Renzo Verleysen

Today our social photography app for Mac, iPhix is off 75%! This is the start of a tradition we’d like to get going on which requires people to post their pictures on Phix Cloud each friday to win great prizes.

So get over to the Mac App Store and grab it while you can -> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iphix/id513779082?mt=12

Or check the product page for more info about iPhix for Mac: http://phixsoft.com/iPhix/

Note: It can take some time for the price change to be reflected in the App Store. 

We are pleased to announce the release of iPhix 1.1, an update meant to make the vintage photography and photo adjusting app for Mac OS X more social. This update adds the ability to share not only your pictures, but also a “recipe” of your filters and adjustments, a description of your picture and EXIF and location data. Your friends will be able to view these in the new online Phix.im service. Further improvements include 8 new filters and huge performance boosts.

Sharing with Phix Cloud

While the first version of iPhix had some sharing options to upload your picture, this version has integrated with Phix Cloud to offer the ability to upload and present EXIF data in a pleasant way. However the top improvement over the old sharing system is the ability to upload what you exactly did to get the desired effect on your picture. These “recipes” contain all adjustments and the effects that were applied on your picture. In this way everyone viewing your picture can replicate that exact look on their pictures. Additionally you can track the amount of views your picture got.

New filters

You can immediately try out the new sharing features with 8 new preset filters and effects. “Inky” gives your picture a blueish look as if blue gel was used in front of the flash bulb, “Woody” is a monochrome vintage effect which covers the picture in a gold hue, “Cool” makes the picture a bit more chilly, “Old Comic” imitates the style of old tainted comic books and “Dreamy” imitates the eighties style marriage pictures with a dreamy blur and bright colors. There are  also 3 new effects, “Stereo” which turn your picture into a stereoscopic 3D image, “Glass” which makes your picture look as if taken behind a tiled window and “Heatvision” an infrared effect.

Other minor improvements include a new preview image for the filter gallery, huge performance boosts and some minor bug fixes.

Get it while it’s hot. It’s still available for 3.99$. (Download link)

Over the past few days a lot of twitter updates flew by warning people of downtime on the side and services that could become unreliable or go offline.

Here’s the story on what’s causing them:
The hosting of our sites hur.lu and phixsoft.com/phoenxsoftware.com is in the hands of a Belgium firm. They recently updated their product line and upgraded to more modern servers. So we send them a mail asking if they could transfer our hosting to a new server with more capacity. About 3 months later (2 weeks ago) we got a mail back that they could transfer the site. We were informed by colleagues that this would only take a few hours. In the end it took 2 weeks and about 20 emails to get them to transfer everything. But that’s not all.

All passwords and logins of our databases, the place where we keep our hur.lu links and your iPhix Cloud images, were all changed. So we had to change the service to use the new passwords a few hours ago. After those changes hur.lu worked again, but we noticed the hur.lu dependent iPhix Cloud upload service didn’t work at all. We believe they didn’t activate certain features we demanded that iPhix Cloud needs to store your images to a remote cloud server.

Another issue is that anything uploaded or changed after 04/25 has gone lost because they used a backup dating from 04/19 and we luckily made another backup of the old site a few days ago and manually restored some of the data.

This is all a horrible mess which also caused a 2 week delay in the release of iPhix 1.1, and we’d like to apologize for all possible damage that has been done and for the downtime of all services. All we can do is wait and hope that our web host will fix the issues. We hope to get iPhix Cloud back online by tomorrow.

We are proud to release a product that has been in development for half a year now, iPhix for Mac. iPhix is an app that allows you to easily apply a multitude of filters or adjustments to pictures and share them online in a matter of seconds. It’s build to be easy and fun to use for everyone. iPhix provides enough power for professional photographers but can also be used by beginning photographers with almost no editing experience.

Adjustments
There are a huge number of adjustment possibilities present in iPhix. In the adjustments window you can change brightness, exposure, saturation, tone, contrast and apply posterization, cross processing, vignetting, grain, a tilt shift effect or blur to your pictures. All these adjustments can be combined to create magnificent effects. Examples of these are in the preset filters window.

The filters
iPhix currently contains 10 preset filters and one preset filter you can customize and save and 7 so called “solid” filters. This amount will increase with future updates. Preset filters are filters which control the adjustments mentioned earlier and are used to quickly apply vintage or flashy effects on pictures. You can always finetune a preset filter in the adjustments window. With the custom preset filter you can record and save a number of adjustments to create your own preset. The preset filters are called: Vivant, Deep Colors, Aged, Toned, Vintage, Mono, Noir, Expired, Daguerre, Sepia and Custom.

Solid filters are filters which are applied on the image and aren’t adjustable. Some solid filters can be adjusted in intensity though. These filters are much more invasive and transform your picture into a drawing for example. The solid filters are: Bizarre, Dots, Pop, Lithography, Edgy, Cutout and Inverse.

Sharing
Sharing has never been faster with iPhix. Most people have their social networking apps or pages open at any time, so why bother people with a “Log in to Facebook to share this picture”-dialog?
What the iPhix sharing options does is upload your picture to our iPhix Cloud servers instantaneously and provide you with a short link to your picture an online iPhix picture frame. All you have to do is copy the link to TweetDeck, Twitter, Facebook, Mail or anywhere you want.

Saving
When opening a picture for adjusting you expect everything to stay the same, except for the things you change. Therefore iPhix remembers your EXIF data and saves it along with your adjusted image. Your lens, aperture, flash settings, camera type, … all will be saved. iPhix also cuts the process of selecting a save filetype for you, all files are saved in the same filetype as the one they were opened in. Additionally it restores corrupted image orientations to ensure that your picture is always the right way up.

Device requirements
iPhix for Mac should run on any Mac built after 2008 running Mac OSX 10.6 or Mac OSX 10.7. iPhix is tested on Lion and is also optimized for it. The executable is only about 12Mb in size. An internet connection is also required for the sharing options.

Pricing and Availability
iPhix 1.0 is currently $3.99 (USD) and available exclusively through the Mac App Store in the Photography or Productivity categories. Interested writers, reviewers and editors of recognized sites can always request a promo code to check it out for themselves.

Download link : http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iphix/id513779082?l=nl&ls=1&mt=12

Screenshots 

The iPhix aperture logo, the names "iPhix" and "iPhix Cloud" are property of Phix Software.

UIC Phoenxsoftware is known to rise from its ash time after time. that’s why I picked the name in 2005. (Actually it should be phoenixsoftware, but the “i” got lost somewhere along the way.)
We rose from the ash when we dropped windows development almost completely and left a number of successful freeware products behind with it resulting in a stable and self sustaining business on Mac OSX and iOS. We rose from the ash when we were hit by a copyright claim from the nice folks at KONAMI for our most successful product at that time iDuelpro, resulting in a 70% drop in revenue. And now we are ready to reimagine Phoenxsoftware for the third time, this time by rebranding UIC Phoenxsoftware to Phix Software.

This giant step comes not only with a new name, but also with a completely redesigned website and more focus on our commercial products. It also means we will release more serious products and have a bigger budget for marketing and more focused management. With the Mac OSX application we will release in a few days we take a first step in this new era.

Not all changes are positive for everyone. Our Windows users will have to settle with a lot less supported apps and some are even completely removed from our website.

Only the following products will be supported, maintained and get their own spot on the new site: MonoPhix (lite), MonoPhix HD, FlashPhix (lite), GrayPhix, iDuelpro (lite), Lingi, iDuelpro for Mac, Duelpro, 36-image express, SpeedShut, ROC and hur.lu and of course our new app.

The following products have been put on a dedicated “archive” page for deprecated software but are still available for download: 36-image converter, LockPhix, LoadDown, FileTorment, CachePhix, MPhix. These applications are no longer supported so we can’t provide mail support for these and waive all responsibility.

The following products are declared dead and aren’t available for download anymore on our site: FileTorment Suite 2006, FileTorment Suite 2007, PhBrowser, Blastgen Beta, older versions of Duelpro, InfoBlaster IN4.

I am certain these changes will benefit the user and will also give us a competitive edge. You can head over to our new site for a look around and check out the products that you didn’t even know existed.

For all people who thought that we had died or abandoned development, think again. We’re very much alive and within a few weeks of unleashing a new app onto the world.

That’s about all I can say for now, but I wanted to throw in a teaser in the form of some sample shots.

Although it are black and white shots, the app isn’t a monochrome app. I just chose that certain filter because we all like MonoPhix, don’t we? Also these images never touched an iOS device.

For a while people have been reporting a strange issue with our black and white filtering app for iPhone, MonoPhix. Up to last week I just couldn’t find out what was wrong, but apparently the iOS5 update messed up the gesture system and caused left and right gestures to malfunction. Up and downwards gestures even crashed the app. This issue has been fixed the same night and MonoPhix should now be fully compatible with iOS5. The update is now live in the App Store.

If you’ve got MonoPhix installed, you can update from the App Store’s update menu and if you have uninstalled MonoPhix because of this issue you can always download it again for free from the download page.

As you might have read on Twitter or Facebook or from the blog’s sidebar, MonoPhix is one of the apps participating in the Mobile Photo Awards. This basically means that you can edit (or shoot) a picture with MonoPhix or a combination of MonoPhix and other apps and submit it to enter the competition. By submitting you get the chance to win amazing prizes and eventually see your pictures featured in an exposition. Of course we would be very honored and proud if a great iPhoneographer could win with a picture edited with MonoPhix. The entry fee is only 20$ for 3 images or 30$ for 5.

The deadline to enter is 30 November, so only 3 days left.

Enter now or go to the MonoPhix page!

Good luck to everyone participating!

All our apps are currently free for Black Friday, so enjoy. The sale will automatically end November 26th.

Here’s a list of all apps with download links:

Photography Apps

• MonoPhix (0.99$->0$) – The most powerful black & white app out there.
• MonoPhix HD (1.99$ -> 0$) - The most powerful black & white app out there. (for iPad)
• FlashPhix (0.99$ -> 0$) – Cross processing, automatic correction and lighting control in one easy app.

Games and gaming aids:

• Lingi (0.99$->0$) – A language game for young and old to easily learn Dutch, French or English.
• iDuelpro (0.99$->0$) – The most popular Yu-gi-oh! TCG scorekeeper in the world.

So go and get your future favorite app for free while you can!

Mac OSX Snow Leopard has some issues which annoy a lot of people, so here in this short post is a list of all changes Apple has to make to make Snow Leopard at least a decent service pack instead of a large annoyance.

-Safari Stripes :
Many people have been experiencing issues with top sites in Safari. When loading a page the first few seconds all we see are stripes. Apple fix this!

-64-bits not enabled and even impossible for most people :
Apple should better not be promoting 64-bits as a new feature in Snow Leopard, because it isn’t. Many people have to perform special actions to boot in 64-bits mode and most people can’t even run Snow Leopard in 64-bits mode disregarding the 64-bits EFI.

-Huge icons in stacks :
The new stacks feature is completely visually screwed up. The icons are huge and this can’t be changed it’s really an eyesore.

-Blue decorations and slowness in exposé :
This is just plain ugly, get rid of it or enable people to disable it.

Solve these things Apple and Snow Leopard will actually be an update instead of a downgrade.

I installed Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard today and I’m actually quite the Mac fanboy, I worship Steve Jobs and cry when I see an iPhone being thrashed, but I must say one thing : Snow Leopard is indeed nothing more than a white Leopard.

I prepared Leopard for an upgrade and made some backups, these were useless to me since everything went flawlessly. After an hour long install, Snow Leopard booted with the same video as I saw when I first bought my MacBook. I tested a few things and indeed it’s a little bit faster, but Leopard was fast enough anyway and Safari 4 still acts like a turtle with a bag of concrete on its back. Snow Leopard do seems to have more vivant colors though.

I tested some other things like the new stacks and well, that’s one of the biggest mistakes I ever saw on a mac. The icons of the grid view look gigantic. Not the flair we are used from Apple, just a bunch of irritatingly giant icons in a grid with a scrollbar next to them.

One of the few things that I do see as an improvement are the new miniatures previews for video files and such. You can play a video from its icon, which is kinda cool but still not worth the €29.

Since I’m a developer and graphics artist I also checked some rumors that Xcode wouldn’t be working, it worked fine and would build iPhone OS 2.0 apps. Photoshop CS 3 worked fine as well, so no flaws there. I’m experiencing one annoying issue, most of my screensavers I installed in Leopard don’t work anymore.

Now about the new exposé. In my opinion, what can you change about something that works great? Ok, when you hold your mouse down on an icon, it displays all screens. But in return you have to take that the exposé you are used to now looks like crap. All exposé windows now have some blue shiny edge on hover, which is in my opinion overkill and just plain ugly.

So is Snow Leopard really the greatest OS release of the year? Certainly not. Many people are comparing Windows 7 and Snow Leopard, but you can’t compare them, Windows 7 is great and might even be worth the €200, but Snow Leopard isn’t even worth the €29. Luckily it provides me with 20Gb of extra free disk space, but 29€ for 20Gb is a little too much in my opinion.

So to see an actual new Mac OSX, we’ll have to wait for 10.7 is suppose.

EDIT : Apparently 64-bits mode doesn’t work either on most macs, you can enable it if you have one of the few chosen models, but most macs even intels, have an 64-bits EFI but do not support 64-bits in the bootloader. So if Apple says Snow Leopard brings 64-bits to the mac they are really selling air.

No one can deny it, the App Store is full of junk and this junk is even flourishing.

In many blogposts and articles Apple has been blamed. In its turn Apple blames the developers for making junk and dismisses a few as an example. But nothing ever happens and the apps just filled with pictures, fart apps and single function apps keep multiplying. So who started it and who can fix it? The user.

People visit the App Store check the 2 front pages and download anything that has a flashy icon and some nice screenshots, without reading anything or without caring about the reviews. The first 2 pages are usually filled with new apps, which features 60% junk from developers that have thousands of useless apps for 99 cents. Then they find out half of it is useless and they remove it. Should it end there? No, users should write a review or give at least a rating for every app they download.

Does it mean you have to be hypercritical when reviewing each app?

Certainly not, many apps give added value to the App Store or bring competition, so be mild with these. It are the fart apps, the completely malfunctioning apps, the picture or sound collections and the travel guides that deserve a 1/5 rating. A functional app that does as it is supposed to do should get at least 2 or 3 points. If you follow these simple rules you degrade the junk and give extra momentum to the decent apps.

So why is the huge collection of junk a problem? As you know one of the only chances for an iPhone app to get some extra popularity or become known to the public is the “Release Date”-listing. This release date listing is always crammed with junk and the decent apps don’t benefit from this anymore. When a developer is releasing a decent app, the app is in the listing for about five minutes before being replaced by 200 apps from the same developer with names as “Rome Traveling Guide”, “Athens Traveling Guide”, … or “Cat Wallpapers”, “Puppy Wallpapers”, and so on.

The problem also is that the top apps in this listing are most of the time the 1-function apps so in this way a “Picture Grayscale”-app of 1,99$ will get downloaded and a 0.99$ full functional photo editing tool for the iphone with multiple filters which is only updated once every few months will not be downloaded at all.

So as the users behave now, the App Store only gives benefits to people who make bulk applications of low quality. Hundreds of good working functional apps are in the back of the popularity listing and hundreds of junk apps are in the middle.

Maybe this is partially the fault of Apple, they should review apps at some times and place these in a front page listing or while they are reviewing an app for listing in the App Store, just give a small review as well and if this is positive place them on the front page in a listing, hence filtering all junk. Just to the right of the window where I’m writing this I see a 0.99$ app on the top of the photography listing just providing “Animal Wallpapers”, is this an image editor or camera app where the photography section is ment for?

So to Apple:
Filter out the junk apps and add flood control to developer’s accounts.

To the people:
Review apps each time and wisely, trash junk apps and think twice when reviewing a functional app. Suggest things to developers before reviewing and search further than just at the front of the listings, many amazing bargains are in the back.

Many people will soon be forced to choose between one of many browsers in Windows 7 so here we made a small article in basic language which helps them pick the Web Browser that is right for them.

The Novice Guide to choosing a browser :

1. Internet Explorer (Download) :

You can use this browser if your used to it, but it’s the uttermost basic browser there is. It doesn’t provide extended functionality, lacks some functions to display websites correctly and is somehow considered unsafe, especially when your e-banking.

Pros : Basic, Simple

Cons : Unsafe, Bad displaying of websites, Lacks functionality

2. Firefox (Download) :

Firefox is the most “fun” browser and is the best browser if you are too used to Internet Explorer but still want to try something else.

You can change its looks by using personas to display backgrounds behind your buttons. It displays the web correctly, is light and is also extendible by using plugins to eg. display all google pages on one one page so you don’t have to click the next buttons anymore.

A downside is that it isn’t the fastest browser and that you still have to install features through the plugin system that are default to most other webbrowsers.

Pros : Fun, Decent, Simple, Extendible, Light

Cons : Extensions are hard to install for novice users, Not the fastest

3. Safari (Download) :

Safari is the browser from Apple, the manufacturer of iPods, iPhones, Macs and iTunes. It has its own look but still doesn’t differ much from what you are used to in layout. It still looks basically like internet explorer and Firefox to decrease the learning curve.

It’s the best browser if you want synchronisation with iPod Touch or iPhone. It’s the fastest browser together with chrome and supports all possible web technologies.

It also has an astounding way to let you open all your favorite websites, by displaying all your favorite websites in a 3D wall, which automatically puts a star next to all websites which were changed since the time you last visited them.

Pros : Best usable with Apple products, Fastest, Simple, Easy access to favorite sites, Displays websites correctly

Cons : Heavy, Lacks Functionality

4. Chrome (Download) :

Chrome is a browser from Google, yeah that’s right, the Search Enige Google. It is considered the fastest browser by many sources, but this is disputed by Apple’s Safari.

It displays websites as well a Safari and has a different look and feel than most browsers. It’s simple and more or less functional, but it is a big step from Internet Explorer since the interface differs too much. It is updated a lot and is considered very safe.

Pros : Very Safe, Different, Fastest, Displays Websites Correctly, Updated a lot

Cons :  Not so easy for Internet Explorer users, Heavy

5. Opera (Download) :

Opera is the least known of this browsers and isn’t made by a huge organisation or a computer giant, but still gets around well.

Opera displays websites quite well, but it definitely isn’t the fastest browser. It has a whole lot of functionality and has a huge amount of features to enhance your user experience. It is always the first to come out with fun features like Opera “Unite” which let’s you chat or share images or other files with other people who use Opera.

Opera is also the browser which looks the least like the traditional browser. It differs from Internet Explorer tremendously and is criticized because many of its features are hard to access.

Pros : Many features, fun, always innovating, different

Cons : Slow, Hard to use, doesn’t feel like a normal browser, not customizable

What do we suggest?

Firefox or Safari

Why?

Firefox has all the things a browser needs and if you need to get more advanced features you can use the plugins, also the personas are a lot of fun, to get eg. your favorite singer to appear behind the buttons.

Safari because it is in our opinion the fastest and because the 3D “Top Sites” feature is the best way to access your favorite websites, something you won’t find in any other browser by default.

What do we avoid?

Internet Explorer

Why?

Many people who make websites agree, Internet Explorer is ruining the web, where Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari already support 3D animations in websites and the ability to watch video’s without needing Flash Player, Internet Explorer just lacks these features. If less people start using Internet Explorer you would have websites you can walk through, view youtube video’s without slowdowns or without needing Flash Player and could play eg. World of Warcraft or The Sims directly in your browser.

Word List :

-Flash Player : A tool created by Adobe that enables you to play games and watch video’s on the Internet.
-Personas : A feature of Firefox which allows you to set a background images behind the buttons at the top of your webbrowser.

-Opera Unite : A feature of Opera which enables you to display applications in your webbrowser which allow you to eg. Leave notes for other users, exchange files or images or host your own website. It is still being developed and isn’t included in Opera at the moment.

-Top Sites : A feature of Safari which enables you to display miniature versions of you websites in a 3D wall to allow you to easily access your favorite websites.

I was browsing the web recently and I came across some intresting facts and rumors about Snow Leopard which can easily be linked to the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. In this way I can predict a date for the release of Snow Leopard and can I also conclude something else about the WWDC keynotes.

First of all, Apple already announced the many performance improvements of Mac OSX 10.6, but a performance improvement wasn’t enough to justify the price of $129 for a new Mac OSX. So Apple took iTunes as an example and started developing a new GUI. The GUI will be darker than the current one and will be smoother. So now we can conclude that Mac OSX 10.6 will cost money but will certainly not be a small update. Snow Leopard will be the fastest and most stable operating system in the world and will have a completely new interface.

What about the date?
Snow Leopard will be released 2 months after the WWDC ’09 on the 8th of June, so that makes somewhere mid August, probably the 10th.

There is yet another conclusion : Steve Jobs will be back to perform a keynote on WWDC ’09! 
He would be away for about a half year and the WWDC is  about half a year after his departure. So he will probably announce the new OS himself.

Yes its so far, Mac OSX has a decent marketshare and they are quiet, some are even willing to install windows 7 on bootcamp. If you would have asked that from an OSX fanboy 2 years ago he would have came to visit you with a bazooka. Anyway, this is a result of their rise in marketshare, they are less frustrated and actually becoming objective. 

Windows fanboys, well they have nothing to complain about, they still have 88%. Think about it, 1.000$ is divided between three children, one gets 85$ (Mac OSX), one gets 880$ (Windows) and one gets 8,5$ (Linux). Which one will be frustrated?

So there is another group with a very small marketshare : The Linux Community!
Representing 0,85% of all PC users they think they own the world and the are 100% convinced that Linux will run on 60% of all desktops within 2 years, I present to you : The Linux community.
Now that Apple fanboys finally do shut up, Linux fanboys become arrogant and insulting, why? How can a fly be arrogant to a cheetah and a lion? Well yeah, we all know the answer, flies are irritating.

So message to the Linux fanboys : SHUT THE F*CK UP AND DISCOVER REALISM!

Recent announcements of Windows 7 chook the entire world and microsoft didn’t even say anything, people are. One of the articles that I came across was about the use of Windows 7 on netbooks and I started thinking.

Apple is releasing Mac OSX 10.6 in a while which will make Mac OSX even more stable and probably the fastest OS on the earth.
It’s kind of an Xbox-effect, Mac OSX 10.6 will be released before Windows 7, so it should have an advantage, but…
Windows 7 is already so popular that it has approximately 1,5% of global marketshare which means that Apple will have to come up with something good to get Windows 7 out of the people’s heads.

Did you notice how I didn’t mention Linux? Well what’s there to mention, Ubuntu, the most popular distro has released its latest version a while ago and it wasn’t very special, I hope Ubuntu 9.04 will be more innovative. And for a non commercial OS it has to be. The last chance for Linux, as OS on netbooks is also endangered. Windows 7 will run on netbooks as well, it will even have a direct-on button for simple tasks and will have a lot higher performance. What do you think people would use? Linux or their favorite windows? Well here in Belgium it’s clear, 3/4 of all Linux netbooks are returned to the store after people find out that there is Linux on there instead of Windows, they now even prefer a 6 year old Windows OS above a brand new Linux distro. Says enough doesn’t it?  I don’t think Linux stands much of chance, people will eventually choose Windows above linux, because they are used to it.

My conclusion is that there will be a war next year between the 2 biggest OS’s Mac OSX Snowy Leopard and Windows 7. Linux will have to watch how the two endanger its marketshare. Of course this will not be the end of Linux since it is community driven, but you’d better prepare for a Linux with 0,3% marketshare instead of 0,85%. Unless Ubuntu 9.04 is there to save the day with a superfast booting OS. 

So the big cat and lucky seven are fighting but the penguin is not invited. And apparently I’m not the only one who thinks that way. Tons of blog posts were released of Windows 7 pulverizing Linux. That’s obviously a different attitude than the one at Vista’s release but at the moment you can’t really tell it will go either way or another, so it might turn out a completely other way.
This is just what I think will happen. 

After having used xp for quite a while instead of vista and having used Mac OSX on a regular base. I return to Windows Vista to make some free disk space and a partition to install the already famous Windows 7. And that’s when I noticed something, is Windows Vista really that bad? After removing some old junk from my hardrive, the boot went as smooth as a baby’s but.

But I also noticed something irritating in this process. To enable me to make room available for a new 20Gb partition I needed to clean my cache with the system cleaning tool and I noticed that all cache and backups, system restore points, page files, … took an astounding 9,82Gb of my harddrive space! I still have pc’s that only have a 40Gb harddrive, imagine that, 10Gb for the Vista installation + 10Gb cache = 50% of the harddisk we used to work with until three years ago. This is huge.
But is Apple any better with their Mac OSX? No, Windows saves all that information to restore your PC in case anything goes wrong. Mac OSX also has such a feature called Time Machine, Time Machine uses an external harddrive to store the info Windows Vista stores in its cache and guess what? Time Machine copies have the same effectiveness but take about 50Gb more on an external harddisk than Windows Vista does in its cache. So this means that if Apple wouldn’t tell you to buy an external HD to backup everything, files on Mac OSX would take twice the normal diskspace. So definitely a good score for windows, you don’t have to buy an external HD and they discovered a highly space efficient method to make backups.

I was afraid for one more thing, after cleaning so many system files and disabling system restore, the paging files, … would Windows Vista still work? If I did this in Windows XP, I have gotten already a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) or two and in Vista, nothing. It’s obviously more  stable.

What brings me to the next point, Virus Protection. Where my old XP PC’s were constantly infected (nowadays less), Windows Vista hasn’t had one encounter with a virus, I don’t even use an Antivirus but do regular checkups by downloading AV scanning engines and nothing! A clean Vista.

Now UAC, the dreaded new function… Well who told you that Windows Vista sucks? I guess in most cases your PC maker from the local store or a 24/7 downloading uncle. Well what do you do on Windows Vista? Write notes, manage pictures, chat with friends, go online,… How often do you have to install something? PC makers all the time and your uncle every time he installs a new antivirus to try it out or downloads a virus actually. You, not very often, so is it really that hard to enter your password once in a while?

So the conclusion is that Windows Vista is quite fast (if cleaned), is much safer than XP and much more stable as well, all driver and software issues are history and it has an even better backup method than Mac OSX. So is it really that bad? No.