Slashdot Mirror
Windows Vista 5342 Screenshots
Lhopar writes "Microsoft released a new build of Windows Vista to beta testers. Flexbeta has got some screenshots. Included in this build is an extensive collection of drivers and the exclusive sidebar. Glass is also a feature that we all have come to respect and love, along with the 3D flip. The official version number is 6.0 Version 5342.winmain_idx04.060321-1730. Internet Explorer 7.0 is build Version 7.0.5342.2. Nice features include a new 'Paint' and needed redesigned network center."
1. Wait for Apple to do it first 2. Take 4 years to copy what Apple did in the prosses promicing everything + a new shiney toaster then take it away so your left with the old OS + some nice pictures 3. Say everything Apple did (now 6 years ago) will be in the next version and have people still eat it up 4. ????????? 5. Profit
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
the firefox slashdot extension does this, with google cache and internet archive.
IE: I notice that they nicked the mini search-box in top right from Opera/Firefox too - really, why do they bother? Where's the innovation?
It has a few other features, with lots more planned for v 1.2.
Well, it obscures a good 70% of each screenshot. How is that anymore useful than Alt-Tab now? Are they worried about completely ripping off Expose?
Everyone's been saying Vista is just stealing from Mac OS X. I never realized before seeing these screenshots just how true that is (appears to be, anyway). I'm not really a Mac user, but that interface looks a lot like a Mac...
;)
All this time, all that money, and this is the best interface they could come up with?
Well, whatever. Like a lot of people on these threads keep reminding us, we don't have to use it and of course there's no convincing me to switch from Linux to Windows
Everything I need to know about copyrights I learned from Slashdot.
Some of us have been using mutliple virtual desktops for a decade and are perfectly qualified to make a personal assesment based on the screenshots. Better than the taskbar model? Perhaps. Than multiple desktops + pager? No, you go ahead and keep it, along with its horsepower requirements.
Alt-tab now only shows an application icon. Even if you use the "enhanced" alt-tab, which shows screen shots of the windows, it is slow, the image is too tiny, it doesn't show any motion ocurring in the windows, and it is unwieldly if you have a large number of windows open.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
For the number of you people bashing Microsoft, a hell of a lot of you are looking at those screenshots, so if you don't like Vista, please get off the damn site.
Well, like it or not, Microsoft is a fairly dominant player in the computing world, and for computer professionals like myself that do not use Microsoft products, its still worthwhile to know what the rest of the world sees and does with computers.
I can't tell if I'm just biased, but to me it seems like there are more criticisms and chronic delays and fewer real usable features that are coming with Microsoft's latest and greatest. Personally, I believe Microsoft should be ashamed for not even attempting the WinFS thing. As computers can do more things like multimedia and the amount of data that people have on their machines today is astounding, yet MS has not properly addressed content management. SourceSafe or whatever it was called is a perfect example. On the other hand, Project is one of their organizing apps that is reportedly decent and has no competition.
that none of the windows have anything in their "title bar"?
Was MS too afraid of obscuring their beautiful see-thru bar to allow text on it?
I might be overreacting here, but I kind of like being able to see the name of the window I have open without having to look down to the taskbar.
Not 5 years, 11 years. It's about time that MS did something about the fucking awful "accessories" they bundle with Windows. Notepad and calculator could do with a complete rewrite too. Notepad still can't cope with Unix or Mac line endings.
Of course if they included something that a serious graphics needy person
And when they offer a graphics application separately, the comments are just along the line of...
- bah, they just bought another company
- pff, it's not Photoshop
- boo, I'll stick with The Gimp
*yawn*
Who Cares? I've seen this a lot lately, but I can't see the point. Whenever Product $Bar comes along, people moan about how Product $Foo had this feature first, as if it's going to make any difference to how it operates. I'm not going to use the product that's out first, I'm going to use the product that's best at doing it.
Whenever I use a Mac, I can't get over the way you have to resize windows from the corner only. Windows lets me drag, Mac makes me move then jiggle about a bit then drag. Until the Dock came along, I often got lost in the mountains of windows I had open - Windows organised them all into the taskbar. Back in the day, the Mac zealots boasted how Apple had the whole window managing idea first. This didn't change the fact that I didn't like Apple's window management at all, though. (Luckily it got better with OS X).
Another example: Popup blocking. Opera was the first browser to stop new windows from being opened while browsing. Then Mozilla came along, took Opera's feature, and improved it by only blocking windows while the page loads. To this day, Opera weenies still proudly proclaim "Don't forget, Opera had popup blocking first!". Screw you guys, Opera's implementation sucked. I went with Mozilla's implementation because it didn't block new windows opened by me.
That being said, Microsoft have a long track record for making bad products - IE still uses Opera's old braindead popup blocking method. Heck, DRM had me sold before I heard any other features.
Microsoft isn't an innovator? Oh. There are plenty of reasons to dislike Vista, but I don't care about originality being one of them.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
[goes off, reads specs]
[blink]
Are they designing an OS, or a video game??!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
In order to see the Aero Glass, users need a 3.4GHz PC, 1GB RAM and a 256MB DX10 Card??????? It's either going to push hardware sales enormously or be a huge flop.
Pretty pictures, transparency, 3D effects. Oooooooh. But how useful, and more importanly, how easy will it be for someone, or someones grandparents, to actually use. The first thing I noticed was the lack of a 'START' button. It seems to have been replaced by a picture. Now I've been in tech support for over 10 years, and it's already dificult enough to get someone to follow simple directions over the telephone. I can just immagine the phone calls now:
Tech: "O.k., please open the start menu and go to the control pannel"
User: "Menu, uhm o.k. What menu? I don't see that."
Tech: "The sart menu. Just click on the button that says 'start' in the bottom-left corner of your screen".
User: "uhm, I don't see that. Hmmm. Start. Start. Nope, I don't see that anywhere"
Tech: "O.K. Please tell me what you do see on your screen."
User: "There are some pretty pictures. I really like the fish, but I want a shark in there."
Tech: "O.K. Is this Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000 or something else?"
User: "My grandson gave it to me. I don't know what it is. I think he said it was Microsoft."
Tech: "O.K. So there is no 'start' word on the left side of the task bar at the bottom of your screen. What is at the bottom-left cornet of your screen?"
User: "There's a nice little circle with some colors in it"
Tech: "O.K. You are using Windows Vista. That circle is your 'start' menu. Please click on it to open it."
-- BEEP --
Your 5 minutes of free product support are now finished. Please enter your credit card number to continue speaking to a technical support representative. This call will be charged at $2.95 per minute. Please enter your credit card number now.
Just the thing to increase productivity. Re-education needed yet again.
- James
...Opera and Firefox, of course, having "nicked" it from iTunes via Safari. There's no such thing as innovation, great artists steal, blah blah blah.
So I don't feel bad about saying: Oh my god, what's up with this interface?
Immediately Noticable Bad things:
1) Close icon 2x the size of minimise and maximise, yet should be used far less. Accidentally hitting close is far more likely than accidentally hitting maximise or minimise. I hope that all applications have warning dialogs. Also these buttons seem to be perched in the top part of the titlebar. So they're thin, vertically, and I imagine most mouse movement to reach them will incorporate vertical movement, so they'll be hard to hit quickly. This may reduce the effect of the larger close button.
2) Large window borders around application content. Again, this looks ugly, serves no purpose.
3) Translucent titlebar with blurring effect. This looks nice until you have to use it. The titles have a white halo around them to make them more readable - but how about just having non-translucent titlebars?
4) The colour scheme and overall effect is very 'gamey'. It's less 'duplo' than XP though, apart from the frosted glass duplo window borders. Will people really want to use a glassy black desktop?
I worry that all the glitz will actually disturb the user when they're using the computer, rather than working as a visual aid to enhance their usage. Microsoft have a long history of putting worthless graphical effects into their desktop - expanding pop-up menus for example - and I don't see them stopping this trend. It will be configurable I'm sure - I hope that Glass has enough configurability to set the translucency of the window borders to 'none' and to shrink the window border (in particular the left and right borders).
There are nice things however. The 'Start' button looks very nice. The desktop widgets look nicely integrated.
So stop moaning and go run Looking Glass. Oh right, you can't. It's a proof-of-concept, not a desktop OS.
Did you blast Apple when they passed off widgets as their own, despite having been beat to the arena by third party developers years ago? And anyway, where in this story is MS claiming that Flip is an innovation? They are saying that flip and the new tasbar and alt-tab options are new to windows and handy features to have. Both are true. Is Microsoft not ALLOWED to improve their OS just because others have done it before?
If Microsoft succeeds in becoming more secure, you'll probably blast them for copying Apple, or Linux, or Fort Knox or something.
Don't quite get the fuss over Windows Vista. I'm strangely under the misaprehension that the killer package on my PC should be the app's I use day in day out and not the OS. The OS's role in life is to provide resource manangement and hardware abstraction for applications running on the box. A GUI, while a nice to have, should not be an essential requirement of an OS and should ideally be a minimal setup which enables the user to easily carry out tasks in a graphical environment without getting in the way. Hence my lack of love for XP, KDE, GNOME when used with all the trimmings.
Everytime the OS forces a hardware upgrade on people we're moving away from app's driving user computational requirements to being driven by the thing which is just supposed to manage all the bits of a PC - not mint money for the hardware manufactures.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
...They only managed to poorly rip the looks of OSX. Maybe they should take a hint, try to rip the security features next time instead.
Warning: Corny karma killing post above.