Media Player 11

If you want a glimpse of Windows Vista's graphical style without installing a beta operating system, one really good way to do that is by installing Windows Media Player 11.

I really like the new look of the Media Player interface. By default, the window looks like it's made out of polished black plastic. It's trendy, but for good reason: it looks great. Hopefully the Vista style will translate as well for other programs. I couldn't find an option to change the color of the window like is possible in Office 2007, but I image that will be a system-wide option in Vista anyway.

Version 11 is basically just an upgrade of version 10, but it's a quality upgrade. Several people have commented that they'd like netcast support included, but since I just run Juice on my sever system and stream the files from there, I wouldn't use the feature anyway.

The main reorg here is the song library. Album art plays a big role, and it's fairly easy to add album art with the "Paste album art" feature. Double-clicking an album or song just adds that element to the end of the current playlist, rather than replacing it.
Also, the "Burn" and "Sync" tabs now show the media library on the left side of the window and allow you to build a "burn list" inside the Burn tab instead of having to create a saved playlist somewhere else and opening it inside the Burn tab. That's good, because now it feels like the Burn and Sync tabs are actually part of Media Player.

Overall, I think it's great. Nothing has been lost and lots of cool or useful things have been gained.