Images of the next OS from Microsoft.....

A buddy of mine sent me this link with images of what appears to be the NT6 system. Thought I would share it with everyone....

http://61.175.211.198/vdown/newsinfo/win2004beta.htm

Ohhhhhhh, rounded window edges, anti-aliased fonts, and transparent windows.


Yeah yeah I know X has already had those things but this desktop still looks tight.

It looks aesthetically nice, but I personally found this and the XP desktop too cluttered for my tastes. It's hard to tell where one thing stops and another one starts. To me it just looks like a haphazard grouping of variously sized icons, buttons, and text, with all kinds of space wasted on presentational fluff. I don't see how this makes using your computer any clearer or easier than the old standard window/menu method. (Looks like a GUI designed by a marketing dept -- Oh... I think I see now.)

Now, I know that I am approaching things from the "power user" point of view, so I won't be too harsh. Of course Microsoft has been researching this stuff for years, and believes this is for some reason the wave of the future for the average computer user. So presumably there is some psychological "fuzzy logic" reason for this way of doing things. At least they aren't trying to make us all use some ridiculous 3D house metaphor .

"Task-oriented". Now there's a new meaningless buzzword for the decade. Pray tell, just what about computers is NOT task-oriented?

I'm still hoping that someday GUI developers will see the beauty of pie menus.

Well now those are interesting. Of course M$ would have to make them fade in and out or something "necessary" and "non-system demanding" like that. (note sarcasm)

Asthetics just aren't important to me. XP seems a little kiddy to me anyway. Security, stability, security, customization, security are more important to me than asthetics. I mean really, it's hard to make something easier or more efficient (in terms of getting to it) than the quick-launch bar.

It would be nice to see M$ raise their children instead of popping a new one out every year and letting if fend for itself.

But of course, responses to this thread will probably be from people who actually know how to use their computers (or at least think they do )

someone has,
you can get piemenus to mozilla
http://optimoz.mozdev.org/piemenus/



btw, couldn't reach the server,
anyone got a copy of those pics or
a mirror?

There are mirrors here: http://www.icrontic.com/modules.php...rtid=112&page=1

and here: http://www.tech-critic.com/modules....order=0&thold=0

hth

Wow.. my personal opinion.. but... what the hell are they thinking? I agree with Rycamor, I've just never been able to touch on what I didn't like about this sort of interface: everything appears to be one big blob of meaningless jumble... I don't know.. maybe I spend too much time on the console....

Speaking of WinXP experiences from a non-power user POV: My parents just replaced their PC. They had an "old" AMD K6/2 366 Mhz with 192 MB of RAM and Win98 2/e.

The new one is a Celeron, 1.3 Ghz, 128 MB RAM with WinXP. Opening the Start Menu requires a wait with the hourglass. Opening a menu requires a wait with the hourglass. Clicking an icon requires a wait with the hourglass. The bloody thing runs so slow that I refuse to touch it. On top of that, the cluttered Start menu is so difficult to use that they are frequently spending time hunting through the icons and menus looking for things. On top of THAT, the damn thing pops up all sorts of obnoxious, unimportant messages while you're working ("You have unused icons on your desktop", "Update me dammit!", "This is just to nullify your last click and aggravate you!"). My father seems to really hate WinXP and my mother isn't too keen on it either...

I always turn the XP GUI off and put it in classic mode.

The XP GUI is pretty big and bloated and confusing.

Hey, I like that gray box that outlines the links when you put your mouse over them, on the Mozilla page.

Sorry to tell you this guys but I love the XP GUI ok!!! On my and my cousin's Athlon 1600+ and my mother P3 933 it's all fine. Click on any menu and it pop ups right away no hour glass, just a menu, boots very fast too.

I agree too that the GUI is quit fruity but if you give me the choice between that and the old ugly win95 gui, I choose XP right away.

Being a Linux zealot I choose WindowMaker as my window manager but as far as Microsoft is concerned there's no turning back, no win98, nt, 2000, just XP.

It's stable and fast, what else can we ask from windows!?

P.S.

Ctb: what are you parents doing with a Celeron in the first place? I know that inferior hardware is no excuse for crappy performance but wtf!?

Dude... they're my PARENTS.. They aren't hardcore gamers looking for monster benchmark scores on Unreal Tourney

To clarify: I didn't say that the XP interface wasn't prettier... I said it was a cluttered piece of crap

It's the RAM that's killing the performance on their machine. Basically, I've noticed that if you don't double your "minimum" RAM reqs each time you get a new Windoze, you're screwed (Win95 was 32 MB, Win 98 was 64 WinME was a squeaky-close 128, XP is 256). We have the same problem at school. 700-800 Mhz (forget exactly where in that range they are) lab computers with 128 MB of RAM choke on XP and have a lot of trouble running the apps.

I still think those screens are lame, however... give me old, ugly, and functional. The layout of the old Windoze OS was one of the few things I liked about it.

Ted -
I think they did put it back in Classic at one point.. but that's just a temporary appeasement thing y'know. They'll yank that mode from releases eventually. Maybe from the Longhorn release?

Well, personally, the only difference I found between the classic and xp gui is that the 'Programs' sub-menu is at the bottom and that the same app occupies it's own button in the taskbar (if enabled). Other than that is there any other difference?!

There are 2 settings on XP that you can use to make it look like Windows 2000.

One is under the start menu settings, and the other is when you right click the desktop to get your monitor settings.

After I selected classic on both of them, it looks just like 2000.

(And a hell of alot less cluttered).

Bah. The two best GUIs I have found so far are BEOS, and the Blackbox X window manager. Both of these are proof that there is no reason (and no excuse) for a GUI to be slow and confusing.

The last time I installed BEOS on my Pentium 600, I measured the time to GUI start-up, and after normal BIOS startup, it literally took abou 4-5 seconds to get a full GUI. And what a nice, straightforward GUI it was; snappiest response I have ever seen. Optimized for multimedia, too: you could click on a 50 MB video file, it would be playing almost before you finished clicking. No buffered read time-- it just streamed directly from the filesystem to the video player. Of course all this was backed by a journaling/metadata filesystem, so you could query it almost like a database. Ahh... excuse me while I get all choked up.

Yes, I know that Blackbox is a geek-only WM, but remember: all the menu data is contained in a single very readable text file. Write an app to populate that text file, and you are on your way to a very workable GUI for any organization. On just about any old install of FreeBSD or Linux, from a standing command prompt, X with Blackbox will start up in about 2 or 3 seconds at most. It has nice Next-ish feel to it, with detachable menus, but it is very cleaned up. Absolutely no clutter, but about a slick-looking a desktop as you can get.

Check out my own blackbox desktop here and here, or see what a little creativity can do with Blackbox here. You can make your own themes very easily in blackbox, simply by editing a textfile with color values, gradients, border widths, etc... (Notice there is no loading of images anywhere, except for desktop backgrounds.) Everything else is pure speed.