brave [little] meme

I just installed Windows 7 Ultimate on my new 27” iMac. Why? For games, of course!

One thing struck me while discussing my initial experiences of the OS with my ‘Microsoftie’ dad: Windows 7, somewhat like its predecessor Vista, behaves like an OS acutely aware of its vulnerability.

With its insane default security settings and constant confirmation prompts for anything involving a system change or the running of an application, Windows 7 seems to be permeated by the mentality of a survivalist: holed up in a shiny blue cave, with lots of tinned food and water, pointing a double-barreled shotgun at the entrance.

By comparison, OSX is like a good bartender: it keeps an eye on you while you have a good time, but only asks for your car keys if you start acting stupid.

OK, I’ll start with the obvious question: WTF is up with the mediterranean holiday postcard look of Microsoft’s newly beta’d Bing search engine? For a moment there I thought I’d ended up at a travel agency.

With that out of the way, first impressions of this repackaged Live search aren’t too shabby. The layout is clean, with a sidebar on the left hand side allowing you to refine your search results in a variety of ways. Image searching in particular has a few handy if unsurprising options with regards to layout, colour, and size, as well as an unexpected but potentially useful one: People.

This search for ‘scream’ is a good example of what the new feature can do. Not only did the search return the obvious results for the movie’s cast, but Bing’s ‘faces’ filter narrows the search down to a veritable gallery of human agony and rage. An interesting study in facial expressions, but also a boon to anyone looking for the right stock  image to add to a composition. 

Another interesting aspect is the seeming lack of pagination in the image search: Bing will in fact load new thumbnails dynamically as you scroll, effectively providing one long page of results for everything it finds - a definite plus against Google’s tedious thumbnail pagination when it comes to locating the right image.

While not revolutionary in any sense, Bing appears to work reasonably well as a Google alternative, bringing some nice interface refinements to the standard searching process. The aforementioned sidebar, with its filters and related search suggestions, works reasonably well; pop-up panels for search results provide quick content previews, and the screen layout will generally try its best to accommodate your browser’s window size.

While by no means perfect (filter results don’t persist across searches and the filter bar keeps stubbornly auto-collapsing, for instance), these improvements add up to a reasonably clean user experience, particularly when compared with Google’s somewhat outdated (and let’s face it, clunky) bare-bones UI.

And this is where Microsoft may be onto a win: they appear to have somehow managed to make Bing’s search capabilities at least comparable to Google’s in terms of both useful results and speed. Having leveled that playing field, Microsoft then went ahead and improved on their rival’s user experience. 

While I’m not sure this will be enough to make people start “binging” for things on the internet, it should at least act as a wake-up call to the Google powers-that-be: simplicity is all well and good, but your interfaces need to keep up. 

Final note: Bing is not without a sense of humour, it seems. An image search for Bill Gates returns this first result. 

This year’s E3 holds many a promise. Secret Microsoft demos, unexplained early starts hinting at groundbreaking announcements (or possibly an expectation of bad time keeping), leaks galore for some of our favourite gaming franchises and a massive, towering pile of garbage.

With so much going on, it’s important for the clued-up gentleman gamer to have at hand the latest sources of information, so as not to appear misinformed at the next gaming-related chat over brandy and cigars at the Gentlemen’s Club.

You might therefore want to keep an eye on TeamXbox, who will be twittering E3, as well as 1up’s liveblog and twitter feed here. Either way, you’re sure to be a hit when next talking to the ladies about the latest developments in gaming entertainment.