And Aero? Hmm… coming 5 years late with a familiar glass look. Where have I seen that before? It looks like a plain RIP-OFF of Aqua, a respectable and beautiful GUI.

Just a thought in this montage of pointlessness. If Apple’s iPods are white and black and their macbooks are white and black, a black GUI would go along with the pattern very nicely…

Competition is competition. I don’t know if you know, but some of the largest businesses that you use every day do the exact same thing, but you just don’t notice it as much.

Take cell phones for example. Sanyo, Motorola, Samsung, Nokia – all of them – are literally neck-to-neck in the latest gadgets, technologies and cool features. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one feature come out for one manufacturer that it didn’t come out on on the other guy’s.

So relax, seriously. Who cares if one is mirroring or mimicking the other, they’re in business to make money. And if one company sees that the other is doing something that is generating business, you’d better believe they’re going to copy it as best they can to make themselves money.

I am going to be completely impartial to this, but I will say that a few nights ago, I installed my copy of Vista beta onto my PC. It looked really neat. I said to my girlfriend “hey, come check out Vista!” and she looked at the mouse pointer and said “that looks like a rip-off of OS X.” I said “oh, doesn’t suprise me, Apple has some really good stuff going on with their new OS.

That’s all I’m going to say.

Vista is going to be very, very cool when it comes out. No question about it. OS X up until now has been so far ahead of Microsoft they could loaf like the little hare who fiddled while the turtle caught up and now the finish line is ahead …

WHO WILL WIN?

One thing, though, is that Microsoft gave away any surprise they would’ve had, and that was a very, very stupid move IMO. Now, at apple, it’s like “tweak this, tune that, and vista!!!” so I expect Leopard will be very, very nice and probably better than Vista in general coolness. Add Parallels and we’re rockin’ baby. (If you have the Intel)

What’s the best point, about Leopard?? That I get to keep my Sawtooth (1999) with the latest and greatest OS on earth [awright, I'm giga'd to 1.8Gz I'll admit]. What’s the worst point about Vista? That everyone’s gonna be back onto the hardware upgrade train, er, gravy train for the manufacturers that is!!

First of all, I am a Mac fanboy, obviously, and I included some of my own opinions in the article. You, being a MS fanboy know nothing, obviously. You wanted me to address your points, and I will one at a time.

1. The column “Leopard VS. Vista” was not meant to be a comparison of the two OSs, it is a column that describes the progress of both the operating systems and their rumors that come from reliable sources.

2. You obviously have never seen a switcher or ever been to an Apple store. I’ve seen countless amounts of people who are awed at the beautiful GUI in Macs, and say “Why doesn’t Windows look like this?”.

3. I have done some research on Aero, I didn’t just write this article without doing any research at all. I wrote that point because I think Aero is just transparent windows. Big deal! OS X has had transparency in its OS since day one. When I heard of Aero, I was expecting a drastic overhaul of the GUI, not just transparent windows, round corners, and 3d effects that are annoying.

4. I never said Apple was the inventor of widgets, I know very well that Konfabulator was really the first popular widget software.

5. Flip is exactly the same as OS X’s application switcher, both triggered by the tab button. You have to admit that Microsoft got the idea of Flip3D from Exposé, they both do the exact same thing. You can’t tell me they aren’t exactly the same.

6. The dock does have live preview. If you minimize a window in OS X, it goes right in the dock, offering a live preview of the window right in the dock. In Vista, you minimize a window and it goes right in the taskbar, offering a live preview of the window right in the taskbar.

7. You don’t know anything do you? Safari has all of these features and more. Safari has Private Browsing (protective mode), a gorgeous UI, RSS news-reader and notifier, parental controls, the best printing-support of any browser, it doesn’t need cross domain barriers because Safari isn’t vulnerable to malicious scripts and ActiveX, modern CSS support, print to RSS, tabs, bookmarks bar, user agent control, and autofill. I am a web developer and I have handfuls of experiences when Safari, Firefox, Camino, etc. display my websites correctly, but IE just can’t display websites like they are meant to. Internet explorer makes my website work twice as hard because I have to install hacks, scripts, or rewrite my code to accommodate IE. And I’m testing in IE7 Beta 3. Microsoft still can’t get it right.

8. What else is there in Vista? You didn’t even tell me, besides a new GUI that is impressive, but nothing to get excited about. Vista is just a lame imitation of OS X, and all Microsoft can implement into the OS is something they stole from OS X. I want to see one decent major feature in Vista that isn’t already in Tiger. I would like to know.

If you can address, anything, I have raised, do so, but I bet you cannot. In the meantime, I suggest you watch this video.

lately ? betas have been available to msdsn subscribers for how many years, 7 ? i guess you’re talking about the cpp program and are just too clueless to know anything.

entire windows userbase has been deprived ? where is your source for this, or is this more dribble based upon your own assumptions and some outcries on the interweb where the majority of windows users are -not- found.

different ? have you even looked at the backend of aero (avalon/wddm) ? do so, than you’ll realise how dumb and clueless you sound.

apple wasn’t the first to have a gadgets-esque system, they have been around for -years- before apple created the dashboard.

flip/flip-3d are ’similar’ – is that all you have to say ? wow, nice argument there buddy !

live preview – does the dock have -live- preview ? nope.. and besides that, how is it similar to the dock, oh wait, it isn’t.

uac – it’s being refined and if you had used the first builds with it in you would say that it’s 100x time better and each build it’s being fine tuned.

ie7 – features not available on osx; protected mode, parental controls, non-archaic ui, decent printing from a browser, rss/favourites centre, cross domain barriers, int. domain anti-spoofing, admin kit and so on.. and that’s -JUST- the browser.

you totally ignored pretty much everything in vista (that is new, changed and improved) and made some comments about rumours for leopard — congratulations, you’re a blind mac zealot.

if you can address -anything- i have raised, do so, but i bet you can’t.

give it up – compare them both when they come out……