I added new subcategories for my Virtools articles. A blog makes writing new articles easy but finding specific content for visitors might be not that easy. I am realizing this often when finding new, interesting blogs. I found myself guilty in this regards too - me who often preaches how important usability is. 
My first step was to add an overview page that lists all article titles on a single page. I now added a download category which mainly refers to my Virtools Editor Plugin DLL. My (now pretty old) maxscripts are still only available via my old site. Might be that in an undefined future I'll do some updates or new releases.
The majority of my postings is about Virtools. Currently it says 61 Virtools articles. 
Thus I added these new categories:
Virtools Tutorials, Tips and Tricks
Virtools VSL
Virtools SDK
I hope this helps. Beside this, I still had trouble with loosing my (perma)links - they often referred back to the RSS feed one day after I fixed them. I disabled the comments for a few days and then they became stable. So it might be related to spam or other hackings. I added a new captcha step - when the anti-spam-module considers your comment as spam, you get now another chance to validate via a captcha query. So far it improved the situation!
If you ever have problems with that, please let me know. thx.
I wanted to post less "news only" stuff but this merits it!
By accident I just saw the news RSS feed for the 2.1 release announcement. It comes with some very useful new features and looks like it's a free upgrade for 2.0 users. If I think how much people had to pay for the Virtools 4.0 to 4.1 upgrade …
They added a complete scriptable assets import-pipeline. This is hyper useful and important !!!!! What I did to improve our Virtools pipeline a couple of years ago, was a bit similar. We script our assets imports too, so our "BogBuilder", which is our single-click build-process, takes i.e. one CMO, instructions from a XML file, data resources to do some processing and then spits out a publishable VMO. This, in combination with the modded 3ds max exporter, boosted our iteration cycle excessively. So, scriptable assets imports … wow, cool addition! I mean most people doing projects will look for something like this, strangely Virtools never added it as feature.
Something I was missing in Unity was to load assets at runtime. Previously you had to create your own i.e mesh serializer etc. Now they have 'assets bundles' - so a weak point fixed. Also the scriptable Editor GUIs is cool. Virtools also has an Editor API but it's MFC and not the easiest stuff to use. Btw. I have a couple of free Virtools Editor Plugins for download (don't know if there are any others freely available).
There is a feature in Virtools which is (was?) one of those potentially good but not usable features, that is probably overlooked by many - maybe because Marketing never promoted it. It's the "Skin Join" BuildingBlock (Component). It joins two (skinned) meshes via a patch/bridge-mesh. I used a modified version for my Thesis project (~5 years ago) where the characters where customizable. The problem with this BB is, as with many others, that it's not targetable. This means it has to be attached directly onto the mesh at authoring time. This renders it useless for at run-time customizable characters.
Unity3D allows now to combine skinned meshes too. Haven't found any details online yet, so I don't know if it will also prevent any seams as the Skin-Join BB does.
Two other new key-features: streaming terrain and real-time shadows on terrain. They say that Unity3D is now ready to be used for MMOs!
Very nice update, congratz!
Picture: explosion view of my thesis character. Besides multiple body parts, you can see the 'patches' I used to join them during runtime without any seams. Skinning and animating this kind of setups is a bit of pain though. Had to script me extra controls to allow me to switch quickly between different combinations inside 3ds max.
When I started to experiment a bit with Unity3D, I used JavaScript. Unity3D uses Dot.Net as "scripting" environment and supports C#, boo and JavaScript. JavaScript is the one I already used in the past thus it's what I went for.
But something that really put me off after a while was how inefficient coding was without a good editor with solid syntax highlighting and Intellisense. In Visual Studio C++ I am using Visual Assist now for many years and don't want to do any coding with out it!
There is a webdeveloper edition of Visual Studio 2008 Express which has intellisense support for JS, but if you want good performance in Unity3D you better use the strong typing language modification Unity Technologies added. Which btw. looks like this
var myFloat : float = 1.23f;
JavaScript itself is a dynamic language with dynamic typing. In the past developing with such a type of languages was a bit old school (execute and observe: "print, print, print .. ah something wrong here"), because you didn't have an environment with syntax highlighting and debugging. So I guess that web-developer VS Express release probably gives a nice boost there.
Dynamic languages have their strong points! I like being able to open the maxscript console (F11) in 3ds max, type in some lines, select them and press Shift+Enter. It executes the code with instant results - fantastic for prototyping. When done, you simply drag'n drop the code onto your toolbar (as example) and dang, new button that calls your code. A very fast way to extend a tool.
Microsoft seems to be aware of this as in a video with the 4.0 C# design team, they talk about use-case. Looks like C# might become a choice for embedded "scripting" language in applications.
An alternative is thus to use Visual Studio C# Express 2008 which is a great C# editor for free. And so far it seems to have very good intellisense and refactoring tools built-in. Another benefit is, that you can compile in VS as a verification step. On the G4 it took nearly up to 10 seconds until Unity3D recognized the recently saved script file and finished the recompilation. Compared to Virtools where VSL compilation is a matter of a second, it felt pretty annoying. On the other hand VSL is a less complex and complete language. VSL code tends to be in most cases short and without many dependencies (at least for me).
As my G4 macbook doesn't have Parallels, I finally rigged up a home-network with Synergy - like many people on the Unity3D forum do suggest and it's really good as now I can use the PC for coding in C#. This brings not only the benefit of using a good Editor - which is the main point - but also the benefit of using familiar Keyboard-Layout.
That G4 keyboard and the unfamiliar way of selecting words or rows in one via the keyboard was a real slow.
Although now I need to learn C#, it's worth in order to use a good development environment. Moreover it might be very interesting for other tasks too. Actually I will start with some C# stuff outside Unity3D first. So Unity3D will have to wait even some more …
Recently I did a little log-analyzer tool in MFC and it really feels old. Luckily due many available resources online, it's still ok to use and especially it doesn't need the dot.Net run-time, which was my major decision point: easy deployment. Just one .exe and go. But I am interested in WinForms.
I played a little bit with WPF and XAML but it adds an additional layer, so I will stick to WinForms first.
I few months ago I bought me a new computer. A nice quad PC. Something I wasn't happy about was that it was bundled with VISTA. But then I thought it would be a good time to re-look at VISTA and learn all its positive and negatives sides, besides that my machine has 4 Gig of RAM which won't be used under XP.
My first contact was over one and half years ago and I had troubles setting up a networking application on it. So my my first contact wasn't positive. And now?
VISTA in a Home Network
Microsoft claims that it always look what the trends will be in future and develop for that. Apparently they didn't foresee that people will have networks at home with mixed OSes. In my case I have machines with XP, VISTA and OS X in the network. So first time I wanted to access the XP machine, I get a pop-up dialog saying that there are incompatible devices in the network. So I got a blank network page and no further information. After some research I found that I have to patch XP.
In addition to that, for being able to access shared folders of OSX, I had to modify the registry. Establishing access to the Internet was painless but beside this, VISTA Home Premium (!) failed to cooperate with my other machines out-of-the-box.
Vista's network map also shows router devices.
System RAM and 32 bit VISTA
Well, officially it says 4 GB RAM is supported. But I think it's misleading. You need to subtract the amount of VRAM your GFX-card owns. Mine has 512 MB, so the task-manager says that 3581 MB of physical system memory is available. With 1 Gig of VRAM you probably only will be able to address 3 Gigs of your system RAM. At least I think so, but this articles says the address-space is needed by the hard-disks, so maybe the VRAM hasn't this kind of impact …
At a given moment I had to import some CAD data and needed the maximum of my RAM to be available. So I checked my system and strangely most of my memory was used. This is due Vista's SuperFetch, which preloads commonly used applications and data. This is also one of the reasons why on start-up it may take a while until the hard disk stops turning. Basically this seems to be a nice feature, but for that situation, where I needed the be sure about memory usage, I turned it off via the registry and since then not back on. I think apps now take a little while longer to load but the system-startup is faster. Probably I'll turn it back on one day in order to observe the differences further.
Another aspect was that aprox 2 Gigs are reserved for applications and another 2 Gigs for the kernel. This can be altered using this command:
bcdedit /set increaseuserva 3072
It indeed increased the memory used by the application - it didn't reach 3 Gigs but was more like 2.8 or so. But now the kernel has less space and it might produce side-effects if drivers (like for a 1 Gig VRam Gfx card) assume 2 Gigs. Maybe I'll turn it later back to default of 2048 using.
bcdedit /set increaseuserva
Visual Studio 2003 and Virtools 4.0
Officially Visual Studio .Net 2003 is not supported on Vista. I turned Vista's 'User Access Control' (short UAE) off and it seems to work fine so far, including debugging. Something that does not work are the Virtools 4.0/3.5 wizards. Virtools 4.0 works fine except that the font/typo is kinda blurry. There is some kind of red ghosting it seems - not sure if you can see it on the left screenshot. This must have to do with the font anti-aliasing. Vista uses by default ClearType. If one switches to standard, as shown on the right picture, then the font in Virtools is very nice but then it becomes blurry in other places of Vista. For example window captions.
I don't know how it's in Virtools 4.1 - maybe it's OK there. Otherwise our option is only to switch between both modes for long sessions.
Quick Launch ain't real Stacklets?
In my quick launch toolbar I only have a few common shortcuts (browser, eMail, winamp, trillian, total commander). I use additional, collapsed shortcut bars for i.e. frequently used development tools like PSPad, Visual Studio and Virtools. There are some inconvenient aspects to this: the button is pretty small as the toolbar name doesn't act as button and under Vista icons become visible when the area with network and active app-icons gets collapsed.
Currently I am trying something different: RocketDock in combination with the Stacks Docklet plugin, both are free. For the stacklet icons I use some free-ones that can be found on the web like here, here or here. I have it at top of my desktop, I hope it won't disturb me too much. I think I still would prefer to have it inside the taskbar itself!
VISTA Security
The vista firewall doesn't really prevent outgoing traffic from applications. It seems much more configurable than the one that comes with XP but it may give a false sense of security. Luckily since recently my preferred personal firewall is also available for Vista. I think this, in combination with the free AVG for personal use, will provide a better protection.
VISTA Theme Style
The task back is 'back in black'. Unless you use the aero theme where you can tint it and, in combination of transparency, mix it with the desktop background image, there is no real control about it's colour. I am no fan of having it in black and disappointed of the lack of choice. Although VISTA has theming it seems locked (for OEM partners?) and you are still required to use 3rd party solutions.
Thestart menu now contain the program directory instead of displaying them in a pop-up. The named reason for this is that people tend to have that menu as large as the whole screen with plenty of installed programs. Now you start with the root dir as list and you click into subfolders. I don't like it because it requires additional clicking. MS probably count on the new indexed searching and the field where you simply type in the first letters to filter the choose. I disabled indexing because having the harddisk rotating all the time disturbed me. In addition to that I organize my start menu in major categories like: 2D, 3D, video, Web, Tools, Games etc. I don't like if installers doesn't give me the option to choose the exact location but in that case it doesn't prevent me from moving the shortcuts afterwards which of course gives me stuff to cleanup manually after an uninstall. And that's where I think MS should have done something more sensible like providing some more standard categories (including API) and tracking, when somebody manually moves shortcuts, for the uninstallers.
On the right side there are some common shortcuts, but some are as sub-menus and some simply as buttons. As you can see in the screenshot, I changed most of them to submenus so I don't have to click on them and for that I don't get an additional window. A good thing would have been if even in sub-menu mode, those items are click-able. another annoying thing is speed and consistency. They often pop-up slowly and sometimes not at all. also on the top-righ side there is an icon that fades into another according the menu item under the mouse. For me it has no real benefit and it even doesn't look better. Sometimes one gets the impression that the slow pop-up are related to the icon-fade but I think it's not the case.
Something else that looks strange is the main menu bar. It has some glossy gradient and somehow it looks misplaced in some standard applications. Below in the article there's a screenshot of the resource manager and it gives an impression about what I mean. In some other applications it looks even worse. Also the progress bars are animated - an 'energy impulse' is going from left to right from time to time. In one case I had a window with a couple of these at 100% and the pulsation felt pretty distracting.
Games section
There's a new window where games are listed that registered themselves there via a new API. It shall help to protect kids so they can only play games fitting their age etc. What I miss is a deinstall item in the context-menu. I often play game-demos because they are time-limited and thus a bit less a time-sink
So uninstalling demos is something I do frequently. There are also a few new games like chess and InkBall. I really like InkBall - played it once for a while - a nice casual game where you draw obstacles using a pen to modify trajectories of balls in order to make them roll in holes.
Positive aspects of Vista (partly)
Explorer
There are some things I like in Vista. Although I don't use the explorer much, I really like the way one can choose a new dir on any hierarchical level of the current directory patch. You can also add commonly used folders in the top-left corner as favorites. In some situations I saw a 'directory' pointing to recently used directories which could be VERY handy but unfortunately in many applications this is not available inside the "open file" dialogs. That would have been a really good improvement! 3ds max has such a directory-history but unfortunately also only in one of their open-file dialogs and not everywhere.
Resource Manager
Something really good is the new resource manager. That's something I always was looking for, for that the system becomes more transparent. One day I was listing to some music while chilling but the harddisk didn't stop working and working … With the resource manager, which launch button is badly hidden in the task manager, I was able to see what process was using intensively the disk and on what files! I found that Vista did some random backup of my system.
This surprises me a bit because I thought this wasn't a Home Premium feature. I turned it off and the computer became quiet. This feature is called 'shadow copy' and although using Vista Home Premium, you can't use it to restore parts of the system by intention, it is used by other services and the Window updater. People recommend to not turn it off.
Voice Recognition and TTS
The Voice recognition engine is much better which is really interesting. But when I tried to dictate an eMail in thunderbird with it, it showed that it still has some way to go. The text area of thunderbird is not recognized and thus a global, less user-friendly mode needs to be used.
Also the TTS voice sounds better, but although I have a german Vista version, it's the english voice and only the english one without possibility to download additional languages.
Windows Sidebar
I like the clock and calendar of the sidebar because of it's bigger size, but beside this I haven't really used it - maybe notes. Weather and gadgets like this doesn't interest me and for RSS I have better tools. Do you use it?
Additional Tools
Vista comes with some useful tools like snipping (selecting an area for a screenshot), Zoom, Notes etc. Unfortunately all of them have their usability drawbacks. It clearly shows that MS has more techies (coders) and less designers - OR - it's their strategy to only provide basic, not- designed tools (like MS Paint). I don't know.
Resume
Overall the user experience could be much better. Microsoft certainly put a lot of work into this but failed on some important aspects in the domain of usability. Vista has a pretty bad reputation, some people like it but too many aren't happy with it. I think Microsoft is aware of this - even if they deny - as they already announced Windows 7 (MS guys went like this: "No we don't talk about the next windows which is called Windows 7… and btw. it has multi-touch support built-in and maybe it comes sooner as expected, but you know we don't talk about it").
I would have loved if they would have improved Vista over a couple of iterations via service packs. But I guess from the the business side and marketing side they wanted to get rid of the bad reputation of Vista and thus the 7 instead of something in the line of XP or Vista. But I am guessing here.
I think a key feature of Windows should be easy customization. The middle between OS X (few choices) and Linux (plenty choices). A good approach would have been to introduce some Target-Audience profiles. Some people just want to use their computer, some want it to tweak a bit and others want as much of transparency and control as possible while keeping the GUI-approach. It's a bit like complex DDC tools: they have different layouts - i.e. in 3D for doing light setups, rigging, modeling etc.
I know that people like Joel think that choices = headaches but I already didn't agree back then when he complained about the shutdown choice in Vista. Too many choices are bad but not enough choices is bad too. It really depends on the personal preference. There's a good reason why GUI customization in complex applications like 3ds max, Silo, Maya or Modo is very important. Besides saving every clicks and distances, personal tastes do play a role for productivity!
What if Vista would have come with theme-creation tools and a community webplatform for sharing and (like Stardock does)? Instead they locked that feature.
I also miss built-it multi-desktop - the first time I experienced it was like 10 years ago on an Irix machine. Alreadythere I wondered why it's not available in windows. Well nowadays there are but it's 3rd party and most of them only deal with windows and not icons on the desktop itself. I tend to have too much icons on the desktop, so multiple desktops probably would help
I already mentioned stacking link-shortcut lists for the taskbar. It's like an enhanced quick-toolbar. The new Mac OS X has it and it's nothing revolutionary but it totally makes sense.
Well, this blog post became pretty long. I think there's more to tell but that's it for now. Cheers 
p.s. Some other recent rants about Vista on blog I read: Steve's BlackAndWhite and Aras's The Problem Of Vista
