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Windows Vista & IE7 Beta 1 Released

Posted by Zonk on from the and-so-it-begins dept.

gdsotirov writes "Today on the IE blog the availability of two new beta tests - Windows Vista Beta 1 and Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 - was announced. These tests are mainly targeted to developers and IT professionals. Thus the betas are only available to MSDN subscribers. Tom's Hardware has details as well." From the article: "While the code also includes an early look at the new user-interface design, the majority of end-user features in Windows Vista will not be included until Beta 2. In addition to these fundamentals, Windows Vista Beta 1 also includes the Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 built into the platform. The technical Beta of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP SP2 also is available today." Any early thoughts, MSDN subscribers?

6 of 727 comments (clear)

  1. For the first time I agree with John C Dvorak. by network23 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    For the first time I agree with John C Dvorak.

    pcmag

    "Vista? As in "Hasta la Vista, baby?" That name might be appropriate as a symbolic goodbye since it might be the end of the line for Microsoft's dominance in the OS business."

    "The new OS is getting zero buzz. Zero. now the name Vista, along with the new Microsoft Vista logo, has made it worse. Could anything be less exciting?"

    "THE FUTURE OF DESKTOP COMPUTING: Apple. Vista will open the door to what I believe will be a radical change in the computing landscape. The trends are clear. Once the new Mac OS appears next year it will gravitate toward the existing x86 community much more rapidly than anticipated..."

    "Right now, and as much as x86 users do not want to admit it, the Mac OS is already better than Windows in its modern look and feel as well as its functionality. I see too many smart people with Mac laptops nowadays."

    "...it is always possible that Apple doesn't understand the power play position it's in and might actually believe that it's better off somehow keeping its OS in a small niche rather than the big market. If the world changed tomorrow to 85 percent Mac "OS x86" its laptop sales alone would triple overnight. Apple didn't put together what many consider the finest in-house industrial design teams in the world to fool around with piddly sales and more redesigns of the iPod."

    "That said, how much more of Steve Jobs can we handle? Do we really want to hear him say "I told you so?" If it gets some excitement back into desktop computing, yes, we do. I think we can take it."

  2. OS redundancy? by Iriel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "...the majority of end-user features in Windows Vista will not be included until Beta 2"

    So in other words, beta 1 is just XP with RSS? They already yanked everything else out of the system as is. The reason they call it Vista is because that's all that's left of the OS; a view.

    --
    Perfecting Discordia
    www.stevenvansickle.com
  3. Windows Vista is visually intuitive! by altan · · Score: 5, Interesting
    This is from the actual page for Vista:

    - Glass and new Window animation. The Windows Vista desktop experience will deliver a new visual identity -- translucent glass with more animation. Because it is visually intuitive, the glass helps users focus on the task at hand, whether reading a document, viewing a Web page or editing a photo.

    Apparently the best way to develop a "visually intuitive" user interface is glass and more animation!

  4. Re:some FFT [food for thought] by PurpleXanathar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    6. Feeding generations of inept developers. check. [re: C#, anything .net, VB, ...] ... I wonder why anything .net feeds generations of inept developers and python or perl or java or any other language don't.

    Oh let's return to the good old days where programmers had two big keys with 0 and 1 written on them and programmed opcodes like playing bongos..

  5. Microsoft continues to make Windows worse... by argent · · Score: 3, Interesting

    From Paul's article: Because Microsoft built a search box into the Start menu, you can no longer use keyboard shortcuts to navigate around. To launch the Control Panel in XP, for example, you simply hit the Windows key and then the "C" key and, voila, the Control Panel opens. In Windows Vista, however, when you hit the "C" key, the system assumes you're searching for an application (Figure). Sigh.

    For me, the user interface of Windows peaked with Windows 3.11 and NT 3.51. In these systems, virtually every control in every program could be easily navigated to using only the keyboard, with consistent shortcuts everywhere. This was a significantly better environment than Apple has managed to provide even now, and probably the best feature of the Windows UI. In 95/NT4 the Start Menu and Task Bar required new shortcuts. Then companies started shipping keyboards with extra keys (making the spacebar shorter and a harder target to hit, and not really solving the problem for people who have to work on multiple computers with a variety of keyboards). Newer versions of Office applications removed the ability to keyboard-navigate through toolbars (with or without he new keyboards). What's next?

  6. Virtual Folders by merky1 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    As with XP, all of these folders are "real" folders. That is, they exist at a discrete place in the shell hierarchy and can contain real files and folders. They are literally identical to folders in XP. However, Windows Vista, as you may know, also introduces the concept of Virtual Folders. These are not "real" folders but are instead XML-based containers for links to other files and folders. Virtual Folders do not "contain" anything. Instead, Virtual Folders point to lists of other files and aggregate data in meaningful ways.

    Isn't this just a fancy way to say playlist? I fail to see the usefullness of adding yet another layer of confusion to getting to a users files. Not to mention, this ought to make user migration a joy for enterprise users.

    --
    --WooooHoooo--