Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Officially Shows Longhorn, WinFX
Theaetetus writes "Microsoft today unveiled its most detailed look yet at its new OS, Longhorn, due in 2006, during Bill Gates' keynote speech at the company's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. An article at Internet Week describes some of the goals: avoiding viruses, worms, and 'building apps that are as smart as Outlook.'" The company "also unveiled 'WinFX,' which it described as a new application programming model for Windows that is the evolution of its .NET programming framework."
The goals of this OS seems pretty much the same as the last one. The productivity gains of having a "sidebar" are probably the same as the MSN website sidebar, which is kinda like having a billboard blinking outside your bedroom window all night : a distraction.
An XM-based FS is going to be a meta-data nightmare, with more churning than one thought possible. The pagefile size will need to be quite large to cache all that crap. But they'll use the extra-speedy Intels to compress is on the fly anyway.
Most of *any* speech recognition is going to be from research done on [cough] *nix machines of the past decade.
Revamping the graphics system is just what the DirectX doctor ordered: new APIs! Everything can be antialiased, from busy dancing icons to cursors to controls. yawn.
By keeping everyone busy adopting the new platform, form ignores function and we get the same stuff in a new box. I hope they keep pushing it out. Then again, we're talking about people who confuse an OS with their desktop images.
mug
"A demonstration of WinFS featured a method to "stack" documents by author in a window, with the heights of the stacks corresponding to the number of documents, as well as file views that showed snapshots of documents, rather than just file names."
... In addition to those snapshots posted of Longhorn over the weekend, isn't it a bit odd that Longhorn is essentially using the brushed metal look from OSX 10.3? The only difference being that MS made the grey a bit darker. Kudo's to the MS UI team.
And ten years before this, Apple patented Piles:
"Apple holds a patent on this one. Developed by Gitta Salomon and her team close to a decade ago, a pile is a loose grouping of documents. Its visual representation is an overlay of all the documents within the pile, one on top of the other, rotated to varying degrees. In other words, a pile on the desktop looked just like a pile on your real desktop.
To view the documents within the pile, you clicked on the top of the pile and drew the mouse up the screen. As you did so, one document after another would appear as a thumbnail next to the pile. When you found the one you were looking for, you would release the mouse and the current document would open."