Submitted by In spite of (or, thanks to?) Windows Vista, a recent release and all, Windows 7 has been getting a lot attention all over the web – even in the non-tech mainstream and print media. Since Microsoft is holding its cards close, people try to get by on little droplets of information, side remarks by Microsoft employees, slip-of-the-tongues, and, of course, plain-old forgery. PC World thinks these screenshots come from a scheduled May 2008 Windows 7 build, but if you look at them with a little more attention to detail, you will easily spot they are – at best – random mockups from Microsoft, or, – most likely – fake.The Blogger weblog “Winners of Life” has published 17 screenshots that are supposedly coming from the latest milestone build of Windows 7. The screenshots have this UFO quality to them – you know, we live in a world where even the cheapest of photo cameras (and videocameras too) can shoot high quality pictures, yet almost every UFO or alien photograph is blurry, dark, and ambiguous. Flickr is filled with 12 megapixel photographs of red-eyed pets, but a photograph of what could be the most profound discovery ever? Let’s shoot those with a 1930s camera. That’s the category these Windows 7 screenshots fall into.
There are more clues as to why these appear to be fake. Every image shows a completely different approach to user interface design, and while Microsoft may not exactly be the bastion of graphical consistency in user interfaces, these shots take it a few steps too far. There are 17 shots, and 16 of them show a completely different type of desktop. It is highly unlikely that Microsoft would release a milestone build of Windows 7 with 16 different user interfaces.
Another clue that these are decidedly fake is that one of them makes use of the nuoveXT 2 icon set – the ‘home’ and ‘network’ icons are clearly taken from this icon set. When it comes to icon design, Microsoft has a long-standing partnership with The Icon Factory, which designed the icons for both Windows XP as well as Windows Vista, so it is not likely they will resort to using LGPL icons for Windows 7.
The final nail in the coffin, though, is the shot of the winver dialog. The Windows version reported in this dialog is the Windows 7 Milestone 1 build, released somewhere in January of 2008 – not some May 2008 build as PC World suggests – and there are screenshots out there to prove it.
The error here is over at PC World, and not at the actual source blog. The source blog does not claim the screenshots are somehow real (nor does it state that they are fake), so you can hardly blame them for it. Instead of assuming leaked screenshots are real, and then stating “…but they might be fake”, they, and other websites, should do it the other way around: assume that leaked screenshots are fake, and then state, “…but they might be real”.
Windows 7 is probably not all that distinguishable from Windows Vista at this point, but who knows – like I said, these shots might be real.
These look very much like someone’s speculation on the coming interface, rather than actual working screenshots. In fact, some of these have the look and feel of an open-source desktop that has been modified to look Windows-like. This is possible in pretty much every DE and window manager for X.org. It could also be skins created for Stardock products.
I seriously doubt any of this came out of Redmond.
yeah, half those look like heavily modified E17 desktops.
Well it wouldn’t be the first time MS has borrowed ideas from it’s rivals.
(joke)
I’m a little confused why Thom would even linked the article if he himself views them as being fake.
Or did I misunderstand Thom’s blog?
Because I want you to make up your own mind?
When I’m in a creative mood, I can see elements of RiscOS, ROX, gOS and KDE. Looks familiar. 🙂
yeah, can definitely see ROX.
So basically screw all usability by making everything transparent, good idea even if it is only mockups. Then again that didn’t stop MS from doing it in vista as well so these are probably not that far from where MS wants to go. Some of those were pretty though.
In fact, they’re going to make the monitor transparent. That way, you’ll be able to see the dust accumulating in the corner of your cubicle behind your monitor. Transparent text on a transparent field, over a transparent background with a transparent monitor. This is part of their new push toward corporate transparency.
I only hope by 2010 Linux really is ready for the desktop.
Linux as an operating system + Gnome/KDE is already ready for the desktop. Whether your favorite application runs on Linux or not is a totally different issue. Distributions can’t control that.
For the record I was being sarcastic. Notice the little
As for applications. It would be nice if more developers would support Linux, but most of them are steadfast in only supporting Windows at the moment.
Edited 2008-05-27 21:54 UTC
by hussam
Linux as an operating system + Gnome/KDE is already ready for the desktop. Whether your favorite application runs on Linux or not is a totally different issue. Distributions can’t control that.
———
i think it was a joke…
Edited 2008-05-28 01:27 UTC
Lil backwards, it’s more a matter of whether the desktop is ready for *nix.
‘nough said.
Windows is not ready for the desktop. The screenshots looks pretty, whether they are fake or not, but it doesn’t tell if Windows 7 will be ready for the desktop. Changing the look is not enough. It looks interesting though. 2008 may be the year Windows is ready on the desktop.
Edited 2008-05-27 14:04 UTC
Agreed but (assuming these are real for arguments sake) the first thing most people ask for when told about an upcoming release of Windows or a GNU/Linux distro is screen shots.
Fact is, screen shots grab peoples immediate attention – especially in terms of mainstream (for want a better term) OSs. Then people will start reading into feature list.
You only have to look at the amount of people who dismissed KDE4 (granted it’s not an OS) down to it’s default theme to see what I mean.
what did we say about this expression “ready for the desktop”, i thought we were going to help eradicate it.
Windows is not ready for the desktop.
LOL That must be the funniest comment ever.
Look pal, Windows is on the desktop.
LOL That must be the funniest comment ever.
Look pal, Windows is on the desktop.
It’s just the same kind of pointless argument people say about Linux not being ready for the desktop either. Truth is, it is already on the desktop.
Although XP is ready for my desktop…Vista sure ain’t :3
I was watching a panel session from the collaboration summit the other day, and one of the PC vendors actually made a relative comparison of the percentage of units returned by the customer for various OSes which they offered. May have been Dell… but I can’t remember for sure. Interestingly, the return rate for Linux units was in between that of XP and Vista. More people return PCs loaded with Microsoft’s latest OS than return Linux units. Five years ago, I would have been shocked by such a statement. Today, I believe it and am not even particularly surprised. 🙂
Edited 2008-05-27 21:44 UTC
Can they concentrate on the core OS?
Any info on memory consumption, different scheduler?
Any manageable security? Not just primitives?
Good shell?
I’m with you. My biggest issue with Windows has always been the core of the OS and not the GUI. There’s a lot of room for improvement under the hood, especially compared to other operating systems built on even older UNIX foundations. Vista was, in my personal opinion, a huge step backward regarding core stability and security. Yesterday I read a story about a glaring security hole that ONLY targets Vista; XP and previous are perfectly safe from it. See below:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/26/0257213&from=rss
That’s a pretty serious glitch, if you ask me. Granted it’s only one example, but it’s certainly not the first nor the most dangerous flaw in a Redmond OS.
It’s a pretty lame exploit, because it requires physical access to the machine to accomplish. If you have physical access, there are a lot worse things that you could do.
Astute observation, but I think you missed my point. I used that example because it was fresh in my mind, but as I said it was one of countless flaws in a commercial operating system that should have been found in beta at the latest. A flaw is still a flaw, no matter how you spin it.
Uh.. that’s not a flaw. If you have full administrative access to the system (which is implied by being able to boot into a linux CD), it’s not a flaw in the OS to be able to do anything a full administrator can do (such as replacing OS files). This is not a flaw and isn’t ‘fixable’ short of establishing a hardware root of trust system such that no software that is uncertified can ever run with privilege on the system.
Ok my intention was never to debate the intricacies of security holes, rather to provide an example towards my point of Microsoft’s poor track record. That being said, the example I used is indeed a flaw, and a big one. First, it should never be possible to gain system wide access simply by renaming a file. At the very least, the OS should simply ignore a file name change and run the same set of instructions it would have with the original name, else error out and run nothing. Second, this exploit only affects Vista, not XP, not 2000, not even 98 for god’s sake. This clearly indicates a huge step backward in securing an OS from local attacks.
Edited 2008-05-29 00:22 UTC
You can’t rename the file in question until you already have system-level access. Once you have that access, you can do a lot more aggressive stuff than just renaming files.
Linux + KDE4 FTW.
Linux + KDE4 FTW.
Tastes differ. I find those screenshots quite pretty. On the other hand I dislike how the default theme in KDE4 looks like. It’s just plain hideous. I don’t really like KDE4 as a whole either but..well, ymmv
No matter if they are real or not, I just hope they will give up on the glossy shiny shitty glary look one day.
If everything shines and blinks, how can you keep a reasonable amount of overview?
A “flat” looking GUI can also be modern, who the hell said that everything has to contain color gradients and glassy effects… it’s just ugly.
Look at the OS news logo. And the rest of the site. Plain and simple. And strong. And good. No glass, no gloss. Perfectly clear. I hope all those GUIs may come back to that one day…
Ah, just like the great ‘mockups’ of Windows Longhorn!
And look how much of that great vision made it through…
It’s (almost) fake.
Most of “screens” are Origami Experience 2.0 (3.0?
) concepts. Not a Win7.
I thought that too. But Origami Experience 2.0 looks like this: http://origamiproject.com/blogs/team_blog/archive/2008/01/07/29519….
Thse fake screenshots are by some guy named xazac that posted his concept pics to AeroXP:
http://www.aeroxp.org/board/index.php?showtopic=11072&st=0
To sell Windows 7, I would start with a completely new GUI. Vista’s GUI is terrible under every aspect, not only visually. I can’t find anyone who likes it.
A completely new, pleasing GUI will make a good selling point… copy that from Apple!
Despite my many gripes with windows, I actually like the windows GUI (many would tell me that’s the reason I am also a KDE user). Though aero is unnecessary and I generally just go with the “classic” win9x look. It behaves much more responsively than aero and doesn’t get in the way of what I am doing. I find the layout of the taskbars etc to be intuitive, though that may partially be due to familiarity. The style windows uses is rather standard though. As a former OS/2 user, win9x didn’t feel like such a radical change.
On the other hand, I, unlike you, have never taken a liking to the OSX gui. I find it a bit awkward to be honest. The dock i much bigger than it needs to be, and on a laptop or small monitor, it consumes alot of screen real estate for my liking. I also dislike the window minimizing behavior of the dock, in that it doesn’t label things, so if for example, you have a bunch of documents open, they are indistinguishable when minimized because the thumbnails the dock uses are way too small to try and read text. I also have never been comfortable with the menu-bar-on-top philosophy, as it seems counter intuitive to me to have a menubar at the top of the screen if the window you are using it not full screen and at the bottom. Lastly, I never got used to the way the mac gui handles multiple opened windows on the desktop. The stacking and manipulation of windows feels awkward.
But anyways, I was not trying to bash OSX here, my point was simply that as someone who needs to use windows on a near daily basis, I would hate to see and windows 7 gui that resembled the mac. If I liked the OSX design, I would use OSX
. Some of us actually do like windows interface design.
Gasp! Are you serious? I thought I was the only one who didn’t like the OSX appearance. I mean yeah, I like the font rendering, and some of the neat eye candy, but all in all I just don’t care for it. The whiteness, the brushed metal, the glass buttons… meh.
The dock as an application launcher if fine, but that is about as much as I would ever use it. Glad to know I am not alone in this.
I don’t like the OSX GUI much, either. I’ve never liked the Mac GUI design much. Which is funny, since I adore nextsteps and it’s rather similar in a lot of aspects. I don’t mind the Amiga GUI, either. There is just something about the Mac GUI that annoys me…
I hate how glitzy every major OS is getting. It’s sad. It’s like people are reverting completely back to the “ooo.. shiny! ug want!” phase of evolution.
🙁
I still wonder why the OS X menu bar messed up the fixed positions of the File, Edit, etc., menus in Classic Mac OS by inserting the app name (which doubles as the app-specific menu) in between the Apple and File menus.
I used to like it as well, but after 13 years I got tired 🙂
This isn’t the point. The point is that the Mac’s GUI is so attractive, that people buy Macs just for it. This is the lesson Microsoft should learn: make Windows something that people will be happy to buy.
Then, you should (preferably) make it something people will be happy to use, too. Sure, OSX isn’t perfect and doesn’t meet everybody’s tastes, but most people is happy with it.
And this is true for most products, otherwise you won’t find them in a store for long.
(Raises hand)
I’ve used every version of Windows since 3.11, and I like Vista’s GUI the best by *far.* I’ve also used every Fedora release since core 5, and Ubuntu since 7.
Vista makes it much easier for me to get work done. And it took all of two weeks of use to get completely familiar with it. YMMV.
Prepare yourselves for years of leaked W7 screenshots… which turn out to be nothing… multi-page analyses of off-hand, three word remarks by Microsoft execs… which turn out to be wrong… endless speculations regarding what Microsoft will do because they are so smart… or alternately because they are so stupid, or perhaps because they are so scared. Gird yourself for endless predictions of release dates, which come and go without event. Rumors of features, always unconfirmed. Rumors of cut features (ditto). Phantom benchmarks sent back from the future (YMMV). And, of course, predictions of Microsoft’s demise, or ultimate triumph depending on the success or failure of this “bet the company” move.
And count on your news source: “OSNews” to bring it all to you blow by blow as the information becomes available.
Or… just blow it all off. It probably doesn’t make any difference. 🙂
Edited 2008-05-27 16:41 UTC
Thank you!
We do know that the next generation of Windows will be built around a stripped-back ‘microkernel’ codenamed MinWin. …As ‘proof of concept’, Traut showed an iteration of MinWin consisting of just 100 system files, which occupied 25MB of hard disk space and ran in 40MB of RAM.
25MB hard disk space? 40MB RAM? They need to send some folks over to QNX and see what a truly stripped-back OS looks like. Or just look up that old floppy download QNX offered, complete with OS, web browser, and TCP/IP stack.
Uhm, the name microkernel has nothing to do with the actual size of the kernel, but with the way it works.
I believe that the confusion arises from the fact that Traut spoke extensively about microkernels in that talk, referring to the virtualization platform he was presenting, and then introduced MinWin. I made the same mistake, at first, thinking that it was supposed to be a microkernel.
However, that still leaves the issue of 25MB of files, and 40MB of RAM being barely enough to run a simple http server. Linux devices do this and more with < 4MB of files and 4-8 MB of RAM. Presumably, the *BSDs and others can do that, as well.
The goal of the MinWin project was not size, but modularity. I’m looking forward to seeing how things will pan out if/when size becomes a goal.
Bad choice of title, sorry. My point was more that “stripping it to the bare essentials” requires so many resources.
wait, wtf. I’ve run windows xp in 32mb of ram with free ram left over. Stripped back to nothing, it was using 24mb of ram. I could still launch most programs I use and get online and everything.
I’m not impressed.
So basically what they do is rape all the screen estate by features in all corners (and everywhere else), increase the size of everything, and add transparency to…everything?
Count me out.
I like the look of Vista. I like the ability to adjust or change color, size etc. My system is fairly complex, yet Vista runs smooth. I kept XP and Ubuntu as back-ups, but never use them.
Tried OSX not comfortable with it, I guess with time it would work for me. Really miss the right mouse button. I use the VistaStart menu add on, everthing at your finger tips. Vista works for me.
Precisely how much do you think would survive from now until it goes gold? Judging from Whistler and Longhorn, I’d wager not a whole lot.
Edited 2008-05-27 20:09 UTC