LONGHORN LOOKS BAD!!

[BlackDan]

i heard about longhorn and how it was supposed to be really good i was sligtly worried ther but then i saw a picture and it looks TERRIBLE! they have made all there windows curvy and abnormal shapes and it is all bright and colorful and looks horrible. also they have copied many features of tiger such as spotlight. it will be a shame when it coms out tho becos tiger is a brilliant selling point: the most advanced operating system in the world. hopefully mac will come back with something 3 times as good tho!

well actually, spotlight isn't very original either. Check BeOS for instance...

 

[GFLPraxis]

Since you are running Longhorn (Beta tester I hope) why not enlighten us with a few screen snapshots?

I have the last Alpha version before the Beta release. According to Thurrott there's not much difference so I didn't grab the latest build, but here ya go.

 

[mad jew]

Thanks GFLPraxis. Is that the default colour scheme?

 

[GFLPraxis]

Yup, but it should be noted that every Alpha revision, even with the smallest updates, had completely different color schemes so I expect the Beta version to look noticeably different on the outside.

It should also be noted that the 3d effects weren't running- I installed that on my second PC, a 900 MHz Celeron with a 64 MB Geforce 2 MX 400. Apparently a 64 MB graphics card isn't enough to run Avalon and all the 3D stuff. If it was a Geforce 4 it probably would have worked, it just doesn't have the Geforce 2 drivers I assume.

I took that screenshot with the default stuff. After I removed the sidebar and rearranged some of the settings to be like XP it worked a lot better. Other than being slow, and having a big explorer.exe memory leak (both of which I attribute to it being an Alpha version), and the ugly interface on IE, it worked pretty good. MS finally supports .tiff for one. You can open it in Paint.

 

[Les Kern]

The builds seeded to MSDN members do not include the new Aero interface. However, you can check out the current "look" of Longhorn at Microsoft fan boy Thurrott's website http://www.winsupersite.com/longhorn/.

One thing that GLARES at me is the default window. So I have this 15" laptop, and on it is a nice wide stripe that holds clocks and other "midgets" (That's the WIN version of widgets I made up, by the way).
How handy is that? Ah the beauty of Dashboard.
I've seen plenty of screen shots of Longhorn and have read a huge number or articles, and it's going to be a disaster.

 

[mj_1903]

I have the last Alpha version before the Beta release. According to Thurrott there's not much difference so I didn't grab the latest build, but here ya go.

The sidebar has been removed from the latest beta's.

As for the interface it is a nightmare. I can remember one screenshot of the installer, there was a "Next" button in the bottom right, a back button (which looked like a browser back button) in the lower left and the options was a tiny little widget in the top right.

The new huge title and wasted menubar space really pains me, what a completely useless change. Some of the new icons bug me as well, why have large icons then the menubar then small icons right underneath that should be large icons? *confused*

 

[MacRy]

On a side note, I love this screenshot off winsupersite.com.

andy.

Damn I was just going to post that!