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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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Perhaps true, but it does make the whole work experience more enjoyable. I use a Mac and a PC (XP). I seriously love spending time on the Mac. The XP machine is boring and dull. Does that make me more productive then? No, but I walk away from using the Mac without a headache.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
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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...
Yes. And seriously, I'm kinda tired of hearing this come up over and over again. Does it increase productivity? Jeez. I spend so much time on my computer I think of it like a second home. And is everything in my home there to increase productivity? I design my home so that I enjoy living in it, and so that I live well in it. It should be the same with computers, (not to mention buildings, cities, etc.).
For some reason it's accepted to choose furniture based on how it looks as well as how it works, but when it comes to computers you are being frivolous if you want it to look nice. Just imagine if every technology we have were built only with its most narrowly conceived function in mind. It would be like the whole world was made of those cookie cutter housing complexes. Maybe they're great for housing people, but don't they also slowly suck the inspiration out of us? Sorry, I don't want to live in one of those places.
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
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."
UI can be done overnight
It's exactly that attitude that will keep me on OS X for the foreseeable future.
While it's true that a UI can be whipped up quickly, a good UI is the product of testing, testing, and more testing in order to smooth away rough edges, figure out where users are confused and make the application better fit to how one would expect the application to be. None of that can be done quickly.