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New Longhorn Screenshots And Schedule
Mozillabird writes "WinSupersite has recently updated the Longhorn release schedule and has provided some new screenshots of Aero. The first beta of Longhorn is May 2005, though there is some speculation about how much of Avalon and Aero will be implemented in that beta. The "big beta" is scheduled for this Fall."
Microsoft released community previews of Avalon and Indigo a couple days ago. For the most part, Avalon has been working for me. I havn't used Indigo yet.
As far as I can tell Avalon isn't hardware accelerated yet but it is still pretty low in CPU usage. The fairly simple calculator sample included uses 25 megs of RAM though!
Fun stuff to play with, even if it's not production ready.
There are already quite a few fast-searching tools available, such as > Avafind</a>, <a href="http://www.copernic.com/">Copernic</a>, and <a href="http://desktop.google.com/">google desktop search</a>. I've found the functionality they offer to be extremely useful, but how can they be a selling point to an OS when they're already out on the market?
Weird, I submitted this story last week and it was rejected.
Anyway, anyone notice a few things?
1.) The dialog that appears asking for an admin password to install software. Directly ripped from OS X.
2.) The titlebars and status bars have gotten bigger for seemingly no good reason. However, the minimize/maximize buttons have been horizontally stretched. This should help alleviate the infamouse "accidentally-close" clicking everybody does now and again. They're still touching each other, though. Weirdly, OS X's are also sitting beside each other but I never accidentally hit the close box. There is space between them.
3.) More shiny blue. Since this isn't the final Aero 3D-accelerated interface, expect more of this but using DirectX.
4.) Drop-shadow from windows in focus. Again, directly ripped from Apple.
Longhorn is shaping up how I sort of guessed. More and more, the Explorer windows are being made to look like web pages, with lists and shortcuts running everywhere.
Since Longhorn will be out in 2006, there's a potential release for another OS X that same year. I predict Steve Jobs will have his designers reimplement Aqua using Quartz/CoreImage. I don't see Apple making everything 3D, but I do see them fully converting everything to vector-based widgets and OpenGL shader effects (that's what CoreImage is based on). Apple has already stated that they have seen no developer interest in integrating full polygonal 3D into the desktop like that, and that developers usually just create a custom OpenGL view.
Note: I compare to OS X because I'm a recent convert and don't plan to ever go back to Windows again. OS X feels five years ahead of everybody. Since every bit of new Longhorn technology is being backported to Windows XP, the only selling point Longhorn will have is its interface, which is something Microsoft has never been known for excelling at. It should be interesting watching Microsoft attempt to pull off aesthetics. Last time they tried that, we got Luna. Blech.
No surprise coming from Thurrott.
Check out this excerpt from a recent review of the MSN Toolbar Suite:
At the Professional Developers Conference 2003 in Los Angeles last year (see my exhaustive coverage of that show), Microsoft chairman Bill Gates touted the searching innovations that would go into Longhorn, the next generation Windows version that's now due in mid-2006. In a way, by detailing the new desktop search features Microsoft was working on so early, Gates had thrown down the gauntlet. In today's PC world, desktop search is a miserable, slow affair, and as Microsoft executives are fond of pointing out, it shouldn't take longer to find a file you know is on your hard drive than it takes to perform a Web search.
However, Gates was also giving his competitors a leg up on Microsoft. And since announcing its Longhorn desktop search intentions, Microsoft's worst fears were realized. Other companies began copying the Microsoft desktop search strategy, knowing that the never-ending Longhorn delays would help them get to market sooner and appear to be nimbler and even more innovative, though it's sort of astonishing how transparent that latter claim is. Chief among these competitors are Apple and Google.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced in June 2004 that the next version of Mac OS X, due sometime in 2005, will include a desktop search feature called Spotlight. The Spotlight feature set is a rough subset of the desktop search features Gates discussed in late 2003, but presented to the user with Apple's standard graphical excellence. Spotlight, according to Apple, is a "radically new and lightning fast way to find anything saved on your personal computer. Email messages, contacts and calendars, along with files and folders, all show up in Spotlight results." Spotlight's biggest claims to fame, presumably, are its near-instant search results and support for document meta data, both of which are, again, planned features of Longhorn. But no matter. While Apple has been busy copping Windows features since Jobs returned to Apple in late 1996 [!!!!!], the company's tiny market share ensures that very few people will benefit from Spotlight, despite Apple claims that it will deliver on desktop search a year before Microsoft ships Longhorn.
The gall astounds me. But hey, he actually believes it.
"but at least (in my experience) the crashes are fairly rare (say, once a month) instead of upwards of one a day..."
Windows XP doesn't crash one a day, either. I've only gotten a BSOD twice in my years of using it.
Windows has gotten a lot more stable over the years.
How was the figure arrived at exactly?
Testing?
All applications and all files will load 15 percent faster?
It didn't say "all." Do you have to take everything so literally on an OS preview for something coming out in about 1-2 years from now?
Doesn't "Longhorn-savvy" kind of imply specific hardware is required?
Yeah, specific hardware is required to enable specific new features. Just like the NX bits in the newer CPUs like AMD64 require newer software (like WinXP SP2) for the new features to work. What is your point?
Surely time would have been better spent by programmers and engineers actually stopping the OS from crashing so much? I'm an OS X user, and I'll be the first to admit that when it does crash, it tends to crash badly, but at least (in my experience) the crashes are fairly rare (say, once a month) instead of upwards of one a day...
Are you seriously implying Windows XP crashes once a day? Windows XP is stable as long as the hardware you've got in your machine has stable drivers.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Last week when I submitted this story, there were three other images embedded in the text of the article. It appears they are gone now.
Here they are:
OS X-alike password request for program installation
New "not responding" message and blurry translucent window borders
Sync manager
The finder in OSX already has this searching option, yes with the icon. It is one of my favorite parts of OSX. I don't see why spotlight is considered a "new" feature. They are just making it more convenient.
I hate to be really sad and geeky, but you're wrong about the fonts. The font in the screenshot is actually Frutiger.
If you look really hard at the lower case 'u' you'll notice there's a tail in the screenshot, where there isn't one in Corbel.
That said there are visible improvements in the kerning in the screenshot to the native kerning in XP.
The only difference is that now it's a framework for the entire operating system to use, and it's now even more powerful.
Find By Content is only part of Spotlight. The metadata index, plugin architecture, and the automatic import triggering are what makes it shine. Saying that it's existed in Panther is misleading, as it was functionally very, very, different.
Microsoft didn't steal "shit" from Apple, they stole Quicktime code, which was definitely not shit.
/me looks at the "Recycle Bin" on his Windows desktop and shakes his head at the obviousness of its origin...and the rest of the operating system...
I hope you're not stupid enough to think that Apple was the origin of that concept.
Note the wastebasket, bottom right.
This is on a Xerox Star system.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
The REASON you hear it is that we're all still astonished people "ooh" and "aah" over features that we've had for YEARS by the time they reach Windows. Furthermore, there have been innumerable examples of how Windows copies features and botches them. A couple examples I ran into in the last hour:
1) Shortcuts (and symbolic links for that matter) break when the original file moves or is renamed. Aliases (from System 7 in 199-freaking-1) have a two-step process to "find' the original. First based on file-id (think inodes), second based on the pathname. If you move a file or rename it, the file-id never changes, so the alias still works.
2) Dialog boxes. Yes, dialog boxes. When you close a document you haven't saved, Windows says "Do you want to save? [Yes] [No] [Cancel]". The Mac says "Do you want to save? [Save] [Don't Save] [Cancel]". Mac dialog boxes use verbs, which mean I don't have to read the whole dialog box closely to see if some idiot wrote "Do you want to quit without saving?" or something similarly asinine. It's immediately obvious just looking at the buttons what they're going to do.
It's been rehashed forever - Steve Jobs visited Xerox and yes, was inspired that GUIs were the way to go. And many elements of the Xerox GUI are on the Mac (windows, icons). However, things like overlapping windows, single menu bar, progressive disclosure, and many other concepts are 100% Apple.
Apple saw a good idea and improved it and made it its own. Microsoft sees good ideas and copies them closely, but rarely understanding the thought that made it a good idea in the first place. This is why Windows always seems so clunky - there is NO thought that goes into its design, just what looks "cool" elsewhere.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Oh, and they also brought us (or at least popularized the use of) the scroll wheel. Nice. Not having a Scroll Wheen (such as right now...) drives me nuts, scroll Wheels rock.
... pretty soon I realize I've scrolled through a long document doing scroll-reset-scroll-reset-scroll-reset with my finger and it actually took *longer* than if I'd just used the scrollbar. (Note this is not possible with Canon's or Apple's wheels: they're always faster than any other way.)
No, scroll wheels on mice kind of suck. You just appreciate them because Microsoft has previously screwed up scrolling so bad.
Maximize a window. Now slam your mouse to the right, and drag the scrollbar thumb. On every Windows machine I've ever used, there's dead space there. Similarly, if you do "full screen mode" in most of their apps, it puts the menubar along the very top (like the Mac), but leaves a dead row of pixels along the top so you get no benefit from it. Dumb dumb dumb.
Now, I don't know that any other recent operating system is a lot better at scrolling, but Microsoft actually had the opportunity to do it right (MS Windows encourages maximizing, and they have control over the OS and many common apps), but didn't. They decided to solve a software problem in hardware.
And on the hardware side, scroll wheels on mice simply aren't that good. You scroll a few lines, and then your finger runs out of wheel. Look at Apple's Click Wheel or Canon's Quick Control Dial -- they're continuous, so they're much faster than my scroll wheel (I own one device with each, and use them every day). They're also easier on my finger.
Scrolling one line is quicker with the scroll wheel than without, but scrolling through a long webpage is slower. So I'll scroll down a little bit with the wheel, then a little more, then a little more
Praising Microsoft for the scroll wheel is like praising McDonald's for offering a bad salad: I guess it's better than not offering anything green at all, but it doesn't make them a health food store. "Is marginally less sucky" is quite distinct from "good".
Obviously you haven't been paying attention to the legality of the situation. This is trade secret law that's involved, not journalism and free-speech (and yes, I'm a member of the ACLU and an EFF supporter). It was quite unusual for Apple to act when they did, and if you'll note, that case was centered exclusively around Asteroid. As for the student who leaked Tiger, he downloaded it from ADC then distributed it and got caught. I have sympathy for the fact that he's a college kid and his life has been hell since, but Apple's position there is completely justified.
I have noticed that they have been remarkably successful on two fronts - first, we've seen no further Tiger builds leaked, just information about them reported. Secondly, we've seen no further information about Asteroid other than what was accidentally left inside GarageBand and such. They have very effectively plugged those two leaks.
In the meantime, Apple's "users" are completely unaffected, and ThinkSecret/AppleInisder et. al. have continued to post rumors and info as usual.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
*G*
Umm, what the fuck?
Do you know how hard it is to read code in a variable width font?
It Looks Like Ass.
Crap doesn't line up, things don't indent properly, understanding the code's layout from a vertical scan eye scan is now a more involved task, and, oh yah, my professors would downgrade the living SHIT out of me for not having proper 80 column code.
Not to mention no one else in the world would want to help me out if I had any problems. Doh.
I have tried to write sample code for people in word, it doesn't work out well for anything but trival examples.
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