Vista’s Distortion
29th of May, 2007
Recently I’ve had the pleasure of using used Windows Vista. It wasn’t official use, I’ve just sat in front of it and looked around. One thing really shone through stuck out for me, the ugly distortion Aero uses on it’s title bars and window edges in general. And while they say it’s transparent, it really only blurs the underlying content. It’d difficult to explain the title bar without some screenshots. So here’s some comparisons with OS X.
Some distortion may have occurred in the JPG conversion but apart from that, I haven’t resized it or anything like that, really, that’s hot it actually looks. there’s really a blurry blog behind the title. Now let’s compare that to OS X so we can get a little perspective.
I don’t know what else to say? The Vista team have got it wrong. Superfluous visual effects are a dangerous thing, if they’re succinct and add to the experience they can be a useful addition. Vista’s just add noise.
Here’s an example of it’s hideous attempt at transparency.
It only took 7 years to make the windows blurry and unreadable. To their credit, anti-aliasing has been greatly improved to a level I’d definitely call “acceptable”.
Photo credit: riccardodivirgilio
