See One, Do One, Teach One

Chris Pirillo is not the biggest fan of the new Vista windows UI. I have always respected Chris as his lockergnome sites is one of the few tutorial sites more heavily populated than our tech-recipes.

Chris’s biggest gripe is that Vista does not maintain the glass aero experience in all circumstances. By design, Vista will break out of this new sexy UI when it is taking up too much CPU cycles or if a program is not compatible. When automatically disabling the glass theme, the screen will abruptly flash and everything loses the pretty transparent look.

I agree with Chris that this sudden flash and theme change can disrupt the user experience. (Heck, I am waiting for the first time it sends somebody into an epileptic fit. FATIS? Flashing Aero Theme Induced Seizure?) That being said, the automatic enable/disable of the theme is not a bad compromise at this point. By having the OS turn off bells and whistles as needed to keep the system speedy will allow more people to experience the new UI with more marginal hardware.

I have three solutions for Chris and anybody else who does not like the sudden vista theme changes.

1. Upgrade. Every subsequent build of vista (and aero-enabled video drivers) have handled the aero glass theme more efficiently. If you are not running the latest software, that’s an easy improvement. As vista switches off the aero effect when your system slows, upgrading you hardware will help as well. Eye candy requires better hardware. If you don’t like the flashing on/off, then you can just disable the effect.
2. Disable. If the aero theme or the transparency effects are not enabled, then they cannot flash on and off. Users can find instructions here for disabling the transparency or for changing the current theme.
3. Wait. Pirillo describes certain pieces of software such as QuickTime that disable the aero theme. The alternative would have been just to error out and force QuickTime to rewrite its interface sooner. By detecting these problems and automatically turning off the new interface, Vista ensures backwards compatibility. Most software designers will want their software to be compatible with the new UI and will fix these issues before Vista hits retail. Patience, patience.

The philosophy of vista was to continue maximum backwards compatibility and to work on as many boxes as possible. Only time will tell if this philosophy will work out well. Considering, however, that this stone has already been cast, I believe the automatic reversion back to a non-Aero compatibility mode is a good option–especially during the beta process.

Many people, maybe even Chris, would be happier if another option was added. Vista just needs the following option somewhere: Do not Automatically Disable Aero Theme. Sure the user might have an occassional slow down or a program that does not work; however, at least the seizure inducing theme flashes would be gone.