2 useful features in Vista

Hey guys,

I was reading about the new 'world is flat' Vista ad campaign and was reminded of 2 features I had been meaning to blog about.

I have to admit that I had a good chuckle when someone showed these two me since they are both from the command line. It seemed really ironic given the amount of attention give to the UI. In any case, irony or not, these are 2 pretty handy dandy features.

The first feature is CLIP which redirects the output of command line tools onto the Windows clipboard. So you can do dir | clip and get the directory listing added to your clipboard.

The second feature is robocopy, which is a familiar utility to many Windows Users. It is a robust way to copy files - so it can recover from network outages and things like that. This useful utility used to be part of the Windows Resource Kit, but now it comes with Vista. More information about this tool can be found here.

As many of you know, Microsoft recently hired Crispin Porter + Bogusky presumably to revamp their advertising. That agency was responsible for a lot of really interesting work, including the recent Burger King and MINI ads. It seems reasonable to assume that they are responsible for the 'world is flat' Vista ads. I'm not sure how you feel about it, but those ads seem vaguely insulting to me. Not like the quirky, edgy stuff that they did for Burger King and MINI. But then again, it has us talking about Vista, so maybe they've done their job.

Thanks!

Eric.