I had the good fortune to attend a Windows Vista demo at Moosecamp (tag)- part of NorthernVoice (tag)- yesterday given by Robert Scoble and assisted by the lovely and talented Chris Pirillo. Afterwards, I had the opportunity to chat briefly with Robert, and he asked me what I thought of the demo.

The thing that really struck me is that watching videos of the new user interface really don't do it justice; you have to see it being used to really appreciate the giant leap forward it is from what we currently have with Luna (Windows XP's interface). I don't mean that as a knock on the great video blogging the Robert does for Channel 9, I simply think that Vista will achieve critical mass when users get the opportunity to see it in person and play with it in stores.

Each session at Moosecamp was only 30 minutes long, so given the brevity of the demo the focus was really on the user interface as a whole. We had some brief looks at how IE 7 in Vista will handle RSS feeds, a look at how Vista will allow users to control volume on a per-application basis, and had some fun with the new task-switching functionality that shows open windows in a sort of scrolling "fly-by" fashion. It's clear that Vista will really work video processors, but it's all to a wonderful end.

At the end of the session, Chris showed off his Lenovo ThinkPad running Mac OS X. All the geeks in the room (okay, everyone) crowded around to have a look, and after a few moments Chris remarked "I'm so going to get in trouble for this..." I hope not. The prospect of dual-booting OS X and Vista on the same machine is hard to beat!

[Edited February 11, 2006 @ 01:30 PM to ensure photos are linked to their sources in Flickr - photos by Mutually Inclusive and mastermaq]