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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
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
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.
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.
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."
You contradict yourself. As you say, there is a correlation. An inverse one. ;)