New Longhorn Screenshots And Schedule 688
Mozillabird writes "WinSupersite has recently updated the Longhorn release schedule and has provided some new screenshots of Aero. The first beta of Longhorn is May 2005, though there is some speculation about how much of Avalon and Aero will be implemented in that beta. The "big beta" is scheduled for this Fall."
A little comparison: (Score:3, Insightful)
(Sarcasm)But hey, if you cant beat them... cheat them.(/sarcasm)
Is it just me... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not impressed - I favor "clean" GUI's (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd like to see how a GUI like this "Aero" will go over with the Windows users who instinctively switch every XP box they touch to "classic" mode.
Claims from the article... (Score:3, Insightful)
"In Longhorn, applications will launch and load files 15 percent faster than with Windows XP."
How was the figure arrived at exactly? All applications and all files will load 15 percent faster?
"Additionally, Longhorn will feature a new instant-on capability that will see Longhorn-savvy systems resume from Standby in 2 seconds or less."
Doesn't "Longhorn-savvy" kind of imply specific hardware is required? Or is that just me? And to be honest, I wouldn't really sell this as a feature other OSs have had for years...OS X certainly starts up from standby on my iBook in under 2 seconds...
"Longhorn will more reliably resume from crashes,"
Surely time would have been better spent by programmers and engineers actually stopping the OS from crashing so much? I'm an OS X user, and I'll be the first to admit that when it does crash, it tends to crash badly, but at least (in my experience) the crashes are fairly rare (say, once a month) instead of upwards of one a day...
"One thing users should be aware of is that Longhorn will include a new kernel and will thus not offer the same level of compatibility with legacy 16-bit and 32-bit code that Windows XP does today. For business users, Microsoft believes that Virtual PC 2007 will help broaden corporations' compatibility options."
This seems like a bad idea - I'm guessing home users will also want to run legacy applications (that favourite game of your son's that you bought five years ago, that piece of productivity software you really like but can't afford an upgrade)...wouldn't it be better to do what Apple did during the switch between OS 9 & OS X, and bundle an emulator in with the OS? Rather than forcing home users to buy their own copy of Virtual PC 2007?
How Many Times (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple copied from Xerox, but you don't mention that. Let's all move on, it's not the 80's anymore, MS writes their own code and Apple builds onto BSD. It's been old for years now and it's getting really annoying to hear the same repetitive crap day-in, day-out.
Re:Send To (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like Linux with Gnome, KDE (etc...) and OSX are just polished versions of an OS that was designed 30+ years ago.
Re:all of these screenshots do not impress me (Score:3, Insightful)
For the same reason they did 10 years ago?
Coincidentally, in 2005 it's 10 years since Microsoft started their Windows 95 era, and a introduced a very different way of working with Windows, compared to Windows 3.1. And it was embraced, oh yes!
No screenshot of this "New OS" has yet to impress me.
All screenshots seen so far are either not screenshots, but Longhorn concept graphics, or alpha screenshots that doesn't represent the final product. I thought that went without saying on a forum like Slashdot. I'd say the same if Apple had released screenshots of an alpha for an upcoming OS.
If you're looking for a new OS you may be better off with OS X on a PPC, or Linux on x86.
Yeah yeah, and that comment of yours was redundant.
Re:Claims from the article... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't believe this. This is market speech. This is totally impossible. If this is the case, we will see the end of the Microsoft monopoly with the release of Longhorn.
Why run Longhorn and upgrade all your apps (except for the one for which the vendors have died out, but 50% of your department insists on continuing to use because it 'just works'), or run them in a Virtual Machine, when you can get Linux, for free, run Wine, which will offer better compatability, or run either a) Qemu, b) VMware, or c) Remote Desktop into a Windows XP server box for legacy apps.
I refuse to believe this thing about compatability, because the entire Microsoft monopoly is built on compatability. Microsoft would never drop such a golden ticket into the hands of Windows opponents.
If this is true, it makes the barriers to either Mac OS X or Linux transitions non-existent. Windows would have to compete on merits alone (security, usability, extensibility).
Bwahahaha. I'll go back to the real world now. This'll never happen.
Re:useless info in status bar (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at WMP. WMP 6.4, the pinnacle of usability and compact design (and yes, I now use Media Player Classic), devoted all but a thin border, compact progress bar, and menu bar to content. WMP 10, on the other hand uses up as much space with stupid buttons, goofy widgets of questionable use, some Photoshop flunkie's shiny excretions and other useless noise, as the actual content itself (for videos obviously). It's huge, ugly, hard to use, and the Classic skin seems to have been retired, which was the only one I found to be useful and not butt-ugly or goofy-looking, as opposed to some art-school dropout's idle doodlings...
You can't expect them to reverse this long trend by devoting more screen space to content! It's all about the application and Windows is becoming like pop music stars who are popular not for their music or talent, but for their clothes, looks or bad behavior. Microsoft, for whom I used to have a fair amount of respect as a UI designer, has fallen into the same trap that has infected every other major software developer since 16-bit color became the norm and the Web helped set back UI standards 15 years... they are more interested in looking "pretty" than being more functional.
I'll give them one thing, the default Windows XP theme was the ugliest Windows UI since Windows 2.1 (which suffered primarily because it was stuck in 16 colors with exactly 1 palette), but Aero actually looks half-decent, if, typically for MS, cluttered and overly busy. At least it's not ugly. A bit rococo perhaps, but not ugly.
Still, I imagine that, should I ever find myself using Longhorn, the first thing I'll do is turn it off and go back to the Windows 2000 style, which combined the best functionality with minimal but attractive artistic improvements. But at least Aero doesn't look like a busybox for holding the attention of babies or MS executives.
Of course, I can't imagine any reason to ever upgrade from Windows 2000, or XP for my laptops that came with it. What could MS possibly offer in Longhorn that an average user would ever want or need? Mostly more protection from all the bad design decisions MS has made over the last 20 years, I suppose. Also, I like the fact that a gigabyte of RAM is still considered a lot. I imagine that will be the minimal reasonable requirement to do any real work with Longhorn, just like 128MB was for Windows 4.0, 256MB was for Windows 2000* and 512MB is for XP.
Hell, I still use Visual C++ 6. It lets me get the work done that I need to get done efficiently and effectively without bloating me up another half-dozen byzantine technologies getting in the way of me doing work (although I am impressed by what I've read about the compiler in the 2003 version). Actually, I'd probably upgrade, but none of my clients want to. Watcha gonna do? If it works, don't break it.
* I actually ran 2000 with 64MB on a laptop for some months back around 2000. It actually wasn't too bad as long as I didn't load more than one or two programs, but for any serious work, it wouldn't have been usable.
Re:I'm not impressed - I favor "clean" GUI's (Score:2, Insightful)
To be constantly changing themes and having pointless window resize animations, etc, is to make it bloated beyond necessity and because of the extra code to make it that much more bloated, they're inviting more and more bugs, and more and more instability and more and more performance degradation.
Technially savvy people can likely work around these differences, but what about grandma jane whose breathing quickens because she's afraid to even turn the damn thing on. If people like this get put in front of longhorn, even though you could change the look to the 'classic' look that might by then be the luna interface of XP, will they even know how to do that? And if they can't, will the shiny eye candy not intimidate them further?
I really do believe sometimes microsoft changes things just because they can, not because they should.
In terms of what kind of GUI I like, in linux I prefer the original FVWM XWindow manager. It's about as appealing as the original windows 3.1 window decoration scheme, but it's classic and it's clean, and it's damn fast.
How many GHz of cpu cycles will it take just to maintain the UI in longhorn? So, while it's glitzy and sparkly, when the novelty wears off, it's just another interface and the performance hit will not justify it, so no, if I'm impressed now, after months of using it I would not be impressed anymore.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just you. (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it's just the techno-nerd in me, but I can't stand it when my computer tries to hide things like actual file locations from me, which is what the new Explorer seems to be doing. The very first thing I do when I set up a Windows machine is turn off all the GUI "features" that hide the contents of directories, file extensions, and menus from me.
Does anyone actually find these features useful?
There once was a day (Score:4, Insightful)
that seems to be all anybody cares about any more. Or have
we reached the point where there is no innovation except
(debatedly) in how the UI is presented?
Re:A little comparison: (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't look enough like Windows! (Score:5, Insightful)
That was one of the main reasons why people said they wouldn't consider using Linux. It was one of the main reasons many people wouldn't use Open Office.
Could it be that upon the release of Longhorn, people may find Linux to be more familiar?
I've heard many consultants say that businesses (mostly small businesses) won't switch from Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Office, even though alternatives would definitely suffice, purely because their employees (or at least some of them) can't handle change.
Many people still use insecure Microsoft solutions, because they feel overwhelmed when presented with something even slightly different. Look at the hassle getting people to switch to the more secure Firefox Web browser!
I guess that the new look and feel of Longhorn is either going to cause people to postpone upgrading as long as possible, or even give people more incentive to try out Linux. I mean, if you're going to have to get used to something new anyway, why not put Linux in the mix?
Re:It must be better. It's taken nearly 8 years... (Score:2, Insightful)
Becuase with the exception of run time generated data (which unless you are running a graphics demo is not going to be all that prevalent) application launching time is more or less independent from CPU speed.
Now your hard drive's speed and your RAM, those make a big difference. as do the overall power and flexability of the OS APIs, more powerful OS APIs preloaded into memory means the application has to load less code of its own when it launchs.
A frequent complaint (at least in the circles I run in. ^_^ ) about XP is the huge bloat of their OS Widgets. 30 pixel (just a wild random guess here) window boarders are rather inane. Likewise so are huge "X"s. UI experts know how elements on the screen should be laid out, Microsoft has (more or less, with the exception of some of the Microsoft Office teams -_- ) traditionally done a very good job of listening to them. No itea what happened with the traditional Windows XP theme. This new theme looks a bit better, but mostly like someone just took the XP controls and did a vertical scale on them in Photoshop.
Re:A little comparison: (Score:4, Insightful)
Whoops... Anyway, I think they can be a definite selling point in that OS-level search capabilities integrate better into the user experience.
For one, OS integration gives you the ability to create "smart" (dynamic) folders which are basically the results of a query against metadata in all files but still have a system-level validity.
In other words, you can create your "Yosemite" folder [apple.com] which will contain anything related to that keyword, and you can do that with other programs, such as DevonTHINK [devon-technologies.com]. What you can't have with third-party apps (AFAIK) is automatic scanning of files across the entire system without prior settings, and most of all, the ability to treat "catalogs" as real directories which you can burn to CD, backup, compress & archive, etc...
More to the point, do these third-party apps offer APIs to other applications, so that you can use their functionality, say, when saving a file or including a picture from your library? That's what OS-level search capabilities are about, at least the way I understand them.
Re:How Many Times (Score:3, Insightful)
The point is, it is only stealing if you take it from someone against their will. Apple, as far as I can tell, does things the proper way, whereas Microsoft often does not.
Re:I call fake on the screenshots! (Score:4, Insightful)
Stacks? looks like Piles. Search dialog is a copy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:More Apple copying (Score:1, Insightful)
I'll grant you that if Apple does hold a patent on the idea and Microsoft is using it without citing or paying Apple, there's a problem. But absent that (and that doesn't seem to be what you were complaining about), blasting MS for running with an idea that Apple had but never applied seems to miss the point.
Re:A little comparison: (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me tell ya one that DID catch on though;
Browser Integration into the primary GUI.
Nice. Really nice. Without it using a GUI is insane. Broadband net access tends to do that to a person, if I want to look something up, open new window, go to dictionary, type in word.
All of a sudden, the net IS part of my desktop. Kick'in. You want to know what killed Desktop Push technology? No longer needed, the internet is now just one more data resource on my computer, albeit one connected over CAT5 rather than an IDE ribbon cable.
Sweet.
Oh, and they also brought us (or at least popularized the use of) the scroll wheel. Nice. Not having a Scroll Wheen (such as right now...) drives me nuts, scroll Wheels rock. Also don't forget that they have standardized on many previously "lost" GUI tid bits, yes there are MANY more that they need to bring back from the dead (*COUGH*largechunksofBeOS*COUGH*), but in general they have done an excellent job of making a thorough, complete, and SIMPLE GUI.
Most aspects of the Windows GUI are blatently obvious, with the main exception being the Window-Key shortcuts, which one of the most useful items about the GUI in general that allow for it to be easily used soley with a keyboard. (Yes without using the window-key shortcuts, Windows is useable without a keyboard, but they make things so much easier!)
Could things be better? Yah, sure, but you know what, things are already so damn good. Sure I may not be able to see a thumbnail of an image I am dragging around, but heck, I don't drag images around anyways.
Now if MS would just implement symbolic links (sp?) into the GUI, wow, that'd ROCK so much. Make organizing photo albums much easier, so hard to decide where to put a picture, if I have a picture of my niece on a family vacation in 2004, do I put it under Vacation 2004, or Niece? Irritating, (yes Windows supports both symbolic links and hard links, but they are not integrated into the GUI yet!)
Re:useless info in status bar (Score:3, Insightful)
But WMP is just imitating other media players, all of which seem to devote an absurd portion of their design effort to making themselves skinnable. I belive the idea originated with WinAmp, which supports thousands of skins, ranging from the clunky [winamp.com] to the absurd [winamp.com]. They all seem to contribute to some strange sense of esthetic among users -- but they actually detract from the usability of the product.
Alas, usability, is just not a priority any more. It's the original reason for the switch from command lines to GUIs. But now the main purpose of a GUI seems to be to look kewl and help sell the product. Even Apple, which literally wrote the book [apple.com] on the subject of usability, seems to consider prettiness a higher priority.
Anyway, I don't consider a info bar to be a major GUI design flaw. It's darned handy to get file details without having to bring up a properties box.
Re:A little comparison: (Score:3, Insightful)
Use Window Blinds and Object Desktop Instead (Score:2, Insightful)
The other big feature of Longhorn, File Searching, doesn't interest me, either. I'm smart enough to put my files in their place, so I don't have to go searching for them. It's my machine, after all, and if I put things in random places, I have no one to blame but myself.
All I'll get with Longhorn is the need to re-purchase all my programs and utilities because the ones I'm happy with right now on XP won't work. Not to mention the fact that you'll need a workstation-class machine (3 Ghz Pentium with a half-gig of memory? Sheesh!) to even run the thing!
And to top it all off, Microsoft wants to give the local machine the same Swiss Cheese security model that IE gives the Internet. Oh, joy! I can't wait.
Re:Claims from the article... (Score:2, Insightful)
> and will thus not offer the same level of compatibility with legacy 16-bit and
> 32-bit code that Windows XP does today. For business users, Microsoft believes
> that Virtual PC 2007 will help broaden corporations' compatibility options."
> This seems like a bad idea
No, it is what Microsoft has needed to do for several years now. Was it a bad idea when Apple did this going from OS 9 (which sucked rocks) to OS X (which is actually pretty decent)? Granted, if they're doing this, they ought to bundle VirtualPC; OS X included Classic and OS 9 OOTB for the first couple of years. But the basic idea of going to a new kernel is a good one. There was a new kernel going from DOS/Win3 to Win95, and a different (albeit not new per se) kernel going from 98/Me to 2K/XP, a _desperately_ needed change, since 9x/Me had no memory protection. But the NT kernel is itself showing its age now, and replacing it sooner, rather than later, is a Good Thing. (Someone will rush to point out how great the NT kernel's architecture design was/is, but the fact remains that it is even older than the 9x/Me kernel and has accumulated a lot of cruft.)
Re:Apple's patent on desktop search before Microso (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A little comparison: (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple is not some kind of perfect and pure beacon of technological excellence. Microsoft hasn't stolen shit from Apple. Pull that cheap plastic iPod white stick from out your ass.
Re:useless info in status bar (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft, like every other OS manufacturer on the planet, has had search capabilities of some sort or another forever. They're making their's better, Apple is improving their's, etc. Who gives a shit whether Apple or Google or Microsoft starting improving search funtionality first? I happen to be glad that they're making the effort. It will probably be a useful addition.
Guys, grow up. Unless they're breaking some sort of IP law, you should be applauding them for implimenting the good features of other OSs instead of knocking them down. Linux, OS X and Windows all share a shitload of similar look and feel features as well as mountains of similar features under the hood. Who used the first hard drive? Who used the first start menu-style button? Who put "disk drives" or "My computers" on the top, left of the desktop? Who put a trashcan on the desktop? The fact is, IT DOESN'T MATTER anymore because they all have 'em now.
Spend yout time dinging the company that doesn't impliment a good feature. Leave MS alone if they're actually trying to things that look or work better.
TW
TW
Re:How Many Times (Score:4, Insightful)
So did Apple 'copy' Kai?
(For the record, I don't care much myself - I just get tired of the relentless "Microsoft just copy but Apple innovate" stuff. It's not always true.)
Re:A little comparison: (Score:5, Insightful)
You've blatantly obviously forgotten how you learned Windows and also have blatantly obviously never seen a co-worker struggling to do so.
I had to learn Windows three years ago (at the same time I learned Linux) and I can testify that there is almost NOTHING obvious about it (other than being aware that clicking a mouse on something makes something happen. Duh!)
Re:A little comparison: (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not seeing it. You're opening a new window to look at something new - in what way is that "integrated?" Or perhaps more to the point, in what way is that usefully integrated? Is is somehow better to have that new window initially display files and folders than to just show your home-page? How is this any better - or any different - than just launching an IE window?
I also use broadband and (for example) dictionary.com or wikipedia.org as a handy always-ready reference. But I do not find the desktop "integration" of IE to be any more convenient than just using whatever browser is available on the machine.
For myself, personally, one of the beefs I have with the Windows GUI is that Windows Explorer tries to do too many things - what do the control panels or network printers have in common with my files, anyway? All of that integrating slows Windows Explorer down without providing anything that looks (to me, at least) like a clear benefit.
Re:A little comparison: (Score:2, Insightful)
The worst thing you can say about Apple, meanwhile, is they stole the ideas for Sherlock and Dashboard from Watson and Konfabulator. And that's if you ever agree on the Dashboard/Konfabulator debate...
Back on topic, Apple has demoed this type of technology back to 1995 in Copland, and shipped portions in several OS revisions (Sherlock, iApps, etc). The only difference is now it's OS-wide.
And who is shipping it first? Apple, by a wide margin. When the announced it last year, they had DVD's under the seats with Tiger, Spotlight, etc ready to develop for. They're on the verge of shipping the final now (in a matter of days/weeks, not months/years as with Longhorn).
Re:Nice fonts! (Score:3, Insightful)
You hear that low rumbling sound? That's 500 years worth of dead typographers spinning in their graves.
You're right to not care -- in fact, it's a failure on the part of the type selector if you do notice the type instead of the text itself -- but that doesn't mean that some type is not better than other type.
When "graphics people" bitch or praise type it's because they've learned that in 500 years of evolved aesthetic tradition, a lot of people have thought very hard about very small details of very specific problems and somewhere along the way someone figured out the best solution, and it's a royal pain in the skull to see people that don't know about any of this and go and do obscene things with (say) Comic Sans MS.
Re:A little comparison: (Score:1, Insightful)
Obviously you haven't been paying attention to the stories posted recently here, where Apple has been suing its users.
Windows is not Simple (Score:4, Insightful)
I use Linux and Windows both. They're suited best for different tasks, different people. But I'm definitely not so much a Windows guy. Here's why:
Linux can be very stripped-down if you want it to be (word to the Gentoo-ers -- yeah!). I can arrange my personal directories exactly how I want them, and I can get to everything I need very quickly, thanks to the omnipotence of the command line. Basically, Linux has the feel of a complex math equation that has been totally factored down to its optimal simplicity.
But Windows seeks to acheive a similar feeling of simplicity not through elegant design, but through showmanship: a veneer of simplicity acheived through even more underlying complexity. It throws all these abstraction layers over your files and your tasks, so that you have to rely on more software to do your stuff.
If there's one thing programming has taught me, it's that software is one of the most unreliable things humans have ever made. If the same task can be accomplished with less code, then you have better code -- always (unless less code results in horrible machine efficiency or lack of modularity).
If I want to get to all my stuff on my Linux partition, I just click up /garage.
If I want my stuff on Windows, I click into D:\. Not too bad, but wait -- all those abstraction layers in Windows constantly insist that I keep my files in C:\Documents and Settings\alucinor\My Documents. But what if I don't want to keep my music files in C:\Documents and Settings\alucinor\My Documents\My Music? Just set an option, right?
Heh ... I do that, and it ~would~ normally work. But since there's so many abstractions, so much software, I often will find crap getting stuck in the My Music folder yet again later, sometimes by the same program.
What I don't like about the Windows design philosophy is that they want to take your computer use into their hands, and they do it acting as though those hands of theirs are perfect. But when they're less than perfect, it just gets annoying, and their hands get in your way.
"Quit auto-archiving my media files, Media Player! Just show me a directory structure instead of artist/album breakdowns of what's in the My Music folder! I just want to burn a cd, dammit!"
Yeah. Looks like WinFS is just going to throw even more sediments of imperfect software in the way of what I want to do. "They're features!"
Advice to OS makers: let the OS stay in the background. Too bad that's impossible for a company that ~has~ to make the OS seem important.
When I use Linux I don't think about using Linux. I just use it.
When I use Windows I'm constantly reminded that I'm using Windows. That's bad design. But I suppose it's necessary when your business is the OS.
Re:A little comparison: (Score:2, Insightful)