free).

Live translation

You already knew about the Google translation service? Well, Microsoft have also started their own: Windows Live Translator. The interesting thing about the latter is that it allows you to compare both the original text and the translated one side-by-side (and that is also the case for web pages). Just like Google's though, it would not translate text that was part of images (I can understand that), but also would leave the text it could not translate as it was, with no particular hint.
By default, the Windows Live Translator uses Systran services, but if you check the "Computer-related content" checkbox, they use their own translator...

Tabs, trees, windows... Don't get me started...

Jeff Atwood, of famed Coding Horror has some issues with tabs in user interfaces. Don't get me started: not only do I have issues with tabs (and that's an understatement), I don't like tree views, or even windows for that matter.
Why? you might ask. Well, I would reply, the reason I don't like these now standard GUI elements is simple: you constantly have to micro-manage them; you constantly have to move them around, switch from one thing to another to see what you are interested in, using the keyboard with them takes ages, which leaves you with the mouse (which I have no problem with, thank you very much).
Expanding, collapsing, moving up, moving down, resizing, minimizing, switching... Aaargghh... This is a good summary of my life...