Why Panther May Tear Up Longhorn

Sophrosyne writes "Microsoft Watch has presented an article on Longhorn, which is due not before 2005, and compares it with Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), which may be released this September. The article touches on some of the areas where Windows is ahead in operating system design and technologies, as well as how Panther plans to compete. Included in Microsoft Watch's article were links to a Extreme-Tech article on Desktop compositing, and 3D User Interfaces. It also contains videos of Longhorn's 3D Quartz-like user interface in action." If processor power is so important, why are we so willing to waste it on making windows do funny things when we move them around? Just wondering.

Comments

3d gui bad

[Apreche]

Okay, 3d is a neat thing. It's really neat because it creates entire new genres of video games. And it also make really cool animation for movies and such possible. However, for user interfaces 3d is bad unless it's a hologram, and we're still talking flat monitors here. It's one thing if you use the 3d stuff to make it look cool. Say an icon is a spinning 3d image of a disk instead of a pixellated icon of a disk. That would indeed be cool, if useless. However, making the actual interfact 3d is bad. 3d implies depth which means something is behind something else. Behind is bad in UI, because it's obscured.

What I would like to see is a vector graphics based user interface. Right now my task bar I have to set the width in pixels. I have to select one of 4 sides of the screen to put it on. All of my windows are rectangular in shape. With a GUI based on vectors I could have a round web browser. Or an oblong winamp. My task bar could be a triangle in the lop left of my screen. I could change the shape of existing windows to make room for new ones. Usually if I've got 3 or 4 windows open on a desktop all the room is used, but a small piece is left over, or one of the windows has to be sized awkwardly to fit. The awkwardly sized window ends up having it's internal ui elements messed up. With a vector based ui you could morph each window to maximize use of screen space.

Microsoft is using 3d because they can. They are thinking about keeping a hold on their 3 year upgrade cycle. Apple, while not making a vector based ui, is thinking about making a good ui.

Re:Wow, what a great read...did I miss something?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I do believe by 2005 when Longhorn is out, Apple will have made amazing OS X gains, heck it might even be OS XI by then, but I do NOT buy first to market wins."

I think the premmise of the article was that because Apple was so far ahead now when compared to XP, the introduction of Panther in a couple months will make that lead massive. In two years time that Massive lead will be growing exponentially.

While Longhorn may (or may not) be an innovative update, the article is simply saying that it will have to be absolutely INCREDIBLE to catch up to the hights that OS X will have achieved by that time.

Apple delivers and MS hypes

[afantee]

Since its initial release just 2 years ago, Mac OS X has had 2 major revisions and numerous minor updates with significant performance gain and countless new features. In contrast, Win XP remains virtually unchanged apart from a single service pack and a large number of security patches.

MS is just full of puffs and bluffs. They have been talking about .NET, Longhorn, speech recognition for so many years, but failed deliver any meaningful result. Now we know that Longhorn is at least 2 years away, and WinFS is just a Windows Service on top of NTSF rather than a revolutionary file system. The only things really worth mentioning in Longhorn appears to be the Aero GUI and Window rendering through GPU, basicly a second rate imitation of Aqua and Quartz Extreme.

MS is just a slow dinosaur that has to die sooner or later due to its total incapacity to innovate. Apple is 60 times smaller than MS, and yet makes more and better software than the Redmond beast, in addition to cool hardware innovations like Xserve, Xserve RAID, iPod, iMac, PowerBook, and so on.

Although Win XP has some nice features, but it just doesn't feel nearly refined as Mac OS X. Judging from the recent leaks, Longhorn can't even match Jaguar, let alone Panther. And no one can imagine how much better OS X would be by 2005.

Re:The biggest difference

[torpor]

The second and third videos don't look like they're realtime to me... I imagine its just clipped video scaled, rotated, and alphamapped ...

If she was hitting the "Start" key and the menu was being build and displayed, and all that, I would be a little happier with what I saw. But as it is, and knowing MS' track record of shoddy demo's, I'm gonna pass all judgement on Longhorn until I hear chimps talking about it on the bus.

Until then, ho hum ...