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Longhorn Pre-Beta 1 Released. OoooOO

Orlando Furioso said:
oh wow. you are right. The icon is just flipped and the handle is a little longer. The colors are swapped as well. Though a magnifying glass is a somewhat generic icon choice related to "searches", the styles of these icons are strikingly similar.
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OMG Don't you know Apple copied this from Microsoft. I bet right now Cupertino is sending an elite team to crack open the secrets of Redmond. I hear there's a secret entrance in the girl's bathroom.
 
As far as I can tell, this is just Windows with a slightly improved skin.

Im sure that there will be some rewrites of the core windows technoligies, but i highly doubt that what will be done will be enough to offset the security and integration problems that promise to plague Longhorn.

I am aware that the 'new super spanking' UI will not be implemented until Beta 2, but i can assume that it will still contain the dated "Start Bar" and overdone transparency, just like in this build.

Windows will always suffer from the same fate until they make the leap, chuck their existing code in the garbage, and start over. You will never get a brand new car if you build it out of old, rusting parts.
 
imo windows xp looks much better. looks like it's going to be a real resource hog, have a bunch of useless crap built in and not improve functionality one iota. looks like crap...
 
I doubt much is going to change in beta two... it is microsoft. If anything does change they will just add more transparency!!! In early alpha videos (the ones of microsoft demonstrating longhorn) everything was transparent, including their start/task bar. It seems like a total rip on the dock, but there is one problem... the dock is nothing but BIG icons, not a 16 pixel high bar displaying text and micro status icons. Poor windows users, I really hope no one ruins their vision. If Longhorn is good, I might buy a pc for the first time as a second computer, but only if i can turn off the see-through craptackular experience.
 
anubis said:
Personally I like the system font they picked. Looks a lot better than every other system font they've ever used.
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It's an improvement but it still looks a little jagged. It has the same almost-but-not-quite-right look that recent GUIs on Linux have.
 
Nickygoat said:
That's going to make it to the final release :p
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LOL... that icon will be present in every application. It is kinda funny though that you guys are making fun of it... it is a prebeta, and safari has a report bug button.
 
SilvorX said:
I actually thought until now that windows couldnt get any UGLIER, I was wrong
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I know, I just hope they improve it! Does anyone know if they have that expose copy feature?
 
Jedda said:
As far as I can tell, this is just Windows with a slightly improved skin.

Im sure that there will be some rewrites of the core windows technoligies, but i highly doubt that what will be done will be enough to offset the security and integration problems that promise to plague Longhorn.

I am aware that the 'new super spanking' UI will not be implemented until Beta 2, but i can assume that it will still contain the dated "Start Bar" and overdone transparency, just like in this build.

Windows will always suffer from the same fate until they make the leap, chuck their existing code in the garbage, and start over. You will never get a brand new car if you build it out of old, rusting parts.
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I do actually like transparency effects - nice and light - but I agree that looking at these it looked like Win XP with a downloaded skin re-do. Still so similar to Win 95, as someone mentioned above, esp. the system icons. Some of the newer icons are nicely rendered, but seem like the exception.
 
Jedda said:
Windows will always suffer from the same fate until they make the leap, chuck their existing code in the garbage, and start over. You will never get a brand new car if you build it out of old, rusting parts.
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Microsoft can see this and I'm sure they would like to start afresh, but the fact remains that while Apple suffered a lag in its customer base during the OS 9-X transition, the Mac OS still has a very small customer base compared to that of the Windows user base. If Microsoft were to change platform, they would be potentially crippled by businesses, which are their majority customers - why? Because Windows using businesses want to natively run all their apps without having any perfomance lag from an emulation layer. Those businesses don't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars in licenses for new apps, and espescially even more of that for Windows licensing schemes for Longhorn. The fact remains that Microsoft wants to get the 49% of businesses still using 2000 to get to XP, let alone a major transition to a new platform.

I still disagree with the mess of code still laying about in XP today - they should at least spend time removing a lot of that spaghetti code that hasn't changed since 3.1. Just my thoughts.
 
I could understand the window transparency as an effect for non-active windows, but the status bar seems to show the Control Panels window as the active one. Oh, well -- I'm sure that they realized that they could do this, so they did, regardless of whether it's usable in the long run.

By the way, what exactly is "pre-beta"? Alpha? I thought that this would be further along by now... ;)
 
idea_hamster said:
I could understand the window transparency as an effect for non-active windows, but the status bar seems to show the Control Panels window as the active one. Oh, well -- I'm sure that they realized that they could do this, so they did, regardless of whether it's usable in the long run.

By the way, what exactly is "pre-beta"? Alpha? I thought that this would be further along by now... ;)
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I dont think Microsoft considers it an Alpha anymore. They are actually refering to it as a "pre-beta," but yeah, thats the first time i've ever actually heard that term before.
 
Stefanlod001 said:
I still disagree with the mess of code still laying about in XP today - they should at least spend time removing a lot of that spaghetti code that hasn't changed since 3.1. Just my thoughts.
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I don't think thats really possible to refactor it anymore as you suggest. Most people don't even know what any of that spagetti does anymore. I remember reading a comment somewhere, an ex developer remembered seeing a comment in the code saying "What the F*ck does this do??" So, I think its hard to refactor and clean up something you know almost nothing about... thats why there's so many security holes.
 
Fukui said:
I don't think thats really possible to refactor it anymore as you suggest. Most people don't even know what any of that spagetti does anymore. I remember reading a comment somewhere, an ex developer remembered seeing a comment in the code saying "What the F*ck does this do??" So, I think its hard to refactor and clean up something you know almost nothing about... thats why there's so many security holes.
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Ya, Windows is just so darn bloated, I really wish they would just start clean, then we'll see a huge improvement. But oh well!

llama :rolleyes:
 
tech4all said:
Well I did notice a little gray block to the right of the right tab. Seemed kinda odd to me. Link to IE screen shot. And are those arrows on the right side of the address bar the refresh button?
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The box looks like the Apple Podcasting button in iTunes 4.9
 
I think the whole Longhorn GUI is very similar to OS X aqua/vaseline look just in black. The enu bars remind me of the skins on certain widgets (clock and weaather in particular), and also it reminds me slightly of the menu bar in Tiger due to the plasticy, reflectivey look, but just in black.
 
A lot of good points in the thread - many things exactly what I was thinking as I was looking at the screenshots...

At the risk of repeating other people, firstly UGH! It's obvious from the "Computer Management" console that Windows hasn't changed significantly since Windows 2000! (Or maybe NT but I try to block that era of my computer usage from my memory!)

I'm not particularly impressed! IE is a BIG ripoff of the Safari and Firefox layouts, (which come to think of it, does Firefox rip off Safari or the other way round?) - except the stupidity of having centered the Home/Refresh etc. icons but put the Back/Forward icons (only!) at the top!! Strangeness...

I quite like the font, but not THAT much - and what's happened to the File, Edit etc. menus? What do they have instead?!

And does anyone have an answer to the question that someone asked earlier about Alt+F bringing up File in windows... the equivalent for OS X? I'd be interested in finding out!

Hob
 
my favorite part is the old dos terminal window thing . i guess thats one thing thats not changing any time soon . DOS .. mwahaha .. that and as mentioned microsoft pain , the exact same crap id play with as a kid 10 years ago .. mwahaha
 
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