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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."
5342 is a lot of screenshots.
Sweet! New version of Paint!
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
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."
5 years for a new version of paint! Well worth the wait. Screw linux, I want the new MS Paint! Linux will continue to fall behind microsoft, it doesn't even have MS Paint. Hahahaha Silly Linux users, you don't know what your missing.
In the performance rating screenshot, they give seperate ratings for CPU graphics etc then give a total overall figure.
Something doesn't make sense:
Processor: P4 3.0GHZ 4.3
Memory: 1023mb 5.2
Hard Drive: 179GB free 4.8
Graphics Radeon 9600 4.3
Graphics Mem: 126mb 3.7
Overall Rating: 3
Wouldn't it be reasonable to expect this machine to have a 4?
Or is graphics memory the only meaningful metric?
liqbase
http://www.flexbeta.net.nyud.net:8090/main/comment s.php?catid=1&shownews=18760
.nyud.net:8090 to all post links automatically?
I wonder when slashcode is going to support inserting
Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes
What's that? They released a new Paint?
Now I have no choice but to upgrade...
I swear these articles are like the Slashdot version of Two Minutes Hate.
See http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/winsat/winsat/winsatinfolevel1_stru ct.asp for a summary on what the various levels need.
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
I'm surprised so many people are even checking this out with all the Windows hate you people feature.
- Still uses crappy activation
- In the third [screen]shot down, the windows stacked at a 3-D angle looks horrible. It might amuse little kids for a while though (clippy all over again)
- The updated paint doesn't look that different, and anyone with any serious graphics needs isn't going to use it anyway
- More of those lovely flashy blue setup screens that dumb down the interface (I personally don't like them)
- The performance rating is an interesting idea; it might be useful for people buying games (especially parents)
Disclaimer: I rushed this post a bit, I'm in a hurryDon't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
I like the screenshot with widgets:
Link.
With the timer, I can time almost anything! (Makes you wonder what is it that I can't time, and why do they need such an obvious explanation?)
The icon for both a number puzzle and picture puzzle is the same! (Requiring me to read the text, completely making the icon irrelevant. --yes, yes, beta version, whatever)
But the best thing of all, and the widget that I think SpaceX is most excited about, is the Launcher!
Name your price Microsoft, name your price!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Here's another page with screenshots, as the story link seems to be /.ed:
1 6
http://www.msblog.org/album/thumbnails.php?album=
http://almostsmart.com
The Windows Vista sidebar has already been ported to Windows XP. You can find a download link here along with installation instructions. More widgets and gadgets for the sidebar can be found here.
I tried it and it just doesn't do anything for me that can't already be done in Windows XP without taking up more screen-space.
The site seems to be slashdotted, so here's the google cache from the site ;)
Solitare Vista is going to be the best-looking card simulation game available on any platform! I can't wait to get my hands on Vista now!
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.
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.
Funny how the window decorations in these screenshots look a lot like the new default Fedora Core 5 metacity theme, at least in terms of shape and the window operation buttons. Shame on Redhat for copying Windows like that. Oh wait.
Seems to me Windows is looking more and more like the *nix desktops all the time. I guess this means that Linux really is influencing even Microsoft.
Having played with Xgl a bit, I find it cool, but generally speaking translucent windows are not that useful and often make the contents of the windows harder to read. Looks like MS's take on this is to add blurring to the translucency which actually makes the window contents very readable while still maintaining some transparency. Whether this is going to be a good thing when you have a bunch of windows stacked on top of each other I don't know. But definitely the blurring effect plus the translucency is much better than just the translucency that I can get with Xgl. Of course nothing stops one from doing the bluring in Xgl too. Xgl has all of these capabilities right here now. It will be interesting to see how translucency is finally used. For all its eye-candy, OS X does almost no translucency, except on the dock.
But how many people will use MSN search? I'm gradually converting anyone whose PC I can get at to Firefox, and as far as I can tell hardly anyone has figured out what the box in the upper right corner is for. It's painful to watch how they'll open a tab and type in the Google URL instead of simply using the search box, even after it's been pointed out to them.
I agree MS isn't doing a great job at synthesizing what's new in Vista. There are so many updates/redesigns/new features across the board in all aspects of the OS, that it's honestly a little hard to put it all in one place. But here's my try at some of the basics:
l uate/overvw.mspx
l uate/feat/secfeat.mspx
o rk/evaluate/new_network.mspx
At a high level, here are some of the new features (not an exhaustive list):
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/eva
Deeper into the new security features:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/eva
Deeper into the new networking features (in a nutshell, there's a lot more since this was written):
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/netw
There are obviously tons of kernel improvements, a new driver infrastructure, the new presentation framework, and system-wide search built-in.
On the client side, new versions of Media Center (great new UI, handles cable cards), new Media Player, a DVD maker, a calendaring app, a sidebar for creating gadets (yes, a la OSX), improved photo handling. Setup has also been improved, both in time (staged builds take >45 minutes to complete), and simplicity (only a few targeted questions at the start and end, no need to stick around during the actual install).
There's more, but that's a gist of some of the new features.
as far as I can tell hardly anyone has figured out what the box in the upper right corner is for. It's painful to watch how they'll open a tab and type in the Google URL instead of simply using the search box, even after it's been pointed out to them.
Old habits die hard.
I hardly ever use the search box in Firefox, and just search from the location bar. (In my defense, I set it up so I can type "g " to return the results of a Google search, so that's what I use. It's possible without that I'd use the search box.)
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?
To clarify, "sucked" is in the past tense; Opera doesn't do that now.
Well after searching for all of two minutes because it bothered me so much I found the Disable Sigs Strip sig quotes from comments option. Finally! I can read in happiness again. I wish slashdot turned this on by default but it was easy enough to find.
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.
Do they have screenies of Solitaire and Minesweeper?
Solitaire has been ditched in favor of Lumines, and both games have been rewritten using VBA.
Erm... is your comment related to the topic at all? Oh wait, this is Slashdot, so it doesn't has to be.
Anyway, most of the criticism around Vista boils down to one point: it is indeed (and looks) like a cool os, and his interface is as good as OS X one (except for the ring on the active textbox, which I hope they will add soon, since it really really helps the user). But, is it worth 300$? Why I should upgrade from my Windows XP to Windows Vista? That's the real point.
Hope you have a good answer
nbody2002:If you can read this you may be addicted to the internet
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
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.
Here's an older video looking at a build of the shell UI:http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=1 14694
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
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.
Not sure if I understood you right, but the IE 7 Beta is available for free download at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/ie7/default.ms px
I personally thought that the lack of a menu bar was fairly annoying, just having a "Tools" buttons wasn't really enough. And when the menu bar was enabled, it was in a fairly awkward position (*below* the address bar? What were they thinking?). Maybe I can convince them to include a menu which is accessed by right-clicking on the address bar. Or, I can just put it in myself. Oh, wait, I can't have the sources to IE. Firefox uses up less screen space and has a menu/tab/nav bar. Plus a bookmarks bar, which I don't see in IE7. Plus, it is fully themeable, open-source, etc. The IE team and the Windows team in general just seems to be 4-5 years behind, taking more time to copy features than the original products that they copied from took to come up with them. Tabbed browsing, web standards, RSS feeds, all were in mozilla/netscape/firefox/opera years before IE. Oh well, I guess I will be forced to use Vista in a few more years as it will be the only OS to run Half Life 3, Halo 4. Or, it might be the perfect opportunity to completely migrate to linux or OS X.
Amazing how much it looks like Enlightenment. Has anyone checked for Rasterman's comments in the code ;-)
Mommy. What's a karma whore?
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.
The Vista interface reminds me of early Mac OS X. Circa 2001.
Back then, Apple made windows' title bars semi-transparent when they where in the background (that is, every window but the active one). Drop down menus where also semi-transparent.
Flash-forward to 2006, Mac OS X 10.4 - "Tiger". No semi-transparent window title bars, menus are almost completely opaque.
What happened? Did hardware mysteriously became slower during the course of the last five years? No, of course not. Flashy transparency effects were there in the first versions because they where new - they were there to show what the window compositor was capable off. Once the novelty wears off, usability is once again the prime factor in every user's mind.
I've played with Xgl on Linux, and just as OS X did in its beginnings and Vista will do on its first iteration (uhm... next year?!), it has many little "show off" FX, like the window "wobbling & inertia" when dragging and the "vibrating" fx for window & menu openings, among others. Luckily they can be customized/toned down.
I expect Vista's "transparency & background blur" on the border of each window to be the first thing most users will disable. I also assume there will be other more real-world-use themes included, least of it one without thick useless, borders.
All that being said, a composited desktop which makes good use of transparency, shadows et al does improve day to day usage. Not to mention that it frees up the CPU and makes everything more responsive. I use OS X daily and find it a pleasure to use. I know people who (for the time being) switched to Genome from their beloved KDE because of Xgl.