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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 ?
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
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...
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/
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.