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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."
at the bottom is a bigger-than-ever status bar with info about the selected item. It seems like very little info is in tat area that is not already displayed in the list itself.
This makes me think about the utterly stupid winXP feature that displays the number of files in a selected zipfile... is that usefull for anybody ? Why do you zip files in 99% of the cases ? TO REDUCE SIZE. so what do you want to know about the selected zip ? Right : it's size. For all other items, the filesize is shown, except for zips.... DUH !!!!
The person who suggested that feature should be shot with a ripe banana until dead ensures... twice !
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
These Aero buttons look so small, they seem difficult to hit to me.
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.
No screenshot of this "New OS" has yet to impress me. Maybe it gets it's hype because "New OS" = boost in hardware sales. But you know what. When the majority of your hardware sales are sub 500 pc's you're not going to make up any profits on the early adopters who buy the bigger and faster machines.
What have we gotten with every new version of Windows.
Software quits working
Have to buy new versions of antivirus and other utilities in many cases to get full functionality and also see above.
Waiting on hardware to get "New Seals of MS Approval" which IMO is silly because that WHQL crap never stopped Nvidia drivers from causing the nv4_disp.dll BDS's.
Oh and this "New OS" that was supposed to run on pc's that were wildly faster (10Ghz) machines. Where are those new machines??
Longhorn is a shell of the promises that were made, it most likely incorporates code from XP/NT4 base so will incorporate security holes and bugs and probably new avenues of attack. It's just plain ugly, and probably will be slow at best on existing equipment.
If you're looking for a new OS you may be better off with OS X on a PPC, or Linux on x86.
It appears that Longhorn will also include piles (or stacks to MS) which were a long rumored feature in Mac OS.
Remember that Avalon heavily relies on the .NET framework and like most .NET apps, they do use a lot of memory at first, but will give it back when needed.
Try running 50 copies of your calculator app and just watch as each one drops to hardly anything.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
This proves that the Longhorn fonts news from Poynter was right, at least. The type in the screenshots looks particularly good, especially compared to XP. Perhaps XP will catch up (or exceed?) OS X in terms of font rendering? Corbel (I think that's the main sans-serif in these screenshots, look at the 'g's) and Calibri are gorgeous screen fonts. A significant improvement over the current XP Tahoma and Verdana fest.
Has anyone noticed that the pricipal colors are blue, green, and purple? As a graphic artist, I can say that these don't really go together very well. So far, the themes included in all the betas have been absolutely hideous, but have slowly been getting better. I'm hoping that Microsoft hires some compitent graphic artists to completely rework the GUI theme before release. Its sad that an OS with so many usuability enhancements as compaired to XP has to be so ugly.
Check out this one of an example search results page. Look at the file sizes. They're just duped between sections.. so are the dates! I'm sure you don't have 5 e-mails and 5 totally random files all with corresponding dates and sizes. Seriously, check it out.
;-)
Even if the interface work here isn't fake, there has been some copying/pasting going on OR Longhorn doesn't have file size and date functionality yet
For Longhorn, according to the developer working on the thumbnail views, there will a remedy to this - there will be a global 'thumbs.db' file that all folders draw from, thus removing the file that I often delete in frustration.
I've been hearing about Longhorn since before Windows 2000 shipped, actually.
If it's so great...
-Why is application launching only 15% faster than XP, despite requiring a 3GHz Pentium?
-Why can Microsoft only seem to get screen real estate back by shrinking existing controls?
-Why is this Paul Thurott person so enamored with what will essentially be a has-been OS with the features and security of something you can buy today from Apple?
If I was Steve Jobs, I'd release Tiger for X86 at MacWorld 2006 - get the PC users hooked before Microsoft can evern release their Tiger work-alike to manufacturing.
Chumps.
Well I said it before and I got modded down as Troll, but I knew this would happen.
Regardless of the past, Microsoft announced and demo'd this feature BEFORE Apple even mentioned spotlight. I'm not saying Apple copied MS, I'm saying MS *DIDN'T* copy Apple, not this time anyway...
I'll take a clean dark interface over either of them, much kinder on the eyes, only reason I don't use a dark theme under gnome is that every bloody website seems to love glaring white backgrounds which hurt my eyes when I'm using a dark theme everywhere else.
The first thing every Longhorn user will do it set the theme back to what it was in the first version of Windows that they ever used.
What the hell are you talking about? The first version of Windows I used was 3.1, and I'm using the XP interface now, and will be using the Longhorn interface when I upgrade to that.
That's why the UI is getting button-bloat. When you see wmp 6.x, it's so minimalistic it could be anything. When you see wmp 10, there's no doubt you're looking at wmp 10 from Microsoft. Branding is far more important that usability.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Thurrott is essentially Microsoft's Rush Limbaugh. The truth doesn't matter, just the ratings, or in this case, the hits to his lame website or the revenue from the books he sells.
Apple licensed the GUI from Xerox. God damn. You criticise him for his repetitive information but then you come out with the same crap about Apple copying Xerox.
Jonathanjk.com
Maybe I'm strange, but I consider that a feature, not a bug. I like being able to change the perceived file type without having to edit the file contents or metadata or whatever. AND I can ascertain the perceived filetype in a simple console dir listing.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Macs have already had fast desktop search since OS X first debuted, in a way. My guess is that the HFS+ format used for the boot drive helps speed up searching even on a slow hd drive. In my experience, searching for a file has been incredibly faster on OS X than on Win 2k. Safari, iTunes, and Finder already include the search bar UI in the upper right.
I don't think who came up with what idea first is really important here, since with increasing computational power, searching could only get faster and more practical - it was an inevitability that searching would become a more important part of the desktop user experience. However right now OS X is winning the race over Windows, IMHO. WinAmp has included find-as-you-type since early versions. Now iTunes, Mozilla, Finder, and Firefox have it.
While working for a MS consultant I spent weeks combing through patents related to optical mouse technology, including finding and collecting all referenced publications.
MS keeps a very close eye on patent filings and yes, they inform their business decisions.
For a taste of their style, read "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates," particularly the section related to Pen Windows. An entire OS branch was instigated by one demo by a potential competitor who was looking to do a deal with them.
Yeah, that "feature" is crap.
I spent 50+ minutes trying to figure out why my dads webpage wasn't loading correctly. He was doing one of those "complete morons page to HTML" type things at the local education center, and for some reason the [start page] wasn't finding the images.
Well, turned out that he had named a shitload of pictures [filename].jpg.jpg.jpg as well as in the HTML code referencing to [picture] instead of [picture].jpg since he didn't see the extension and got confused.
After that I pointed out that start page.html isn't a kosher name for the entrypage, and due to the stupid "feature" he ended up renaming it to index.html.htm
Since this was over phone, I'm REALLY happy that I had my headset handy and didn't have to hug the freakin handset for close to an hour!
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Looks like you haven't learned that there are different Linux distros yet. I have Yoper Linux on a 233 MHz that boots faster than my XP on a 3 GHz, not to mention how fast the apps start. Gentoo is pretty fast too.
See, with Linux you can find lots of options and tradeoffs depending on what you want. With Windows you get XP or your option is something older, less functional, slower, etc.
The wastebasket was in the version of the OS that Apple saw on their "visit" to Xerox's HQ. They took it out before the Star's launch.
From someone who worked at Xerox:
(I worked at Xerox on Star/Viewpoint from early '83 to '89.)
This was true of the first version of Star, but this problem was recognized very early, perhaps even before the first shipment of Star. A new project, known internally as Phoenix (although spelled "fnx") was designed to solve this problem. It drew from the Mesa Development Environment (known informally as Tajo) which originated on the Alto (I think first release was in 1977). The result was an open toolkit known as BasicWorkstation (desktop) and a compound document editor which had a "generic frame" mechanism. The Viewpoint Document Editor (as it was known) continued to use much of the Star code (including Traits), but reworked.
It was "closed" in that Mesa wasn't widely used in industry, although we gave several universities grants of hardware and software, the Xerox Development Environment (public brand of Tajo). Mesa was very similiar to Modula-3, and like any system with a large number of libraries (e.g. Smalltalk-80) it took months of learning before a programmer could be productive.
Interesting note about the wastebasket. When Macintosh came out Xerox bought a couple. I remember people being annoyed about this. I was told that an early design of Star included a trashcan, but it was decided that it was unnecessary in the version that was shipped. In Viewpoint (1985) we added a trashcan, but felt that we should use a "wastebasket" icon.
The document centric model (not knowing about applications, no quit) came from Star. In Viewpoint you had control over apps launching, but once launched they didn't quit. Most apps were launched at boot time -- hence the 3+ minute boot! As a result of this painfully long boot, a colleague (Makota Mita) invented a sleep/quick restart feature that took about 30 seconds to put the sytem to sleep and awake again after poweroff.
Star had "stationary" as well, although it didn't have the double-click-to-tear-off UI. Instead, users would open the Prototypes container (see icon in lower right of this image)
This prototypes container (labeled OSBU here because the photo was taken of someone's workstation who worked in the OSBU network) had one copy of every object available to the user -- blank compound docs, compound doc with lots of graphics examples, folders, networks (where you found printers, file servers, mail servers, address book/directory server), small database (aka record file), etc.
Note: I'm not saying that Xerox invented everything. I think Lisa and Mac introduced several ideas (e.g. the suspend/resume for each file in Lisa is a GREAT idea) that we didn't do, but there are more similarities than people sometimes think.
Dave
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Kind of like how KDE copied the start menu from Windows? Oh, I forgot, we never talk about stuff like that here.