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Windows 7 Beta Screenshots Leaked
Slatterz writes "Screenshots of what is said to be the next version of Microsoft's Windows operating system have been leaked onto the internet. The ThinkNext.net blog posted a range of screenshots over the weekend which it said represents Windows 7. Overall, the screenshots show a distinctly Vista-like interface, but there is still plenty of time for tweaks and changes to take place."
Funny thing is they're not actually screen shots, they're running videos... guess they haven't fixed the memory management or paging issues in v7 either.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
That said, given that aero was one of the nicer things about Vista, I imagine they'll base the GUI on it but make it look different enough to elminite comparissons between vista.
Ideally they'll strike a balance between the prettyness of vista and the functionality and performance of XP.
For those of you who cannot read the article due to slashdotting, here are some highlights:
* It's main color is no longer blue, it's brown
* The default desktop image features a graphical heron
* The start button is now a circular orange button
* Task bars or "Panels" can now be found both at the top of the screen AND at the bottom.
* The new graphical bells and whistles previously referred to as Vista Aero is now called "Beryl".
* Beryl is cooler and runs much smoother than Aero. It requires much less hardware power than Aero.
* The new version of Windows is said to be much more stable and secure than any previous version.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
Look and Feel isn't the problem with Vista.
A todo list would be a far more valuable leak at this point if MS want to change their fortune.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
As far as I can tell, there is nothing that looks really really special that would prompt me to shift off what I'm running now. The fact that they still require malware protection (evidenced by the "we can't detect any anti-virus software, panic" screen), tempts me to question why they haven't focused more energy on securing the system.
The only really interesting thing I saw was the sharing option, "homegroup"? Could be interesting. But overall, nothing revolutionary.
Come to think about it, I remember reading before MS Windows XP came out about all the wonderful things that were going to be in it. Yet, when it did come out, it wasn't a revolution, just more gradual changes.
This promises more of the same.
So, as I said, I'll stay with Ubuntu, because if nothing else, at least it runs on my machine with only 512 MB of ram. (I'm poor, and it works, why would I upgrade?)
I wank in the shower.
They missed this one from their screen-shots.
Everyone knows 'Leak' is Public-Relations-Speak for 'Released'. Now if someone uploaded Windows 7, *THAT* would be a leak. But for anything else than that, why can't we call it what it is?
"Windows 7 Beta Screenshots Released"
Fix'd!
Slashdot is not the place for hot news. Slashdot is a community forum dedicated to discussions regarding "news for nerds." The point of Slashdot is not to present you with news but to allow you and other nerds to debate yesterday's news.
With a product that's been stable for a long time (stable in the development sense, not in the 'not crashing' sense) you shouldn't expect any large changes between major versions, and no changes at all between minors. You don't just throw away decades of work to make it different for the sake of it. If there are any differences they're probably only there because the marketing department demanded something obviously different so people would upgrade for the new eye candy. Or, at a push, because some HCI guru has had a brainwave about how to make things radically easier to work with. That's very rare though.
Frankly, the fact it looks very similar is a good thing. It might mean MSFT aren't just doing some window dressing.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
From what I understand, and from personal experience, the way Vista looks is not the problem. It wouldn't make sense for them to invest so much money in a new look and then dump it. After all, if we take a look at previous Windows versions, this doesn't happen very often. Additionally, you can customize Vista in a million ways with the plethora of skins out there.
Windows 7 will be a hit if they focus on what people have been complaining about, which is largely the sluggish performance - and this is what we should devote our attention to.
Full Tilt
The name. They couldn't figure out how to salvage Vista trademark, so they're just making some relatively minor changes, and releasing it with a new name.
They can't really do anything else without pissing off a majority of their customers. Lets face it, if they put in a dock or unified titlebar on the top everyone would lambaste them for copying Apple, not to mention there are 3rd party apps that have the same functionality, which may put them in an antitrust situation.
The only annoying thing about vista UI is UAC, and from the article it appears that they possibly fixed that. I was envious of expose, but then I installed Switcher, and while it may not have the same functionality, I'm content.
The only things I would like out of windows 7 is for it to use less resources, improve UAC, and increase security. The last thing I want is a total UI overhaul or total rewrite making 98% of my programs run slower in emulation mode, or not run at all.
If you are in marketing, and have a dog of a product to sell, a good tactic is to focus attention on the jam that you'll be selling tomorrow. Of course you don't actually have the jam yet, and you're still selling borg-daschund, so you can't just come out and say 'hey we have this radical NEW NEW softwares so much much better than the old tired limp one you are using to wash your spreadsheets'. So you behave like a hose. A drip here. A leak there. And before you know it all the people are clustered around the tiny tiny pastures of green in a desert of grey, saying 'wowser, check that colour scheme out'. Such a pity that they can't click to discover that the buttons don't do anything, but that's someone elses job and Bob is on an extended five year coffee break.
Don't get too excited people. Remember that Microsoft is incapable of shifting an OS in the timescales that we've seen casually prognosticated. By the beginning of 2010 Vista will have hit its sweet spot in terms of hardware, and the drivers will be mature. That would be the worst time of all to introduce Vista2. Look to about 2012 for the next version, once Vista has peaked.
Microsoft are in a monopolists market, there's no need for them to improve Vista in the short term despite the screams of pain from users. And anyway, the way to maintain dominance when you are the market leader is to force changes, so that your competition looks like followers; there's no way back for them.
Executive summary: don't wait, at best this is a distraction. Go make some software. You be the leaders now.
Yeah, you're the only one using those applications.
Erik Dalén
Ah, nope.
Slashdot is CmdrTaco's blog.
This
To be honest, I don't care what it looks like. So long as there's a "classic" option, that'll do, but I have much bigger problems that are not addressed by releasing videos/screenshots.
I don't care what it looks like SO LONG as it has something I need. It doesn't look like it. In fact, it looks like they jiggered the Vista menus and toolbars a bit, renamed a few items, etc. These are changes I expect to see between SVN versions 7348738 and 7348740 of a window manager, not a "show-off" of the next version of Windows.
The main problem I have with Windows is the laughable security - just look at that warning next to "no anti-virus software found"... those sorts of messages make me crease up.
Antivirus software is like employing a $30/year, 500lb security guard to sit on the front step of your house and "confront" burglars, but who can't actually do anything to them because he can't stand up (and even if he could, why would he bother at $30/year?), while leaving all your doors and windows open and a ladder up to your bedroom out the back with a large sign that says "Free stuff inside" attached to it. Security Centre and UAC are like a nosey neighbour who you can't get rid of (without a lot of hassle) that likes to tell you that your security guard didn't come into work today or that some people walked out with tons of your gear but he didn't bother to call the police or anything.
Also, I hate the pathetic attempts to set standards for everyone, rather than letting the users adjust Windows to their liking. Even Vista's "classic" mode isn't like it should be, it's impossible to get things exactly how they were in XP. And somehow the OS thinks it "knows better" than you. I daresay it does most of the time but the point is that sometimes IT DOESN'T and I need to override it, whether that's simple and personal (I don't WANT to know that I don't have antivirus, I don't WANT a new start menu) or complicated and technical (e.g. if I'm setting modelines in X). Don't like the new ribbon? Well.. tough really. We've splatted it over everything from Paint to Wordpad.
I don't know if the release of Windows 7 is trying to cover for Vista's "mistake" (which, of course, MS has done quite well out of anyway because of the usual reasons) or whether they really think that people will want to upgrade to Vista and then to Windows 7 within the space of three or four years. Tell me that WinFS is in it, tell me it doesn't NEED antivirus or a third-party firewall any more (you could still install it, obviously, but if it didn't need it, who would?), tell me you've condensed all the versions into one quite-cheap version with no artificial limitations, tell me it's got some radical new ideas that nobody's seen before, tell me anything... but don't show me screenshots that I could mock up in seconds using Vista's menu and a quick Photoshop. Don't show me "features" that would take about 20 minutes each to write once the windowing/toolbar code was properly seperated out into new libraries. Don't show me even more of the same rubbish that I can't stand Vista for.
In the meantime, I've got to print off that antivirus screenshot and pin it on my wall to laugh at occasionally.
The wha?
Tip: With ram at around $20 a gig, the people running around screaming that Vista won't run on ten bucks (512meg) of RAM should probably not be considering a $200 OS. It doesnt run on the free toy you get with a happy meal either.
DAMN YOU RONALD MCDONALD... DAMN YOUUUUU!
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
Unfortunately for Microsoft Windows XP is the first OS to "work well enough" which makes me ask, why would I update? IE 8 certainly looks nice along with the enhanced GUI features, but they aren't so large an improvement that I'm going going to spend $120 to upgrade.
As long as OOo, Firefox, Thunderbird and Gimp work on my computer, I don't see any pressing need to upgrade. They're going to have to pull out something much better for Windows 7 to get my hard-earned cash.
Even getting it "free" when I upgrade my computer isn't enough of an incentive because my computer's speed seems good enough at 2.67 GHz with 2 GB of RAM. I've also only used 32 GB out of 201 GB (I actually have more then that but they're on a separate partition for Linux which I need to develop in sometimes for university).
Having worked on the Win7 team, I'd say Vista to Win7 felt more like the difference between 2000 and XP. There are a couple new big features (Win7 has multitouch support, BitLocker has been dramatically improved, etc.), a variety of UI tweaks and tricks (the new theme picker, the modified system tray, and more of that sort), and some mostly-behind-the-scenes changes (faster bootup and hibernation on multicore machines, UAC by default now elevates without prompting for Microsoft-signed executables, and a few others).
It *is* an improvement, but could arguably be described as a refined and matured version of Vista, with a couple new features. It's a bigger change, especially from the user perspective, than XP RTM to XP SP2, but much smaller than XP SP2 to Vista.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
1. Windows 1
2. Windows 2
3. Windows 3 / 3.10 / 3.11
4. Windows 95
4.1 Windows 98
4.9 Windows ME
Windows NT (Started at 3 to be on parity with regular windows at the time)
3. NT 3.1 / 3.5 /3.51
4. NT 4
5. Windows 2000
5.1 Windows XP
5.2 Windows XP 64 / Server Edition
6. Windows Vista
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
This is Microsoft we're talking about.
This is a deliberate and orchestrated part of Microsoft's marketing campaign that will gradually intensify up until the time when it is foisted onto the general public as the next "most secure version ever" release (together with several increasingly crippled "home" or "business" versions) of the next iteration of WindowsNT (WinNT7).
Do not be fooled by this "leaked" bullshit.
The problem of these screenshots is that they show us nothing that wasn't there in Windows 95. Of course, I'm talking functionality, not looks. The Windows 95 dull beveled style interface is more usable too, I'm afraid. Beveled is the most usable interface style in history, ironically because it is boring, and outrageously because it offers more depth than UIs developed for higher resolutions, with their flat buttons and all.
The problem of MS is that the desktop metaphor works. You have a desktop, you have icons on it, you click an icon to launch a program. From an UI point of view, there's not much too it. So how do you sell a new cycle of your product when you're unable to offer true new stuff like a history machine or database file system?
These screenshots show nothing but that same ability to launch the same old programs in windows. With one exception: the ribbon (or tabbed toolbars or whatever you want to call it). There even seem to be mini ribbons on things like IE8. This, I think, is an interesting development, as MS seems be be targeting differentiation from Linux and Mac style UIs. I for one think both the old menu style is kind of broken (but easily fixed if the standard lineup is updated to our times) while the new ribbon style also has many problems. Problems are: abandonment of all the sweet we got from IBM Common User Access standards (less consistency throughout applications-but better, optimized usability for single programs you mastered), less screen estate for the content, too many options in view for basic users (by adding lots of icons/functionality to the normal view, it weirdly seems for power users - yet then they remove the menus from standard view to reduce complexity). One of its strongest points is context-changes. The weakest that one app will have ribbon, the next traditional menus, and it's a mess now with two systems. Overall, it has some advantages and disadvantages, and it will be interesting to see MS pursue this idea and use it on their user base, and see what happens. Me, as a View->Toolbars option I'd never object to it, but I'm not sure about defaulting it because I rather dislike CUA being lost. I don't like the mess with the hiding of tradional menus/alt key, perhaps they should go for a single topbar on the desktop, Mac OS style.
Overal, I'm not entirely convinced yet this is a real improvement, or just another alteration to defeat the problem of the 2nd paragraph, which reminds me too much of football teams slightly changing their kits every season, to sell "new" kits to their fan base. But I applaud MS for at least trying to combine it. I guess this is one of the good side-effects of MS becoming less relevant. They will have to innovate.
Who cares?
Apple (who is even more proprietary than Microsoft) has seen amazingly significant growth in their user base.
Desktop Linux (this is the year! again.) is growing.
People don't want to pay $200 for their operating system and another $400 (or more) for application software, just to write a few letters, surf the web, balance their checkbook and (maybe) run spreadsheets or create presentations. That's just not worth $600.
Ubuntu, Fedora, or what have you, and you get all this for free.
Vista (the OS that nobody wants) is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Windows 7 will suffer the same fate.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
I seem to recall Microsoft like that idea so much that they paid their former CEO a huge amount of money to look at you, wag his tail, and walk away.
Delicious!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
You mean that if somebody can figure out how to forge a microsoft signature or infect a signed file they can get carte blance access to your machine.
Spoken like someone who has absolutely no concept on how certificates and signing works.
Read up on certificates and signing code, then come back and say you're sorry.