Various sources are posting screenshots of the upcoming beta release of Longhorn, Microsoft’s succesor to Windows XP. IE7 shots are also included. Due to the Slashdot-effect, mirrors are already available. Original source | mirror 1 | mirror 2. My take: Too much transparency.
This is from the post-Beta 1 branch. Also note that this is still not the final UI. Beta 1 will be mostly a developer/IT Pro release with about 1/3 of the planned features. Most user-oriented features will come with Beta 2.
Typical MS apologist’s disclaimer.
No, it’s not… do you remember Windows XP? The UI used until later betas was just a placeholder.
You should probably see this UI just as a technical implementation.
(Icons will probably be this ones in most places, like XP too. the folder icons designed to show the folder’s content and other stuff possible with WinFX for example… but I could be wrong and this ones may be just placeholders too.)
They are really floundering for inspiration are’nt they?
They changed the copy dialog!! <g>
Actually what happened to all the menus?
Previous versions of Windows seem to have a menu for every open window.
What now?
Buttons and Tabs aplenty or maybe heavy reliance on contextual menus.
Wonder if there is a way to set transparency levels, especially in the active window.
Microsoft never had good tast in ui designe. The best they ever did was Win95 (compared to win 3.11 and the macs of that time not to mention CDE) after that they never ever made a significant improvement again. Windows XPs Luna isn’t that nice. I use WindowBlinds to make it look good. With Longhorn Microsoft is going the rout of lots o useles eycandy, just like with XP. Looks good for 5 minutes, they its just fucking anoying.
That’s not plain transparency, did no one notice? There’s a smoothing filter applied to the items in the background, which allows for much more transparency to be used, without disturbing IMHO. I like the style.
This transparency/translucency is the new drop-shadow.
Remember when all the sites in the mid-90’s used drop-shadow fonts, images, everything?
Now it’s the same with transparency: overused and not really necessary. Just makes the UI more confusing, especially for people like my grandma who has trouble already figuring out the GUI.
Except very specific use cases, transparency is just useless eye-candy, I hope it’s a short-lived fad. At least it should be easy to be turned off, or so I hope.
It still looks like Windows.
And come to think of it, keeping the interface familiar does make sense considering that for most users Computer==Windows and they are used to the interface.
What’s more interesting is the question what new features Longhorn is going to deliver. I know this may sound like a troll, but it’s not meant like that, but with all the hype and bashing, the anouncments of new features and the pulling back of new features I have a really hard time keeping up with what is going to be new in Longhorn.
So if anybody who knows more about it could give or link to an overview about the new stuff in Longhorn this would really be appreciated.
How come every operating system these days has to be as ugly with all sorts of annoying effects as Mac OS always has had
I don’t want flashy things, round corners, transparency and stuff like that.
I want a fast no nonsense OS with a lot of software.
I sure miss Amiga Workbench 1.3
It’s quite well known that with windows you can downgrade the UI to something snappier or simpler.
The funny thing is that a lot of people considered the Windows 2000 to be over done GUIwise compared to Windows NT4.
Personally i like all the bells and whistles ‘ON’ even at the expense (within reasonableness) of a little performance hit
Windows NT: http://lhcb-doc.web.cern.ch/lhcb-doc/userdocs/images/image7.gif
Amiga Workbench : http://www.harryfisch.de/amiga/wb13.jpg
Ah, that Workbench GUI bought back good memories
a nice simple GUI, with none of the unneeded fluff.
When I was using Solaris, even with the nice KDE and GNOME gui that was available, I found myself constantly moving back to CDE – its maybe ugly to some people, but it did the job with minimum fuss and bother.
Why was this original comment moderated down? A person is entitled to their opinion, even if you disagree with it. People do read the screen where it asks you not to moderate comments down simply for this reason, don’t they?
It’s certainly a valid opinion that not everybody likes bells and whistles on their interface, just simplicity and the ability to get the job done without needlessly draining system resources and forcing upgrades. It’s still going to be interesting to see just what the final minimum system requirements for this next Windows release will be.
On a side note, I quite liked the Workbench 1.x GUI. The colours were fine, and it was designed to work well on a television output as well as a monitor. Workbench/AmigaOS 2 and above were drab looking in comparison, dull shades of grey everywhere.
“Why is it that every household appliance and automobile that they come out with these days has to have fancy industrial design and superfluous design features? I don’t want something that aspires to aesthetic beauty, I just want something that works. I want a plain white rectangular plastic toaster and a boring econobox of a car with good gas mileage. I sure miss the Toyota Tercel.”
You may disagree that this new Windows look and feel has aesthetic merit, and desire something with a more minimalistic design, but I think that most people want the things they use everyday to be both beautiful and functional. They’re trying for beauty. They may have missed the mark, but I’m glad they’re trying.
Anyone know the name of the font in these screenshots?
I have always wondered that.
Maybe it is one of the six new Opentype fonts that MS will be shipping with Longhorn, supposedly intended to improve readability (and then they add a blurred translucent background behind them…)
See samples in http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=78683
If it’s the same font that MS has been using in the previous builds, the name is SegoeUI
From the screenshots, this is what I see
1) A new icon set, that is so much the same as the Aqua icons from KDE and OSX
2) Shadows around the windows, just like in OSX
3) Transparency, just like in KDE and Gnome
4) Ugly theme with buttons that are way to high and colors that do not match (sorry, no reference here)
Hmmm, everybody must be so excited to get this update / upgrade or should we call it service pack ?
So what happens if all windows are maximized? Yup.. plenty of (very) transparent window titlebars on top of each other. Won’t that be a pretty potpourri?!
The wallpaper is nice, that’s about as much credit as I can give MS. Seems to me that MS’ photocopiers are doing a very poor job on copying OS X! 🙂
Actually the transparency is not that bad. I like it. Would be very nice to have it in Gnome/KDE before Longhorn release.
And oh, it will require a very speedy videocard it seems… no way it will pull such tricks with older hardware. Wonder if the author of the screenshots provided some info about his hardware?
So, Aero is the new GUI standard? Good to see they don’t even respect it themselves (see the media player).
This is one of the worst aproaches I have ever seen UI wise. They moved the close (X) button to the left, so noone can just blindly close the windows by quickly moving the mouse to the right top corner of the screen.
Everything is just too transparent. Even the window borders to make it even harder to resize a window.
I thought, it would be hard to create something that is even worse than the WinXP themes. But they did it … again …
If that’s the new revolutionary OS (I know, it’s a beta, but it should show the way), the so called “innovation”, then OSS-Desktops have nothing to fear. Even better: MS shovels its own grave.
I wonder what MS did during the last 5 years (XP was only a better service pack to win2k). Seems like the company became too big to really push out revolutionary new things.
They moved the close (X) button to the left, so noone can just blindly close the windows by quickly moving the mouse to the right top corner of the screen.
Did you even look at those shots? The window buttons are still all in the top-right corner, so I have no idea where you got that idea from.
Actually, I would applaud if they had moved the close button to the top-left.
I think you misunderstood.
The poster is not talking about moving the window buttons to the left corner but about leaving them at the right corner but moving them a little bit away from the actual corner.
The problem with this is that if the window is maximised you can’t just move your mouse to the top right corner to close it, but actually have to navigate your mouse to the close button.
Uhm, yes, that’s what I actually meant. Thanks for clarifying this.
I think he meant that they moved it to the left as in not anymore in the topright corner exactly, not as in moving it to the topleft corner.
That would be a bad thing ™ when the window is maximized because of Fitt’s law blah blah…
But actually, the close button seems to be aligned with the content of the window on the right edge, thus I’m pretty sure that when maximized it will cover the northeast corner of the screen.
As someone else said, though, I’m worried about the readability of a stack of maximized, half-transparent, pixel-shader diffusing windows. We’ll see when the definitive UI comes out, for the moment it seems quite tacky and distracting.
Hmmm, everybody must be so excited to get this update / upgrade or should we call it service pack ?
Nah it’s a theme pack no more no less regarding all the scrapped “features”.
I’m not sure it’s relevant but I’d like to know how the titlebar transparency relates to GUI design guidelines and other HIG. I found the transparent blur quite disturbing and it makes text less readable, especially the ‘search’ box in one of the screenshots.
Oh, and aesthetically the inside of the window doesn’t quite fit the window frame. But that’s just my taste.
The only thing I wonder is – have they lost their only small icon designer? Come on, these “administrative” icons are YEARS old! They can be replaced for something as big as Longhorn, can’t they? Because they look really really ugly.
the trashcan and “Report a Bug” …
That’s selfexplanatory, isn’t it.
..if WinXP would have a useful theme engine ;o)
But nothing new, at the first sight!?!
This probably isn’t anything like the UI that will be shipped with Longhorn. The betas closer to release (sometime next year maybe) will probably start exposing what the final interface will look like.
It is more likely that this UI is made to show off the features of the underlying technology.
I find it amazing how the engineers over at Apple can implement the same types of eye candy as shown in these screenshots, yet somehow manage to do it a bazillion times better. Also, from the looks of the taskbar and start button, they’ve been studying those Dashboard widgets, too.
Still looks more like a window blinds theme.
The taskbar from Project Looking Glass would look much better.In fact i had hoped MS would come up with something similar as Looking_glass especially because they have had plenty of time.
http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/details.xml
My problem with them is that, while they look arguably nice, they seem more interested in showing off than being useful. That transparency makes readability difficult and has no real usefulness. (as a side note, take into account that Mac OS X 10.1 had translucent chromes -although much, much more opaque- for unfocused windows, and they came back to full opaque chromes in later versions… Wonder why).
As for Mac OS X mimicking, drop shadows, etc. Apple did not invent them, so stop the zealoting. This comes from an exclusively Mac OS X user, BTW. While there might be some copying in aqua reflections, who cares if the UI experience is usable and beautiful (or not).
OMG, they replaced the windows tree list with those evil Mac style triangles! If there’s one thing that really annoys me about Apple’s operating systems it’s that.
Check out the scary faceless types in the ‘User accounts and parental controls’-icon !
http://elliottback.com/wp/wp-content/lh1r5yr.png
Note that screenshots don’t tell you the complete story. In fact they tell you almost nothing.
Most changes happen in the code of course, not in the visual styles.
Give them a little bit of credit.
The graphical themes you see now are probably just tests. Most likely you’ll even have the option again to make it look like Windows 2000 again.
And if not… it’s just a theme, it can be changed.
And most likely other things, like the blur and transparancy can be altered too of course.
I just had to chuckle when I saw some of the sites that they decided to visit for the screenshots.
Note that screenshots don’t tell you the complete story. In fact they tell you almost nothing.
Maybe not.But what’s left of their development road?
Give them a little bit of credit.
They have to earn it like anybody else.Maybe you actually meant the benefit of the doubt?
Just looking pictures of new Longhorn won’t tell much. They haven’t changed much from previous developer versions. Lots of people are complaining about eye candy, but in Microsoft case you can change how much you want to use. I like eye candy as long as it doesn’t slower system too much. Hard to say anything from pictures, most changes are deep inside and can only be seen when first programs that really use these new features comes out.
New IE looks good and will have all same features as most browser now so it will be good basic browser. Gives lot of push for Opera and Firefox to develop new useful features. Might even bring some old users back since it has same features as Firefox.
Anonymous wrote:
“I sure miss Amiga Workbench 1.3”
And you call OS X ugly? Workbench 1.3 was the ugliest UI the Amiga ever had. 2.x and 3.x were lightyears better.
Sorry not 1.3 but 3.1 🙂
My mistake.
And 3.1 was absolutly a better GUI than Mac OSX is today, to much Barbie world over OSX
Yep looks like KDE/Gnome to me, the great inovators are at it again. Mind you, if you have never see Linux/KDE/Gnome before it would look new! They woudn’t copy would they?
Actually the transparency is not that bad. I like it. Would be very nice to have it in Gnome/KDE before Longhorn release.
Actually, KDE already has it.
Show me. I’ve never seen transparent window borders with blurring. Please, show me!
It looks like a poorly themed windows xp.
WTF is up with the IE7 menu bar ? Is MS so desperate to make themselves “different” that they will trash their own UI guidelines ?
I’m slowly losing interest in longhorn.
a *NEW* version of windows with more and more layers of useless trash (not that I care), How long can they pile on layers of trash without addressing those fundamental underlying flaws. Heck this day and age they still can’t boast a true multiuser os..
wasnt one of the big gui things supposed to be a sidebar with a big clock? where did it go?
with winfs out most of the under-the-hood stuff will not interest most users. but if its still in they have now seperated the gui from the core files so no more having to wait for patches to be translated to your language. kinda how you can change language in kde and log back in
That is too much transparency. There are things that are useful transparent, and there are those who aren’t.
Also the tabs and the menus moving and all. So confusing. I like the “menu bar always on top of the window”. We’ll have apps that have menu bars above and below tabs and other things. Eeek, talk about usability.
Also, 6 years to add eye candy to windows xp? Geez. I haven’t seen a single thing there that would make me change back from kde, and I don’t even think that most people using windows xp will change. Hopefully, this time they’ll get activation right, and stop piracy, and open the floodgates for linux to spread.
I think it looks much better than the XP themes, so score one there. On the other hand I’m not one for a whole bunch of eye candy so when the time comes and we all must run Longhorn I’ll probably find it amusing for about half and hourn and then turn it all off in order to save me as much resources as possible (call me old fashioned, but I like having resources aplenty).
One thing though that cought my eye was this:
http://elliottback.com/wp/wp-content/lh8r9xe.png
Notice the way they finally have managed to handle long filenames, such as the Adminstrator directory, in the console. <– Notice the sarcasm 🙂
Maybe it’s just me but isn’t it about time they finally managed to handle long filenames as long filenames in a console. After all they were introduced in Win95 and now 10 years later they still fall back to ‘ADMINI~1’ even though we’re looking at next-gen Windows.
Cheers.
They seem to be making the same mistake as Apple in using transparency for the window tab. When the window is in the background you still need to be able to spot it quickly and bring it to the front. For that, the tab is what is important, and in a way, the part that is still active. So it should be opaque.
But then Apple went and threw out the baby. No need to get rid of transparency altogether. Make the tab opaque and the rest of the window transparent.
I still think Microsoft’s best GUI is Windows 98/2000. I even make my XP boxes look like the “classic” style. For me, it works the best. And as long as Microsoft still allows for the classic style in Longhorn, I’ll be happy. I also agree that transparency will be a fad.
If Microsoft forces something equivalent to the default XP theme in Longhorn, then I’ll be sticking with Linux or XP for quite some time.
Amen! The first thing I do with XP is to turn off pretty much every sound, animation, etc, that can be turned off, and switch the atrocious Start menu to 2K-style.
I don’t see my company doing anything special with Longhorn as long as it runs “legacy” code acceptably and doesn’t add anything useful (it doesn’t appear to.) We use no XP-specific stuff either, for that matter, since XP doesn’t have enough market share _yet_ to drop the other platforms. That’s why .NET, even if it’s finally shipped w/ the new OS, is still a non-player in commercial desktop programs, what is usually called a “dismal failure” in non-MS products.
Windows has always had the problem that pretty much any action takes at least one extra click/keystroke/modal dialog compared to Mac OS: XP’s default look takes that to the next level by making everything slower and the extra buttons much harder to find and identify as well. Somehow I doubt Longhorn will fix that.
Just admit it. Longhorn is just so going to beat Linux that it isn’t funny anymore.
ha ha ha ha tha was funny … (i guess this must have been a joke ?!)
Wow. Some lucky dudes get a hold of Longhorn beta and the best they can come up with is posting screenshots of My Computer and mspaint.
How about running Acid2 test with IE7? How about any other info on IE7?
What is the point in screenshots of Longhorn that feature no revolutionary GUI improvements or none that are all that flattering?
The transparency is hideous and overused.
The drop shadow is very unsexy (it looks a hell of a
lot better on a Mac).
It’s all very inconsistant.
Those candygloss-looking progress bars look horrible and clash.
There are way too many colors happening… way too busy.
What the hell possessed them to move the menubar below the toolbar buttons?
There are too many menus in Explorer. It looks complicated and discouraging.
That being said, I do like the breadcrumbs where the location bar would normally be in Explorer. It makes it easier to use and gives the user a better sense of how the filesystem works–somewhat like spatial windows.
I know this isn’t at all final, but there’s no point in releasing such hideous and unflattering screenshots. It looks like XP, only worse.
linux was always ahead.
Always a gnome enviroment and inside the window, a Qt app, with an totaly different color scheme and widget look.
Then apple followed, half you OSx apps had the aqua look, the other half the brushed metal look.
and now windows is following. a all new round trasnparency, and some icons that have a white square background inside.
i think that too much transparency is there so devs can check if everything is all right. if you want to test everything you need to _have_ everything on. i’m quite sure final ui design will be reduced to something not ridiculous as the testing version. if they’ll keep it, fine. that’s better for floss.
anyway what i found interesting is “keywords” in media files browser… i hope beagle (actually reiser4 if possible or gnome or kde or whatever) will catch on that… i’m also interested how they implemented “keywords” or are there any changes in file system and wtf is happening about winfs.
they didn’t improve cli at all. that is so stupid. there is probably some shell under bsd licence which they could use….. msdos prompt sucks big f* way…
Can somebody please explain what is one supposehd to use transparent windows for ? ln either windows, macos or linux ?
The best bit in those screenshots is the wallpaper.
The rest is no different than a theme a la windowsblind.
I agree about the tree icons. I hate the triangles in any UI that uses them. Gnome, MacOS, etc.
I thought the condescending, inaccurate, and confusing “My” was going away?
* Condescending: As in “My Little Pony” or “My First Sony”.
* Inaccurate: It’s not “My” stuff, it’s the association to the current login. This may or may not point to a local resource, and that “My” may or may not be ‘me’.
Where do you tell someone to go to find “My” any file that you have under your login? Only under your login name and only for that “My Documents” folder…which is called “LoginName’s Documents” not “My Documents”…because that would be an extra layer of confusion. Speaking of…
* Confusing: The directories are hard coded. If data is tagged as yours elsewhere, you won’t find it under any of the “My” folders.
Data may not have an owner that is known by the local system, and if it does the act of inserting a flash drive does nothing to the whole “My” organization system. “My” also vanishes when looking over the network unless your admin has roving profiles.
The solution to all this is to rely on a dynamically updating search engine that will allow you to find what you need regaurdless of where it happens to be — and Longhorn is supposed to have one. In that case, what value does “My” retain at all?
It’s always nice too see Apple/Linux zealots bashing Windows for no good reason, this should become a sport or something!
First this is not the final UI, I can remember Whistler theme and it looks just like a more colorfull and flat version of Windows 2000:
Here -> http://www.internews.hu/pic/cikkek/whistler_b2276/about.jpg
Does this look like XP? No. Does it look like a enhanced Windows 2000? Yes. Why do zealots keep bashing Longhorn style? Because they have nothing productive to do with their lives.
Now is Longworn missing important features? One would think so but giving in a second thought maybe not. Do we really need those things MS said Longworn would have? I really don’t need WinFS or Spotlight for that matter, I can understand just fine a directory structure and so does anyone without a mental disability, but for some wierd reason nowdays everyone thinks the end user is dumb and so they try to dumb it down even more with things like the computer will store everything for you, it will even think and do your toasts! Please let us not dumb down people.
Infact I think Longhorn should ship even less, what I would want from a new Windows “breakthrough” release is a simpler directory structure, the end of the regestry nightmare, and especially a simple way to fix and restore the system, something in the likes of if something goes wrong just delete the related config file, reboot and when the file would be restored to it’s default. A leaner, simpler amd faster OS would be much more of advantage to the end user than WinFS, Avalon or whatever new great feature we see in Windows/Linux/OSX, it would enable the end user to fix any problem in a simple way saving him (repair) money, time and headaches, also bieng smaller means one could backup his system in a single CD instead of 4 DVDs.
Since Longworm does offer this is it worth the update? Not if you plan the spend money on it or have a slow computer but eventually the network effect will make Longworn worth at least a bittorrent download.
“Why do zealots keep bashing Longhorn style? Because they have nothing productive to do with their lives.”
It couldn’t possibly be due to the fact that the Windows UI is now, as it always has been, a usability nightmare. We can see from the screenshots Longhorn STILL won’t fix this.
1)Let’s start by considering the placement of the menu in the lower left hand corner, while noticing the close, maximize and minimize buttons (cmmb) for the windows are in the upper right hand corner, which separates these two oft-used points by the longest possible distance on the screen, which is the diagonal.
2)The taskbar itself is placed at the bottom of the screen, near the menu, but nowhere near the cmmb of the windows, which are in the upper right hand corner.
3)Additionally, we have icons placed on the desktop, which are very inconveniently located if you have a window maximized. In order to reach the desktop icons in this case, you must first minimize the maximized window which covers the desktop icons.
Now, let’s compare this to the KDE UI, which allows these desktop elements to be altered in way which solves these usability issues.
1) Consider a panel which holds the menu, desktop pager & taskbar, in that order, located at the top of the screen, sized 65% of the width of the screen.
2) We can set the cmmb to appear on the left hand side of all windows. On a 17″ monitor, our close, minimize and maximize buttons would now be located roughly two inches from the menu, so we no longer have to move the mouse from one corner of the screen to the diagonally opposite corner, in order to access the menu or cmmb. You could have the menus and cmmb even closer together if the top of the screen taskbar is expanded to cover the entire width of the screen.
3) We can create a panel on the left hand side of the screen and add icons for whatever apps used to be on the desktop, then turn desktop icons off completely. Now, if a window is maximized, our panel of icons will not be covered, allowing us to access our frequently used applications without having to fist minimize a window.
This type of setup is particularly useful if you happen to be left-handed, yet impossible to setup on any version of Windows I have ever seen.
Guys, it’s a beta. Not even a beta really. What you’re looking at isn’t the new default theme or anything. I kinda doubt that’s a real priority right now.
Longhorn will be a huge success whether we like it or not. MS isn’t going to release some default theme or UI that is difficult to use. They do spend plenty of coin on this type of research, and they don’t maintain their current market position by being idiots. In fact, by the content of many “What Linux Needs” articles that flood the Internet, it seems that MS actually *defines* usability for some of its users.
Funny thing is, that most of you moaners and naysayers will be the first to jump ship when it’s released. OSS makes big inroads during the long development times between Windows releases simply because people get bored of the same thing for years. Linux is something different for them. Don’t think for a moment that those same people that we’ve gained over the past five years won’t be gone as soon as Longhorn hits Kazaa. It’s not a matter of loyalty or anything.
It should be a priority. It’s their time to show off with pretty looks cause they can’t yet back it up with the software. You see, they can release pictures and such but they can’t release the software: So they need to make the thing pretty.
Not to mention, Microsoft has plenty of probably bored graphics people to do it.
That said, I think it looks a lot better than XP; I’m sure the transparency is totally adjustable.
I have mirrored the snapshots at my blog, http://randombytes.blogspot.com/2005/07/longhorn-screenshots.html
If Whistler’s beta cycle serves as any indication, the final Longhorn UI will be a radical change from what you see now. Likely it will be a change for the worse if the jump from Watercolor to Luna is any indicator.
Looks cool to me. I’m still running Panther on my Powerbook with no real need to switch to Tiger. It looks like Longhorn will be a good reason to upgrade my PC’s, though. I guess mostly because I’m just sick of Windows XP.
So, why doesn’t the Media Player have a drop shadow???
Are there any Paintbrush users out there?
From the screenshots it seems that Paintbrush was not improved. As long as they don’t improve Paintbrush, I will not recommend this operating system.
used to be present in OS X – was dropped with advent of Panther – good move IMO.
Funny thing is, that most of you moaners and naysayers will be the first to jump ship when it’s released. OSS makes big inroads during the long development times between Windows releases simply because people get bored of the same thing for years. Linux is something different for them. Don’t think for a moment that those same people that we’ve gained over the past five years won’t be gone as soon as Longhorn hits Kazaa. It’s not a matter of loyalty or anything.
Not whining. Just disappointed. While I’m not a big MS fan, I do cheer when they do the right thing. It’s so rare, though, and very little of it can be chalked up to keeping consistant as they seem to add/remove things in an arbitrary manner.
My main complaint is that over the years Microsoft has had a chance to correct obvious mistakes. With what I have seen, they haven’t corrected many obvious ones in the Longhorn beta.
I haven’t used Windows as my primary system since NT 3.x, though I have kept up with developments and do admin Windows systems.
As opposed to the ‘give me Windows 2000 or nothing at all’ crowd, I don’t see anything too horrible about XP. XP is the current release, so I advise people to use it instead of getting W2K and dealing with it.
While I agree that this is looking like a pre-beta release, they are calling it a beta. I’ve been on Microsoft alpha test teams — a very small group outside of Microsoft if you compare it to beta releases — and Microsoft has followed the right steps in the past;
* Alpha means: ‘will change substantially’.
* Beta means: ‘will not change substantally except for bug fixes and refinements’.
If this is an official beta release, even though it does smell like a late alpha from what I’ve been able to gather, I wouldn’t expect any big changes except the removal or addition of one or two independent apps. The OS core, UI, and major features should be frozen at this point.
It’s hugely disappointing. Yet a new operating system with bugs and incompatibilities, and new Office software to match, new “antivirus longhorn”, product activation, DRM…
No improvements, no WinFS, no included SQL database, no decent software bundles (paintbrush???)…
I can’t take it anymore.
From Windows 2000 to Windows XP, I made the effort to reinstall. Now, I will only reinstall if Microsoft forces me to do it.
This Longhorn is horrible not just on its lack of merit as an operating system, but for the lost opportunity to improve.
But really, I only use Windows for 3D games and p0rn. To get work done, I rely on Linux and MacOS.
For a Windows OS that’s faster, more secure, and overall more efficient.
I want less bloat, so my computer will run faster on Longhorn than it does on XP, not slower.
WTF do I care about transparent windows that serve no functional purpose?
Is that what they’ve been taking all this time with, to make it look pretty (all the while dropping useful stuff like WinFS)?
so,what is special in it?it is wondoze in allway.trojan coders should update their progs soon for this shit os soon!
Because the theme used in the beta is called Aero some of you think it is the Aero GUI… it’s not… this is just a WinXP theme until the new GUI is ready.
I think MS should give us an early peek at whats really instore.
Hey,
I moved the images to http://www.phoenixrealm.com/longhorn-images
Thanks,
David
“You may disagree that this new Windows look and feel has aesthetic merit, and desire something with a more minimalistic design, but I think that most people want the things they use everyday to be both beautiful and functional. They’re trying for beauty. They may have missed the mark, but I’m glad they’re trying.”
Do you care how attractive your hammer or screwdrive is? How about how sexy that Makita is?
I don’t. An OS is a tool to do tasks, not give me a warm fuzzy feeling when I boot it up.
I would assume most users would rather have a stable OS with more security than a warm fuzzy feeling. Just a hunch.
When I write software, functionality is the most important thing, if the s/w has less functionality than another, then it will be a harder sell.
However, once that is there, adding warm and fuzzy is the next thing that will help your product to sell. Ask anyone in marketing.
OK, if you are in OSS, then fuzzy may not be a consideration, but I always feel better about a product that is well built and considered form and function. If all the functions are there, but it takes me 10 days instead of 1 to learn (yes, extreme example) then you may as well not added those extra functions anyway…
A hammer with a nice grip that means I can work with it longer than a hammer with a bad grip would be a good example. But I do take the point, a hammer with a really nice grip with no head is not a hammer.
If Apple and MS can do both at the same time, even better, but functional should always take priority.
One more point, and one that others here have been saying, this is not the final GUI!!! The final GUI will be more like Looking Glass. This GUI will be seen on lower end machines most probably, but on newer machines with good GFX, this won’t be the default.
ok
“Let’s start by considering the placement of the menu in the lower left hand corner, while noticing the close, maximize and minimize buttons (cmmb) for the windows are in the upper right hand corner”
Have you never used Windows since like NT 4? You can DRAG the toolbar to any edge you want, make it auto-hide, add icons to the quick launcher. Try it sometime, it’s amazing UI technology that doesn’t require Longhorn.
“Have you never used Windows since like NT 4?”
I have both XP & 98.
“You can DRAG the toolbar to any edge you want, make it auto-hide, add icons to the quick launcher.”
Yet it still can’t be as customized as I require and this doesn’t address the other issues raised. I am well aware the Windows toolbar can be moved around. For years I would move it accidentally and it was almost impossible to move it back. Whereas with KDE it is a simple operation to place it whereever I choose and add or remove whatever I need.
“Try it sometime, it’s amazing UI technology that doesn’t require Longhorn.”
It’s amazing that KDE allows me to perfect my setup in ways that no version of Windows has yet to reach.
It kind of looks nice, although it doesn’t seem to be overall consistent, something other OSs suffer from as well. The glass theme… I don’t know whether that is going to work well in all usage scenarios.
I would have enjoyed seeing some more new features. How it looks is not important [well, it is to me but I’m not a Windows user] because you can modify it however you want anyway.
It seems Microsoft is making the mistake of trying to be as cool as Mac OS X. They should be doing their own thing, for their own, well-thought out reasons. Everybody ogles the other party for what they come up with, but Microsoft at least should take the lead in how things look/work in an OS.
Functionality is the key feature. Windows Media Player 10 is a case in point. Does it look nice or not? I don’t really care all that much. What is far more important is that it’s really not a nice experience for me as a user to try and make sense out of it. It invites me to read a manual and all I want it to do is to play music or a movie. It’s not a welcoming experience at all.
iTunes in that respect is a far better experience. It’s like a zero-friction environment. It makes sense.
That’s one application. Of course the important bit is how the system works under the hood. It seems Microsoft hasn’t come round to changing the way the tools in the Control Panel look/feel/work. I would hope that is going to be a major improvement.
I’m not a fan of the whole icons with lines of text next to it. I’m reading instead of working with the system. I’ve never learned to enjoy that. It’s not what I want to do.
Once you get used to [Command + Space] to find files, it’s not easy to go back, let me tell you.
I’m looking forward to Longhorn delivering good security in a stable environment. I really can’t see it ever winning a beauty pageant, but then again, as has been pointed out, that’s not what an OS should be for.
I want it to be intuitive, accessible, solid, reliable and safe.