Windows 7 Beta Screenshots Leaked 587
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."
Pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
From what I hear... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Why do we say 'Leaked'? (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
It looks just fine (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I can see they fixed the big problem with Vista... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why do we say 'Leaked'? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pointless (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope they don't keep that. If microsoft wants to prevent the bad press associated with vista - they may need to make it un-vista-like atleast superficially.
Re:*Yawn*, I think I'll stick with Ubuntu. (Score:5, Insightful)
And before Windows 95, they promised a badass new system codenamed Cairo, remember that? It would rival what NeXT and IBM had back then... and people believed that shit. Always keep in mind, Microsoft is a master in overpromise and underdelivery.
Re:Interface "changes" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
With a barrel of salt and a pinch of mixed metapho (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
Ideally they'll strike a balance between the prettyness of vista and the functionality and performance of XP.
Call me oldfashioned, but I still use XP with the Win2000 interface. Much cleaner and faster to me.
Re:Pointless (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I'd rather have the performance of Windows 2000, the functionality of Windows XP and the GUI of.... Windows 2000.
Re:Instead of appealing to the "oooo shiny" crowd. (Score:2, Insightful)
It's all subjective. When I tried a Mac, there was an error with a program - but instead of it telling me what the problem was, the icon got a little question mark on it. When I clicked on it, it bounced.
What does that even mean? Is it not starting? Is it already open? Is the bouncing some kind of metaphor for the futility of human existance?
Re:Pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In case it gets slashdotted (Score:3, Insightful)
Screenshots (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:With a barrel of salt and a pinch of mixed meta (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:3, Insightful)
(pity Windows programmers, in general, suck at following the >5 year old guidelines).
And the rest. IIRC you couldn't even get a "Designed for NT 4" label if your software demanded local admin rights. (Of course, you could get a "Designed for Windows '95" label which was almost identical visually)
In many ways it's a shame so few people (both individuals and businesses) continue to accept IT stuff (both software and hardware) which doesn't bear such labels. It might prompt developers to produce code that might be complete crap but at least won't stomp all over your system.
Re:*Yawn*, I think I'll stick with Ubuntu. (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude, we CAN afford it but that's not the point. The point is there's something seriously fucking wrong with the software world if we're at the stage where we need ~ 600 MB of RAM to merely open google.com (vista + drivers + IE).
Re:Sure those are pics? (Score:3, Insightful)
wooooosh!
Re:It looks just fine (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
I would not be surprised Microsoft does the following:
1) They aggressively optimize the code base for x86-based CPU's, which means overall faster performance.
2) They decide (despite what has been said publicly to this day by Microsoft managers) to drop any pretenses of Windows 98 and earlier compatibility and require at least WIN32 API compatibility, so everything runs in flat memory model to allow for true protected memory management all around.
Not "leaked" - a deliberate marketing campaign (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Ribbon revolution (Score:5, Insightful)
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 really cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
I know everyone likes eye candy these days, but really, does the look of the Windows UI really make much difference? One of the biggest things I think Microsoft got wrong was to assume that people only cared about what Windows looked like, and really didn't care about how it worked. Now, I'm pretty sure that a lot of people don't care about how it works, as long as it does.
Oh dear... ...Paint? Calculator? (Score:3, Insightful)
I would like to see at least one --just ONE-- new piece of technology. WinFS much Microsoft!!!
I'm reminded of this comment from somewhere: 'Google isn't interested in Microsoft's 90s era technologies'.
Re:*Yawn*, I think I'll stick with Ubuntu. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the point is Windows is still swiss cheese no matter how much their marketing department is saying its secure.
A OS shouldnt need anti-virus.
Tell me - (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:*Yawn*, I think I'll stick with Ubuntu. (Score:5, Insightful)
I can understand the question in the inverse direction, but this is the strangest concern I've ever seen. Software written for a low end machine wouldn't run faster on a beefed up machine?!?
I must be missing something, care to expand a bit on the issue?
I've always been /for/ the idea on giving developers 5-year old machines so they start to care a bit for performance. Heck, and I am a developer....
Re:From what I hear... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes I do. When these amoral and criminal types have the choice of targeting 1% of the market or with the same amount of effort targeting 90% of the market, I'm going to guess they'll pick 90%
Re:In case it gets slashdotted (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that's definitely AND. I have right now the taskbar at the bottom of the screen, the quicklaunch bar at the top and a "My PC" toolbar on the right.
Re:Pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad press was about performance and lack of support.
What they will do is repackage Vista almost 100% the same except for minor tweaking and GUI gimmicks.
Just that in 2 years time, all the machines on the market will have driver and be fast enough to run vista, so they will be able to claim 'XP level' performance and driver support. They will even claim that they are right on time and boast about their new fast development cycle.
Re:I can see they fixed the big problem with Vista (Score:1, Insightful)
"UAC by default now elevates without prompting for Microsoft-signed executables"
Say what????
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.
Wouldnt a more sensible policy be to allow users to install programs in a sandbox area and then have a "program firewall" of sorts in windows filter the requests the programs make to keep bad behaving programs out of sensitive areas.
Re:Pointless (Score:3, Insightful)
I still use VISTA with the old Windows 2000 interface on my personal laptop, and XP with that one at work. All the themes following it have been "ooo, pretty" for about a week and then they get old and I'm ready for the more conservative classic interface.
Re:increasingly irrelevent (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a specious argument. Just because you can download some of the source of OS X, doesn't make Apple an "open" company. Their behavior demonstrates otherwise.
I dislike Apple less than I dislike Microsoft. However, if I want to run their OS, which is clearly superior to Windows, there is a > 25% premium on the hardware. Why can't I run OS X on a Dell, or Lenovo laptop? Why am I locked into Apple's hardware? Because Apple is a proprietary company.
Re:I can see they fixed the big problem with Vista (Score:3, Insightful)
But does it still support DRM (Trusted Computing or whatever)? Because so long as it does, I'm never going to switch, nor recommend anyone I know to switch from XP.
Re:Sure those are pics? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but I cannot read Chinese, so I really did not know what I was looking at.
Truthfully, what is wrong with the Vista interface? I thought the main thing people were complaining about was bad software compatability (which is a crock), poor drivers (the hardware developers have largely resolved this), the UAE (which can be turned off),and high resource hog (sadly, I have no comeback for this). Out of all the people that we have given Vista to in our company, not a single person has complained about the interface. In fact, the only two complaints we got was of a software bug (it exists in XP as well in this program package, but people natually blaimed Vista, even though they had it for years), and that their 15 year old printer suddenly does not work.
Re:increasingly irrelevent (Score:3, Insightful)
1. If MS went the route of Apple and started selling their OS on tightly controlled hardware with a limited set of rock solid drivers, we wouldn't be talking about BSOD's, hard freezes, etc. - at least no more than it happens on OSX (oh yes, it does!).
2. Desktop Linux will not continue to grow until somebody gets the UI out of diapers. It will not go past the range of the geek and the hobbyist. The cost of maintaining a system in which most administrative functions end up having to be done in a terminal window or a text file far outweighs the $130 or so that it costs to have Windows preloaded on a new computer. From the consumer perspective you may have a point about spending $600 for software. But for one, you exxagerate the cost of software; most consumers spend about $100 of the cost of the new computer on windows, and add another $130 for MS Office Home edition. However the flip side is that most computer-dummy consumers will flip out when something doesn't work and, if they are really resourceful, they search google for their problem and they are confronted with a bunch of well meaning people telling them to run commands in a terminal windows and edit a bunch of text files. Sorry, the UI needs to be able to do all of this. MacOS and Windows have been doing it for 12+ years and Linux still hasn't made it out of the 90's in this respect.
3. On the corporate side, Linux currently has no replacement for MS Outlook, ACT, or any other CRM client/server package. The free office packages do not provide seamless compatibility with MS Office, which is the best office suite out there even though it costs a fortune up front. I agree, nobody really wants Vista, but the corporate world will gobble up Windows 7 once it is proven to run all their business critical apps the way XP does now. Oh and their business critical apps don't run on Linux. Accounting systems, CRM software, CAD software, ERP software - the cost of replacing these far outweighs the savings of moving to a free OS. That's not to mention the cost of educating staff and retraining tech people.
Linux is making baby steps forward, but this ain't the year. Unless somebody steps forward and starts developing for profit, Linux will be doomed to languish among the geeks and nerds.
Several things must happen before Linux will qualify as a bona fide mainstream desktop OS: 1. A UI that does everything a user needs without ever needing to show a text only window. 2. A unified application installer a la .exe
3. A well funded corporate backer that will make linux profitable and convince developers to create mainstream software to run on Linux.
I guess what I'm saying is that unless Linux makes these steps forward, it's not Windows that will become increasingly irrelevant, it's Linux. People will tire of hearing about it, hearing about it, hearing about it some more, and finding out it still hasn't approached Windows 95 in usability. Case in point: if MS released Ubuntu in it's current form as their next generation OS, people would be complaining to no end about how crappy an OS it was because previous Windows releases did things so much better.
Why do I get the feeling I've seen this before? (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt whether it was originally intended as such, but I'm betting that the utter failure of Vista is going to mean Windows 7 will be rushed into production long before it's ready, and in a completely different form that what was originally conceived.
In short, I suspect Windows 7 will wind up being The Pig That Is Vista with lipstick...probably eye-liner and blush, too.
Re:increasingly irrelevent (Score:3, Insightful)
I can get all the source code to products from Microsoft provided I sign certain NDAs with certain assurances and give a reasonable explanation as to why.
Yes, and you used to be able to get all the source code to VMS on Microfiche. That doesn't make either of them open systems.
Open systems are all about interoperability. Publicly documenting what you're doing, so that other people who aren't you, or your partners, can work with you. Source code is only part of that process when it is freely redistributable. Source code distributed under NDA is irrelevant to open anything.
Well, beyond the stuff that was already GPL before they adopted it (thus, preventing them from close sourcing it - ie: webkit). I can get access to... The kernel and some old BSD utilities.
Have you actually looked at what they're distributing? They include almost all the command line tools except for some (like ditto) that they're trying to get rid of. That includes most of the non-GUI code from NeXT, most of the new tools (like launchd), the whole framework behind their Framework library model. It's a hell of a lot more than "the kernel and some old BSD utilities".
The code that Apple isn't distributing is also largely self-documenting because of the design of the Cocoa framework and Objective-C, and it's also far better formally documented than Microsoft's code. Reading technical books on Windows you come up against situations over and over again where the documentation says one thing, Windows does something else, and the author has to throw their hands up and say things like "it appears that the FooObject returns a BarObject under all situations, even though it's supposed to return the object requested in the Baz method...".
They both seem pretty closed to me, the only advantage is that with Microsoft, there is a chance to get into everything.
But only by abdicating from the open source and open systems communities. That's a hell of a string.
Re:With a barrel of salt and a pinch of mixed meta (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
The problem with that logic is that there are competing operating systems which will happily run on "ten bucks of RAM" and do everything Vista will do. Its not that RAM is expensive, its that Vista wastes the RAM it has on stuff that users don't want. I don't want a bunch of trusted computing threads watching to make sure I don't dare watch a movie I paid for on a monitor I paid for. I don't want threads making sure the audio I listen to is being played on Microsoft Approved High Security DRM+ Speakers. I want the OS I buy to use the hardware I buy to do the things I want it to be doing. That's why I switched to Debian years ago and haven't looked back.
Re:Sure those are pics? (Score:3, Insightful)
A-ha. A Freudian spellink error. Vut ve have here is a vish that Microsoft vill fail.
I think ordinary people see problems with Vista, not just power-users. I don't think Microsoft is so stupid as to think that they can fool the majority of people by just tweaking or re-branding Vista and expect it to succeed, "Mojave Experiment" or not.
Re:Instead of appealing to the "oooo shiny" crowd. (Score:3, Insightful)
it will remain an inferior interface, even compared to OS 9 -- in fact 9 beats X in a few interface aspects.
I believe the phrase that comes to mind is "lol". Mac OS 9 had the worst goddamn user interface I've ever seen. I sincerely hope that whoever designed some of those things (like the fscking drop-down menu to switch which application has its menu bar showing, not to mention that having only one menu bar is horrible UI design all by itself) never has a job doing anything with computers again.
Re:Sure those are pics? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry if that came across harsh or something, it was not meant to. Actually, most of the issues I have seen from what you were describing are caused by IE or the OS being wacked out, and reinstalling should fix it. If not, that is very interesting.
It is the IT in me, I sometimes forget that the readers on Slashdot know a bit more about PCs than the users I have to support. I tend to dumb stuff down, sorry if it came across as condenscending (sp?) or something.
Actually, to save you a bit more time, I suggest creating your configuration, and then creating a ghost image or something. That way, you do not have to go through all that installation crap. 20 minutes to reimage versus at least 30 to install the OS, plus the software you have to install? Just a thought, not really sure if it will help or not.
Once again, sorry, I was just trying to be helpful.