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Windows Longhorn Beta Screenshots
An anonymous reader writes "A few screenshots of Windows Longhorn Beta 1 have surfaced on the net showing off many of the new transparency features, Internet Explorer 7 and Avalon or WinFX."
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I'm puzzled by the whole hoopla of transparancy. Besides being a 'cool feature', how does it help me in becoming more productive?
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
As a long time Linux user, I still always cringe when these articles come along. Can we at least keep the attacks on Microsoft original this time?
"Seems like Microsoft is doing what Microsoft does best. Copying other companies. Maybe that's an unfair statement, but man, I hate Microsoft =)"
:)
But only Microsoft can 'borrow' from one of the greatest (visually) UIs on the planet and still manage to make it so... butt ugly
It's not like the quick flick & close works on macs, that just opens the clock pull down menu IIRC
True. Has Microsoft done anything big to actually improve the usability since '95? The Start menu still has the same usability issues it had a decade ago (i.e. inconsistency with the apps it actually points to and general clutter) and the Taskbar is a usability horror if you've got a couple of dozen windows open. I think they had a bad start with the general UI and only made it worse and more inconsistent over the years. I mean, right next to the fancy glass effect (and yes, it looks rather neat), there are some buttons and elements that seem to have been copied straight out of '95 or '98. I wonder if systray tooltips still tend to appear behind the taskbar occasionally?
Why don't they give the whole thing a once-over and just do it right?
Oh, yeah, sorry, it's Microsoft...
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
But seriously, i say that because i was really actually looking forward to something new and dareing from microsoft.
They let me and themselves down.
Frankly it looks like Windows XP with a new UI and alpha tranceparancy.
Actually, come to think of it i cannot in words exspress my dissapointment. I don't hate microsoft (thats a mod down) but i'm starting to think they that why linux and mac zelots say is actually grounded by some evidence.
Common Microsoft, wheres the new File System, the, the sidebar with add-ins, the new user experience?
Please don't tell your customers we waited 6 years for a new desktop theme and background.
Have any of those people started a "freedom to innovate" campaign and released dozens of press releases touting what innovative people they are?
By the way if you don't think free software innovates you are just plain ignorant of what's going on out there.
evil is as evil does
A few things that strike me about the screenshots:
1. The Computer Management window has two sets of min/max/close buttons in the top right, one of which looks like Windows 95 stylee!
2. The Control Panel has a search box in the top right, straight out of Mac OS X Tiger. Or is it just the search box left over from a normal Explorer window? What does the search box do when you're looking at the Control Panel?
3. The menu bar in Internet Explorer is vertically even further from the top of the window that usual. Clearly Fitt's Law has been thrown out of the window, or maybe they really don't expect people to use the menus much anyway.
Using that is so 2002, I use the power button. And yes, Windows does shutdown correctly when I do that.
Wow, I actually expected more, considering how much MS has been hyping the "new UI" of Longhorn.
In no particular order:
(1) Explorer seems to have taken a cue from PathFinder's directory browsing, a concept which has also been integrated into the GTK File Open Chooser Widget in the Linux world. Definitely a step in the right direction, but perhaps bundled up with a couple steps backward. Notice the new "My Computer", which sports all sorts of useless widgets everywhere, a mixture of task- and object-oriented interfaces, and more panes than one can possibly be expected to comprehend quickly. Typical Microsoft "toolbaritis," now applied to the file manager.
(2) Media Player continues to amaze in how far it distances itself from any UI sanity. Yet another argument for why toolkit consistency does not matter to normal users. File menu: gone, or just "annoyingly mouseover hidden"? I can only imagine what that menacing "Online Stores" button is for (can anyone say software-as-advertisement money?)
(3) Transparency: ooh, eye-candy. But wait, why does my desktop look like so many stained glass windows, who are, at the same time, light sources? Yet another Microsoft imitation gone bad. Notice how the borders of applications turn into transparent "stained glass" areas, serving to do nothing but make it more difficult to see, grab, and interact with the border of an application. For some reason, toolbar areas are also "semi-transparent," I guess just so you can make sure your graphics driver is working. Notice also how even when the eye candy features are enabled (transparent borders, shadows), Media Player refuses to comply! Stubborn lil' guy, aren't ya? heh heh.
(4) I'm utterly not surprised to see that Windows still makes use of dialogs whom cannot be resized, as in the displayed (and New) Copy Dialog. Yet another great "feature," as my 1920x1280 screen real estate can't even be utilized to show me the full directory name of a the path I'm copying from. Instead, I must make due with two halves of a path concatenated by three dots '...'
(5) Internet Explorer 7. Does this even need comment? What a UI disaster. First, the "toolbar" area is a different color than the rest of the application, which gives us some sort of Carbon/Cocoa hybrid in a single application. Then, the menubar exists below the tabs, implying that these options are on a per-tab basis, when this is clearly not the case (It's true sometimes, like in View Source or Save As, but not true others, like Work Offline or New Tab, which alter the whole application and not just a single tab).
In conclusion, Longhorn, at least from a UI innovation standpoint (but probably from others, too), looks to be the vaporware we were all expecting. Let's keep our eyes and minds pointed at where the real innovation is happening: in ANY of the alternative OSes, proprietary or Free. Maybe by the time Longhorn is released, we won't even need it anymore. We'll just send Microsoft a memo: "Dear Sirs, you can have it back."
Did you notice that in screen 4 that shows the "new" explorer you have a link to firefox "the browser that you can trust" along with a Red-Hat link?
I can't believe that such images can come from real Microsoft source, unless FF is on radar of MS future purchase list.
Microsoft is doing Longhorn right by not focusing on the UI. Most of the changes made in Longhorn are internal. Logic to handle driver failures without the bluescreens, sandboxing in kernel file system filters to stop virus scanners from crashing the OS, componentizing everything to end the days of rebooting on patches, creating a single world-wide binary, hardware support for all the PCI express features, microphone arrays, ambient light sensors, hybrid hard drives, the list goes on and on. And then you have the whole 3-D desktop compositing thing which OSX may do as well. But they don't have to deal with the fact that Windows has to contend with both D3D and OpenGL apps on the same display surfaces. Plus an utterly massive library of software and hardware to run it on. It's a really big deal. It took years to solve the problems of putting OpenGL on a D3D surface while handling the tons of pixel formats, and supporting accessbility screen readers, and working over terminal server as usual.
You will get your UI innovation in beta 2, because it's not a big priority. And when you do, you will have a completely replaced library of icons, games, and dialogs. UI can be done overnight, internal changes can't. This beta was ment for IT departments, not for consumers to scrutinize the interface.
Some criticisms:
Why is the close box larger than the minimise and maximise/restore buttons? I can see a lot of accidental closing of windows simply by flicking up to where the buttons 'ought' to be. Why emphasise a destructive task?
In the Internet Explorer window, why are there still several different icons for a web page? The icon in the title bar is older than that in the address bar.
In Computer Management, why have the icons still not been updated to match the rest of the interface? In Windows XP, for example, there are still some folder icons (Downloaded Program Files, for example) which maintain the Windows '98/2000 appearance. This just looks sloppy.
In Internet Explorer, why are the File, Edit, etc. menues below the tabs? That makes no sense at all.
Windows Media Player. 'nuff said, really.
I think I'll stick with Mac OS X. Eye candy, stability, and complete immunity from the masses of Windows viruses/trojans/worms/spyware? Yes please.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
I think the reason your average Luser doesn't press that button, apart from having it drummed into them not to 5 years ago, is that its behaviour is so inconsistent. Sometimes it shuts down, sometimes it sleeps, sometimes it locks the machine up (yay for Windows' ACPI support)
Yet again I'd have to be an Apple whore and say that OS X wins on that one - one little window pops up asking you what you want to do.
At least to me, there's a few rather obvious things wrong with these screenshots. Remembering that this is a beta and that this list might change, I'm just saying what is on my mind about this.
1) Take a look at the 'Computer Management' window and you begin to understand just how little has actually changed concerning the UI. It's almost like you're running it in a Windows XP emulator frame as it retains the old window controls inside the new fancy ones. Is this the way older programs will look?
2) The screenshot with the drive listing is intriguing. I like the colored progress bars representing drive space - but why is the CD-ROM in red? Because you can't write to it? Doesn't red strike you as being a color that should indicate that something is wrong?
3) The taskbar - it's soooo 1990's. What did I expect? Oh. I dunno. Maybe a better way to express when you have 5 programs open at once. Most displays today start at 1024X768. It seems to me that it should be possible to manipulate the size of the tasks listed rather than make them entirely unreadable. Minor, yes, but then this is supposed to be the 'next best thing' from MS.
I sure hope there's more to this than simply cosmetic changes. I'm trying to keep an open mind about it, but so far I have to say that 3rd party enhancements to XP seem to have more originality.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Microsoft with all that money
I keep seeing this come up over and over again. There is no correlation between funding and creativity. In fact, the better funded a company is, the less likely they are to take the chances necessary to come up with something new.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Those screenshots are not all the things that will be in Longhorn.
Avalon and WinFS won't be there.
But what about the stability ? What about the security ? Maybe they are going to be improved, but we can't see this on screenshots.
Actually, I'm a bit disappointed with these screenshots, but screenshots doesn't show the whole new features.
Bonjour !
I'm fairly certain this is something tech geeks say to impress other tech geeks.
I've been doing support for nearly 10 years now and I've come across the most retarded humans bad genes can supply - and not one of them has ever had a quibble with the "start" for shut down.
Start implies you're starting to do something - even if it's shutting down.
You contradict yourself. As you say, there is a correlation. An inverse one. ;)
No, I understand that entirely, and have used that option myself... but you're misunderstanding my point in your eagerness to flame me for hyping (slightly tongue in cheek) an Apple "feature"
My point is that there's a clearly visible choice - and sometimes (IMO) choice is actually a *bad* thing. Now, I know that's a very unpopular view on a Linux-biased site, but that's how I see it. Because in this case, some computer manufacturers set it to shut down, some set it to stand by or hibernate, some even have it ask. So as a person uses a computer at work or college, or uses a friend's machine, they won't know what'll happen. So they use the menu instead.
What would be better behaviour is if it just always asked, and to have it do something else by default (which let's face it, only a geek would really care about) required a small registry tweak instead.
Naw. I'd say that's BSD ;)
mean, why is it that everyone is getting so 'uptight' here about that anyhow? I don't see Linux with a DB driven filesystem either!
Honestly, I don't think that DB is the way to do it either. I find indexing (ala Tenor/Spotlight) a much better solution. Regardless of that, though--you must admit that the Windows search engine blows.
And, in a related topic: Most filesystems are, in fact, database driven. They use many of the same algorithms, provide atomic operations, and have queries (file locations). It just so happens that they don't use SQL to do it.
(Windows NT-based Os' are built to have an extensible filesystem)
May I be the first to plug Reiser 4?
However, it's obvious many here have never written code & certainly not of enterprise class size, because expecting to be able to do it in a heartbeat or miracles as others stated about doesn't happen overnight
Well, the expectation can happen overnight, but the programming certainly can't. ;)
Personally I think the current filesystem arrangement on Windows Server 2003 is just fine and it has been fine for ages. Windows Server 2003 is the core code of the next release, LongHorn, it's foundation. It is stable and solid as a rock imo. I have been using it for all of this year 2005 and much of 2004 as well. I can safely make that statement.
And you could say the same for HFS+, ext3, & reiser3. What's your point here?
However, again, the more I come to slashdot, the more it seems it is just ammo for the pro linux zealot's jihad against Microsoft with it not being in these Longhorn beta
Are you new here? I've been around for a few years now, and it's always looked this way, to me. ;)
Note: most of this made purely in jest :)
From the screenshots, Longhorn LOOKS like a good O/S, but how much stress will it put on the machine? I'd like to think I can just run out and buy it for my OptiPlex once it hits the store shelves, but I really don't know. Any beta testers here care to enlighten us as to the minimum system requirements so far? ;)
Also, will there be a Longhorn Server or will they continue the Server split that they started with XP? Not that it really matters to me in particular since I use DrangoflyBSD-powered servers, but it would be interesting to know.
Bullshit. Microsoft could have a puke green background, chartreuse 20pt font, and nails on blackboard as the default beep, and still people would not migrate to other platforms. Maybe when the user interface requires roach clips connected to the nipples and plugged into the USB2.0 port, people will switch...maybe.
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
It's screenshots posted by someone who has obtained a beta copy of Longhorn. Nowhere is it claimed that Microsoft has released these screenshots.