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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.
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.
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.
/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