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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."
Looks like the biggest selling point in the screenshots for longhorn is its new fast "searching" "feature" that looks remarkably like apple's new "Spotlight"...
(Sarcasm)But hey, if you cant beat them... cheat them.(/sarcasm)
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
Or does the Aero theme not look that revolutionary? It kinda reminds me of Bluecurve actually...
Is anyone else just not impressed here? I'm not a big fan of the uber-eye-candy shiny GUI's, and I know for a fact that a lot of seasoned Windows users aren't either. I favor the cleaner toolkits like GTK and the Blender toolkit, which manages to find a good balance of eye candy. No highlights, no annoying gradients to make us think that the buttons are made from glass-tic, just a relatively clean GUI.
I'd like to see how a GUI like this "Aero" will go over with the Windows users who instinctively switch every XP box they touch to "classic" mode.
From the article:
"In Longhorn, applications will launch and load files 15 percent faster than with Windows XP."
How was the figure arrived at exactly? All applications and all files will load 15 percent faster?
"Additionally, Longhorn will feature a new instant-on capability that will see Longhorn-savvy systems resume from Standby in 2 seconds or less."
Doesn't "Longhorn-savvy" kind of imply specific hardware is required? Or is that just me? And to be honest, I wouldn't really sell this as a feature other OSs have had for years...OS X certainly starts up from standby on my iBook in under 2 seconds...
"Longhorn will more reliably resume from crashes,"
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...
"One thing users should be aware of is that Longhorn will include a new kernel and will thus not offer the same level of compatibility with legacy 16-bit and 32-bit code that Windows XP does today. For business users, Microsoft believes that Virtual PC 2007 will help broaden corporations' compatibility options."
This seems like a bad idea - I'm guessing home users will also want to run legacy applications (that favourite game of your son's that you bought five years ago, that piece of productivity software you really like but can't afford an upgrade)...wouldn't it be better to do what Apple did during the switch between OS 9 & OS X, and bundle an emulator in with the OS? Rather than forcing home users to buy their own copy of Virtual PC 2007?
How many times do we have to hear from Mac fanbois about MS copying Apple?
Apple copied from Xerox, but you don't mention that. Let's all move on, it's not the 80's anymore, MS writes their own code and Apple builds onto BSD. It's been old for years now and it's getting really annoying to hear the same repetitive crap day-in, day-out.
"...just a polished-looking old idea."
Just like Linux with Gnome, KDE (etc...) and OSX are just polished versions of an OS that was designed 30+ years ago.
I'm sorry but why are people and business who have for the last 10 years been using Explorer to manage files on pc's and networks suddenly going to embrace a completely different method that is unfamiliar and will reduce productivity at all levels until the user becomes savvy enough to use it.
;-)
;-)
For the same reason they did 10 years ago?
Coincidentally, in 2005 it's 10 years since Microsoft started their Windows 95 era, and a introduced a very different way of working with Windows, compared to Windows 3.1. And it was embraced, oh yes!
No screenshot of this "New OS" has yet to impress me.
All screenshots seen so far are either not screenshots, but Longhorn concept graphics, or alpha screenshots that doesn't represent the final product. I thought that went without saying on a forum like Slashdot. I'd say the same if Apple had released screenshots of an alpha for an upcoming OS.
If you're looking for a new OS you may be better off with OS X on a PPC, or Linux on x86.
Yeah yeah, and that comment of yours was redundant.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
But the whole evolution of Microsoft's UI in the last 10 years has centered around stealing screen real estate for useless chrome, unnecessary widgets or information of no utility.
Look at WMP. WMP 6.4, the pinnacle of usability and compact design (and yes, I now use Media Player Classic), devoted all but a thin border, compact progress bar, and menu bar to content. WMP 10, on the other hand uses up as much space with stupid buttons, goofy widgets of questionable use, some Photoshop flunkie's shiny excretions and other useless noise, as the actual content itself (for videos obviously). It's huge, ugly, hard to use, and the Classic skin seems to have been retired, which was the only one I found to be useful and not butt-ugly or goofy-looking, as opposed to some art-school dropout's idle doodlings...
You can't expect them to reverse this long trend by devoting more screen space to content! It's all about the application and Windows is becoming like pop music stars who are popular not for their music or talent, but for their clothes, looks or bad behavior. Microsoft, for whom I used to have a fair amount of respect as a UI designer, has fallen into the same trap that has infected every other major software developer since 16-bit color became the norm and the Web helped set back UI standards 15 years... they are more interested in looking "pretty" than being more functional.
I'll give them one thing, the default Windows XP theme was the ugliest Windows UI since Windows 2.1 (which suffered primarily because it was stuck in 16 colors with exactly 1 palette), but Aero actually looks half-decent, if, typically for MS, cluttered and overly busy. At least it's not ugly. A bit rococo perhaps, but not ugly.
Still, I imagine that, should I ever find myself using Longhorn, the first thing I'll do is turn it off and go back to the Windows 2000 style, which combined the best functionality with minimal but attractive artistic improvements. But at least Aero doesn't look like a busybox for holding the attention of babies or MS executives.
Of course, I can't imagine any reason to ever upgrade from Windows 2000, or XP for my laptops that came with it. What could MS possibly offer in Longhorn that an average user would ever want or need? Mostly more protection from all the bad design decisions MS has made over the last 20 years, I suppose. Also, I like the fact that a gigabyte of RAM is still considered a lot. I imagine that will be the minimal reasonable requirement to do any real work with Longhorn, just like 128MB was for Windows 4.0, 256MB was for Windows 2000* and 512MB is for XP.
Hell, I still use Visual C++ 6. It lets me get the work done that I need to get done efficiently and effectively without bloating me up another half-dozen byzantine technologies getting in the way of me doing work (although I am impressed by what I've read about the compiler in the 2003 version). Actually, I'd probably upgrade, but none of my clients want to. Watcha gonna do? If it works, don't break it.
* I actually ran 2000 with 64MB on a laptop for some months back around 2000. It actually wasn't too bad as long as I didn't load more than one or two programs, but for any serious work, it wouldn't have been usable.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Apparently file extensions are still off by default. That "feature" has caused many newbies to double-click on what they think is a .jpg or .doc, only to find out that it's really an .exe that will screw up their system.
Whenever I work on somebody's computer, one of the first things I have to do is to make the file extensions visible. Why, Microsoft, why?
The screenshots look like someone from the Microsoft design team saw a Mac and a Fedora machine side by side, and shoved them together.
Perhaps it's just the techno-nerd in me, but I can't stand it when my computer tries to hide things like actual file locations from me, which is what the new Explorer seems to be doing. The very first thing I do when I set up a Windows machine is turn off all the GUI "features" that hide the contents of directories, file extensions, and menus from me.
Does anyone actually find these features useful?
when an OS meant more than 'ooh what nice eye candy'. Sadly
that seems to be all anybody cares about any more. Or have
we reached the point where there is no innovation except
(debatedly) in how the UI is presented?
Although Linux was very similar to Windows in look and feel, even as far back as 2001, many people said that it was too different, that the learning curve was too steep; things were in different places than expected, and that there were too many options.
That was one of the main reasons why people said they wouldn't consider using Linux. It was one of the main reasons many people wouldn't use Open Office.
Could it be that upon the release of Longhorn, people may find Linux to be more familiar?
I've heard many consultants say that businesses (mostly small businesses) won't switch from Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Office, even though alternatives would definitely suffice, purely because their employees (or at least some of them) can't handle change.
Many people still use insecure Microsoft solutions, because they feel overwhelmed when presented with something even slightly different. Look at the hassle getting people to switch to the more secure Firefox Web browser!
I guess that the new look and feel of Longhorn is either going to cause people to postpone upgrading as long as possible, or even give people more incentive to try out Linux. I mean, if you're going to have to get used to something new anyway, why not put Linux in the mix?
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
Becuase with the exception of run time generated data (which unless you are running a graphics demo is not going to be all that prevalent) application launching time is more or less independent from CPU speed.
Now your hard drive's speed and your RAM, those make a big difference. as do the overall power and flexability of the OS APIs, more powerful OS APIs preloaded into memory means the application has to load less code of its own when it launchs.
A frequent complaint (at least in the circles I run in. ^_^ ) about XP is the huge bloat of their OS Widgets. 30 pixel (just a wild random guess here) window boarders are rather inane. Likewise so are huge "X"s. UI experts know how elements on the screen should be laid out, Microsoft has (more or less, with the exception of some of the Microsoft Office teams -_- ) traditionally done a very good job of listening to them. No itea what happened with the traditional Windows XP theme. This new theme looks a bit better, but mostly like someone just took the XP controls and did a vertical scale on them in Photoshop.
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Yup, they're mock-ups and not very good ones at that. Since they're being touted as screenshots, it brings into question the validity of anything else in the article.
The document stacks look an awful lot like Apple's piles That search dialog (not just the search box in the upper right) looks like Apple's search dialog from before os 8. Although I must say that those Shorthorn( tm) screen shots do not look as bad as XP.
I'm no fan of defending MS, but: if the piles idea was rumored, but not implemented, in MacOS, how is Microsoft's implementing it "copying?" Especially when this was a rumored feature for Panther, which has already been released WITHOUT the feature?
I'll grant you that if Apple does hold a patent on the idea and Microsoft is using it without citing or paying Apple, there's a problem. But absent that (and that doesn't seem to be what you were complaining about), blasting MS for running with an idea that Apple had but never applied seems to miss the point.
But WMP is just imitating other media players, all of which seem to devote an absurd portion of their design effort to making themselves skinnable. I belive the idea originated with WinAmp, which supports thousands of skins, ranging from the clunky to the absurd. They all seem to contribute to some strange sense of esthetic among users -- but they actually detract from the usability of the product.
Alas, usability, is just not a priority any more. It's the original reason for the switch from command lines to GUIs. But now the main purpose of a GUI seems to be to look kewl and help sell the product. Even Apple, which literally wrote the book on the subject of usability, seems to consider prettiness a higher priority.
Anyway, I don't consider a info bar to be a major GUI design flaw. It's darned handy to get file details without having to bring up a properties box.
Frankly, I think the Longhorn eye candy is pathetic, compared to what is available today from Stardock for Windows XP, 2000, and even 98/ME. Of course, *anything* is better than XP's default Fisher-Price interface.
The other big feature of Longhorn, File Searching, doesn't interest me, either. I'm smart enough to put my files in their place, so I don't have to go searching for them. It's my machine, after all, and if I put things in random places, I have no one to blame but myself.
All I'll get with Longhorn is the need to re-purchase all my programs and utilities because the ones I'm happy with right now on XP won't work. Not to mention the fact that you'll need a workstation-class machine (3 Ghz Pentium with a half-gig of memory? Sheesh!) to even run the thing!
And to top it all off, Microsoft wants to give the local machine the same Swiss Cheese security model that IE gives the Internet. Oh, joy! I can't wait.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Do you realize how many patents are thrown around each year by these two giants? Tons. Having the patent for something is in no way indicating that it will be used in future products. To be honest I would highly doubt MS goes through all of Apple's patents, picks out a random one that hits its fancy and decides to make that the flagship feature of it's new OS.
Wow. I see post after post as a litany of stuff people feel Microsoft ripped off from others. But does it matter?
Microsoft, like every other OS manufacturer on the planet, has had search capabilities of some sort or another forever. They're making their's better, Apple is improving their's, etc. Who gives a shit whether Apple or Google or Microsoft starting improving search funtionality first? I happen to be glad that they're making the effort. It will probably be a useful addition.
Guys, grow up. Unless they're breaking some sort of IP law, you should be applauding them for implimenting the good features of other OSs instead of knocking them down. Linux, OS X and Windows all share a shitload of similar look and feel features as well as mountains of similar features under the hood. Who used the first hard drive? Who used the first start menu-style button? Who put "disk drives" or "My computers" on the top, left of the desktop? Who put a trashcan on the desktop? The fact is, IT DOESN'T MATTER anymore because they all have 'em now.
Spend yout time dinging the company that doesn't impliment a good feature. Leave MS alone if they're actually trying to things that look or work better.
TW
TW
I have no idea WHAT they look like versus, say, Times New Roman, or Arial, which, by the way, are the ONLY TWO FONTS anybody cares about.
You hear that low rumbling sound? That's 500 years worth of dead typographers spinning in their graves.
You're right to not care -- in fact, it's a failure on the part of the type selector if you do notice the type instead of the text itself -- but that doesn't mean that some type is not better than other type.
When "graphics people" bitch or praise type it's because they've learned that in 500 years of evolved aesthetic tradition, a lot of people have thought very hard about very small details of very specific problems and somewhere along the way someone figured out the best solution, and it's a royal pain in the skull to see people that don't know about any of this and go and do obscene things with (say) Comic Sans MS.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
I use Linux and Windows both. They're suited best for different tasks, different people. But I'm definitely not so much a Windows guy. Here's why:
Linux can be very stripped-down if you want it to be (word to the Gentoo-ers -- yeah!). I can arrange my personal directories exactly how I want them, and I can get to everything I need very quickly, thanks to the omnipotence of the command line. Basically, Linux has the feel of a complex math equation that has been totally factored down to its optimal simplicity.
But Windows seeks to acheive a similar feeling of simplicity not through elegant design, but through showmanship: a veneer of simplicity acheived through even more underlying complexity. It throws all these abstraction layers over your files and your tasks, so that you have to rely on more software to do your stuff.
If there's one thing programming has taught me, it's that software is one of the most unreliable things humans have ever made. If the same task can be accomplished with less code, then you have better code -- always (unless less code results in horrible machine efficiency or lack of modularity).
If I want to get to all my stuff on my Linux partition, I just click up /garage.
If I want my stuff on Windows, I click into D:\. Not too bad, but wait -- all those abstraction layers in Windows constantly insist that I keep my files in C:\Documents and Settings\alucinor\My Documents. But what if I don't want to keep my music files in C:\Documents and Settings\alucinor\My Documents\My Music? Just set an option, right?
Heh ... I do that, and it ~would~ normally work. But since there's so many abstractions, so much software, I often will find crap getting stuck in the My Music folder yet again later, sometimes by the same program.
What I don't like about the Windows design philosophy is that they want to take your computer use into their hands, and they do it acting as though those hands of theirs are perfect. But when they're less than perfect, it just gets annoying, and their hands get in your way.
"Quit auto-archiving my media files, Media Player! Just show me a directory structure instead of artist/album breakdowns of what's in the My Music folder! I just want to burn a cd, dammit!"
Yeah. Looks like WinFS is just going to throw even more sediments of imperfect software in the way of what I want to do. "They're features!"
Advice to OS makers: let the OS stay in the background. Too bad that's impossible for a company that ~has~ to make the OS seem important.
When I use Linux I don't think about using Linux. I just use it.
When I use Windows I'm constantly reminded that I'm using Windows. That's bad design. But I suppose it's necessary when your business is the OS.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.