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Windows Vista Build 5231 Review

Posted by samzenpus on from the read-all-about-it dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has just released a new build for Windows Vista and it looks like Microsoft has made quite a few graphical changes. "This is possibly the only application with more anticipation surrounding it than Internet Explorer 7, if not Vista itself. We wonder if Microsoft would bundle Windows Media Player 11 with Vista exclusively or would it be available for download separately for Windows XP as well. It most certainly will end up looking a lot better (graphically) than most music players out there, iTunes included. Although it appears to look pretty straightforward, the interface has changed drastically, which makes it far more attractive than Windows Media Player 10 as well as competing applications."

33 of 390 comments (clear)

  1. But.... by silverkniveshotmail. · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How much do you need your media player to do beyond playing media?
    If i wouldn't have gotten a mac I don't know if I would have ever gone past winamp 2.x

    1. Re:But.... by bigman2003 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I need it to burn CD's.

      I need it to sync with my portable player.

      I need it to do a good job of scanning my computer for media.

      Despite everyone's best guess...I do not need it to be a portal for purchasing anything...

      --
      No reason to lie.
    2. Re:But.... by Kjella · · Score: 4, Interesting

      How much do you need your media player to do beyond playing media?
      If i wouldn't have gotten a mac I don't know if I would have ever gone past winamp 2.x

      Well, as far as video goes I'm more than happy with Media Player Classic. It's basicly a WMP6.4(!) clone but able to play DVDs+++. No skinning, in fact 99.9% of the time I use it is in fullscreen playback with no UI at all. Haven't seen any feature in WMP7-10 that would make me change back.

      As far as music goes, I know a lot of people have much more desire to organize and sort and do multiple playlists and ratings and even eyecandy while listening to music. Both Winamp, WMP and iTunes have made a lot of progress since Winamp 2.x here. I'm mostly like you, not really in the market but it's definately there.

      Kjella

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    3. Re:But.... by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Why not use a CD writing application for this?

      People like to connect the dots. "i go *here* to play my media, why can't i burn my playlists from here as well?"

      I'd rather just be able to drag & drop files I wanted to use on the player onto the player's icon under My Computer, rather than having to use a media player to manage it.

      two words: Custom playlists. Instead of having to reselect an entire range of files stored in seperate subfolders (from the original albums) I can simply transfer the playlist in one go (see above burning as well).

      Why not store all your media in a single location? That's a much simpler solution.

      Because "My Music" is not your music, and shared music is not everything on my machine, and I don't always want everything together, and because whichever p2p software by default stores it in one place, and something else stores it in another, and my mp3 player comes up in a different drive, and instead of being a jack of all trades and needing to tell people how to configure every single piece of media software on the planet (to look for media in one place) I would just like to scan my machine and find it all for me.

      I understand you like operating using single individual steps, but not everyone is as savvy as yourself and just wants a simple life, your steps may be simple, and once configured it might be easy to manage, but its getting started thats the problem.

      People already have the option to do all the things you suggest, and most who do similar to yourself won't like this new media player, but for the rest of the population, the suggested features don't seem out of step at all.

      --
      liqbase :: faster than paper
    4. Re:But.... by Jugalator · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You prefer alternative solutions probably because you attack the organizational problem from a different angle. While your solutions makes perfect sense to someone working on a file system level -- you have tidy organized music so it's easy to find & burn, and don't need to scan -- many users work on a more abstract level with playlists. If you do, suddenly the playlist sorting intelligence and logical grouping of music from possibly more than one folder (or even drives) etc, makes a lot more sense because instead of opening up a separate app to select and burn your music, you click a single button to take care of burning your sorted list already open. The same thing with syncing. No need to open folders and drag & drop stuff each time you want to do this. Sure, you can make a script for the job or whatever, but then you just do a different form of preparation to simplify your job. Another user may instead of that form of automation prefer the media player's.

      Store all your media in a single location? Yes, it's a much more simple solution, and also less flexible as you aren't working on an abstract enough level to e.g. cover multiple physical and/or network drives, and so on. Sometimes you actually want this, and then you can use one of these players, and you'd once again get "your single location" point of access -- the media player's metadata-powered music library.

      --
      Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
    5. Re:But.... by MobyDisk · · Score: 4, Insightful
      People like to connect the dots. "i go *here* to play my media, why can't i burn my playlists from here as well?"


      That is an excellent point. It is also a perfect example of how people still don't understand the desktop. You don't go to Windows Media Player to play your media. You go to "My Music" or wherever. People still use the old DOS way of doing stuff: Run the application, then click open, then browse to the location. That's backwards. If they went to the location first, then they could do all of the things the GP post is talking about right from there (copy, rename, delete, organize, burn, play, ...) and you won't need the application to then have al lthe same features as Explorer.

      You point out the issues with sharing, and applications creating multiple folders, etc. So you do make a good point: Users won't ever "get" the desktop analogy until the software uses it properly. Until 95% of apps start using these folders properly, it won't be useful.
    6. Re:But.... by ultranova · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That is an excellent point. It is also a perfect example of how people still don't understand the desktop. You don't go to Windows Media Player to play your media. You go to "My Music" or wherever. People still use the old DOS way of doing stuff: Run the application, then click open, then browse to the location.

      That's because the current systems are still designed around the old DOS way of doing things, instead of being truly object-oriented - they just try to look like it. Click on a document in a folder. What happens ? A program starts up, reads the file and presumably shows you the results. This is, behind the scenes, exactly what happens in DOS. Furthermore, the program cannot be easily reused by other programs, unless it was specifically designed that way. Modern GUIs simply generate the command line automatically; but the actual operating paradigm is unchanged.

      This system is very inefficient. Imagine you have several documents open at once. For each of these, there is at least a single thread (and associated stack and other system resources) that does nothing but sits around waiting for events most of the time.

      The system is also very fragile. The desktop system (as well as almost all other systems, like web and database servers) depends heavily on communication between different programs. However, when heavy communication meets the combination of direct memory access programming paradigm with no bound checking of any kind of C and the difficulty of checking for and defending against every possible kind of malformed communication, buffer overflows are an unavoidable result. The situation is not helped by the nonexistent security paradigms of Unix (try to make it impossible for a program to write anywhere except in a subdirectory of your home directory without having root privileges on Linux) or Windows.

      So, what is needed is an operating system designed from grounds up.

      Make the system completely object-based. An application is not a program; it is a class that implements the Application interface. It doesn't get started, it gets instantiated. When you click on a file on a file manager, the a thread calls the appropriate even-handler method on the manager; that method most likely creates a new thread and has it instantiate the file viewer object; when the viewer's initialization method has been completed, the thread returns and, since there's no more methods on the stack, it exits (of course the initialization method is free to run as long as neccessary, or spawn a thousand other threads if needed). When the viewer needs to be told of a keypress or mouseclick or needs to be redrawn (or simply when some timer set by the initialization method expires) a new thread gets created for the purpose. No threads are wasted on waiting in the event loops of a hundred viewers, no more single thread managing 10 different windows (which means that if it crashes, they all close, and if any is engaged in a long-running operation, they all block).

      Such objects are inherently reusable. Currently, if you want code to be reused, you need to put it to a library. This requires extra effort from the programmers point of view, and so programs and libraries tend to be strictly separated; if you want to reuse the functionality of another program (like burn CD's), you'd better hope that the code is in a library or that the other program was designed to be remotely controlled. With programs made by combining objects, however, the chances are that the burning code is in a class of its own, and can be easily reused.

      So, basically, desktop paradigm is not understood by many because it is not implemented by any operating system that I know of. Windows and Gnome just make a show of supporting it; under the hood, everything still works just like it ever did, which means that you get a lot less grief by using the system in a program-centric fashion, for that is how it really operates, deep down.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

    7. Re:But.... by damiam · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Most music listeners keep their media players constantly loaded. If I want to open iTunes, all it takes is a click on the taskbar and it pops right up. It's certainly no slower than opening a terminal window. And once iTunes is up, all I have to do is type "Stormb" in the search box (or however much of the name it takes to uniquely determine the album). Click the first song, and iTunes will play the whole album in sequence. Total time: 3 seconds. It's much faster than fiddling with a command line (it takes more than one second to type 123 mp3/Di[tab]/St[tab]/*; I'm a fairly fast typer and it took me five). Now on the other end, when I get a new CD, I just stick it in, click "import", and I'm done. If I otherwise acquire MP3 files, I just drag them into iTunes and it automatically copies them to my library folder, sorts them into a directory structure, and copies them to my iPod on next sync. Meanwhile, you're manually managing the directory structure and renaming all your new music to fit your naming conventions, which takes a lot more time for really no benefits. What do you do if you want to shuffle-play a certain album, or your entire library? I'm sure it's possibly with some elaborate perl wizardry, but you can't seriously tell me it's easier than clicking the "shuffle" button.

      --
      It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
    8. Re:But.... by binarybum · · Score: 4, Funny

      Are you kidding?? Desktop media players are so far behind! They have to catch up to network television! I want a media player with a constant scroll ticker, animated graphics that pop up and consume the lower left quadrant of the screen every minute or so, and a memory and processor heavy 3D rendering engine that runs all the time just in case when I'm watching the credits for a movie I want to tilt them into the screen at a 35degree angle and shrink them so that I have room to watch advertisements that stream into my media player and are saved to my HD while I was watching the movie. But they'll be totally kick-ass advertisements geared towards me because the media player will automatically send microsoft a list of all media titles on my computer so they can build a psychological profile. Oh, and it damn well better support animated skins so I can make it look like it's on fire. I hear they might even integrate clippy the paper clip in WMP-11!

      --
      ôó
  2. Feh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Phantom Menace had pretty graphics too...

  3. Looks Ok... by Sebilrazen · · Score: 3, Funny

    ..but so does a gold plated turd.

    More screenies here (if /.'ed)

    --
    "There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
  4. off google by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I typed build 5231 into google ... heck out the sreenshots from winsupersite:
      http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_5231 _gallery_02.asp

  5. MIRRORS by dsginter · · Score: 4, Informative

    Mirrors

    --
    More
  6. Marketing first, function second... by SpasticThinker · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Microsoft again proves it knows how to sell a product. Not that graphical changes/updates are a bad thing - far from it, I like my eye-candy as do most. The most important thing about it, however, is that looks sell.

    Now maybe since the thing looks prettier, they'll start working on adding some revolutionary functionality. I think that consumers valuing function over appearance are the minority of those who will be spending money, however.

    You can fault Microsoft for not being much of a software company if you wish, but their business/marketing/money-making talent is second to none.

  7. Re:And? by I+confirm+I'm+not+a · · Score: 3, Funny

    If I wanted to know how Vista was doing...

    Dude, these stories don't get posted here for information value - it's so we can reduce their pitiful Windows servers to a heap of smoking rubble. Which we're very successful at doing, thankyewverymuch.

    --
    This is where the serious fun begins.
  8. Too much Player! by Jjeff1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Windows media player and Realmagic player both suffer from the same dilusional management. Someone believes the player is more important than the media. If I want to watch a DVD or listen to an MP3 all I want is an easy way to find my media, and then to see/view the media itself.

    This obsession with skins and enormous toolbars and wasted screen real estate drives me nuts. Winamp was good because there was virtually nothing wasted in the display. iTunes also realizes the media is more important than the player. When will Microsoft and Real catch up?

  9. Complimenting on how smoothly stuff scrolls... by QuantumPion · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...is not a good sign for people who don't have the best hardware. The article talks about how smoothly WMP11 ran and how they were able to easily scroll through long lists of songs without hiccups. If you ask me, that is not really a feature or something to get excited about. It's something you'd take for granted as being able to work in the first place.

    Quote:

    We have never seen any WMP run this smooth especially on a beta release. While this might not mean much to anybody, it's a step in the right direction for Microsoft. Only thing we need to check now is how smoothly it runs while running a plethora of other applications in the end.

    ...

    One thing we would like to mention is that our library had 1000+ songs, but there were no hiccups while scrolling through the list. It was almost like scrolling down Google's search results, which is very smooth and hassle-free. This could be due to implementation of Microsoft's new graphics technologies, namely XAML and WGF 2.0. Needless to say, this is definitely something to get excited about, since we can clearly remember the times when we launched WMP 10 and it would get stuck at the guide page, thereby making the user experience terrible.

  10. Slashdotted Already... by inkdesign · · Score: 5, Funny

    Are they running their webserver on it?

  11. Re:Not working by bigman2003 · · Score: 5, Funny

    It doesn't really matter, I'll make my standard response here:

    "This looks pretty good- the graphic stuff doesn't really excite me, but I am interested in the way that it will integrate with my portable devices. I really like the move toward the better/more integrated syncing in Windows Media 10, so this should be even better.

    While I am not too concerned about the new features, I wonder what the hardware specs of this will be. I guess I will need to upgrade my computer, but I'll wait on that. I'll probably move to Vista about 12 months after launch. But at work I am in the process of getting a new computer and I'm trying to load it up with everything possible. It's hard to explain to my boss (a gamer) why I need the best possible video card in the workstation I run a text editor on.

    Oh, and I wonder if we'll be able to skin this version of Windows. I eventually liked the bubblegum blue theme, but it took a while. I hope they have a classic (bubblegum blue) mode!"

    There..that's it. This is what I would have said if the article was available. And I would have tried to post it as close to the top of the page as possible (replying to another post which is unrelated) just to whore some Karma...which I've already whored enough of that it doesn't really matter.

    --
    No reason to lie.
  12. AmaroK by hummassa · · Score: 3, Interesting

    (needed) manages your albums
    (pretty) gets album cover to display so you can visualize
    (good) manages your preferences/statistics (you can see what you are listening to)
    (pretty) presents those informations in an aesthetic way
    (good) or just gets minimized to the systray
    (good) all operations are two to three clicks away.

    --
    It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
  13. seriously by nuggetman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    what's with all the dead space around toolbars, blocks of text, etc?

    --
    ...and that's all there is to it.
  14. Some working screenshots by jgritz · · Score: 4, Informative

    are here

  15. In other news by Stephan+Seidt · · Score: 4, Funny

    Steve Balmer just sat down and wrote a review about the new ... Wait, there were any chairs left to sit?

  16. Mmmm Fresh.... by lifebouy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Smell that freshly baked propaganda frosted with a heaping helping of hype. Mmmmm.
    Seriously. Vista is going to flop, mainly because XP can already do what people need their computers to do. No reason to upgrade. So beyond the initial rush of people keeping up with the Jones', it'll peter out pretty quickly. Then Microsoft will blitz every media source even harder and attack linux some more. Frankly, this sucks. I would rather have a root canal than have Vista ever get released. Just do it quietly, please.

    --
    Drop me a line at:
    Key ID: 0x54D1D809
    1. Re:Mmmm Fresh.... by jcr · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Vista is going to flop,

      That depends on your definition of "flop". MS is going to arm-twist the Dells and HPs of the world to include it with all new machines whenever it ships, so there will be many millions of copies of it inflicted on the public in any case. Sometime four or five years from now, it will be 30% or more of their installed base.

      Somehow, Apple manages to get their users to take up each new version of OS X at a pretty good clip.

      -jcr

      --
      The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
  17. A plague on all media players by dpbsmith · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "It most certainly will end up looking a lot better (graphically) than most music players out there, iTunes included." In an ideal world, that would be a sensible comment. Gee, I think I'll dump iTunes and install Windows Media Player instead, because I just like its looks better.

    iTunes, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer: the truth is, they're all badly behaved applications, and they are a pain. They're all getting bloated, they all suffer from featuritis.

    And not one of them seems to more than about 10% devoted to serving actual user needs. They are 90% devoted to pushing someone's agenda--sometimes blatantly, sometimes insidiously.

    I install security patches to Windows and Mac OS fairly routinely, but frankly I'm loathe to update any media player, and terrified to install a new one.

    The percentage of times that installing a new version of a media player will break something that used to work is higher than the mortality rate from playing Russian roulette.

    And they all seem to grow invasivelyinto your operating system like rootlets into a sewer.

    When they are clean and functional and do what I want them to do instead of what someone else wants them to do, then I will be very interested in how they look.

    --

    "How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!

  18. Re:Cotton candy interfaces suck by CyricZ · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Indeed! I find these new attempts at GUI creation to be terrible.

    I mean, look at this screenshot:
    http://www.winsupersite.com/images/showcase/vista5 231_2_cpl.jpg

    Look at all the text there! That's not a very good interface for finding the icon you want quickly and efficiently. There's too much textual distraction.

    There there is something like: http://www.winsupersite.com/images/showcase/vista5 231_wmp11.jpg

    It takes forever to find out what it is you can click on, since buttons and other components are not well defined. I mean, is each album entry something I can click on? What will happen if I do click on them?

    I hope that the Linux desktop community does not fall victim to the same shenanigans. GUIs are best when they consist of well-designed components, each with a clear and well-understood function. Microsoft's new fascination with random text/image mixtures is often counterintuitive and leads to applications which are difficult to use.

    --
    Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
  19. PC Mag has the pictures to by bigHairyDog · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You'll find all of the pictures here

    --

    foo mane padme hum

  20. Re:Not working by jcr · · Score: 4, Funny

    Link /.'d already?? I get timeout errors.

    Slashdotted, or just an XP server? ;-)

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
  21. Re:Linux killed OSX. by jcr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Most importantly the development tools MS is providing are awesome!

    The trouble is, their frameworks still suck. They still don't even understand the basics of OO development. (It's model-view-controller, not model-view-"view model"). Take a look at some of the examples they've posted of (say), how to implement an animated button with Avalon: hundreds of lines of XML, for Christ's sake.

    Those guys are lifetime members of the Golden Hammer-of-the-Week club. Let me know when MS has an answer to Cocoa or Quartz Composer, and I'll take another look.

    But, here is why apple should be scared. MS is taking away every reason you should use OSX, with the exception "I hate MS", which Linux can cover.

    Nope. They're not making a dent in the main reason for abandoning Windows, which is that it is simply not trustworthy. Exposing a Windows machine to the internet is just begging for pain. We've had well over a decade of MS putting out press releases insisting that they've gotten their act together (this time, for sure!), and it's just not true. The only way I can see Windows overcoming its basic design flaws w/r/t security is to run it in an emulator under Linux, one virtual machine per app.

    I predict OSX won't survive this round with MS and Apple becomes a premium hardware supplier. Say bubye to OSX, I don't see it making it past this decade.

    Apple will be selling Mac OS Eleven within three years, so you're right in a sense. However, if you want to bet that the Mac OS will be gone by the end of the decade, I'll take that bet.

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
  22. Re:Better looking media player? by Koiu+Lpoi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Ever used professional music production software and VSTi instruments? It's worse - they seem to think that if an interface works in hardware, it'll obviously work great in software. With a mouse. This paradigm needs to stop.

  23. Summary by geeber · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why not ....

    Here, let me summarize the parent post in one concise sentence:

    "Why not do things the way I do them?"

    Answer : Not everyone wants to do things the way you do them.

    --
    Download my free songs!
  24. Re:Not working by NatasRevol · · Score: 3, Informative

    WTF, did you even try?

    Go to the desktop, View>Show View Options,

    You can:
    -change the icon size
    -change the text size
    -uncheck snap to grid

    --
    There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure