Longhorn Vista Pics & Movie

[nixgeek]

Originally Posted by JonKemerer

You can't be serious. I'll agree I'm not too impressed with what it looks like right now, but it certainly isn't getting worse. Besides, if history is any indiction, I recall the Whistler Beta 1 having a watercolor theme before it got the axe in Beta 2 with the release of the luna theme (the current XP look). Point is, you can have an opinion about the GUI now, but Beta 1 isn't going to show much in ways of the GUI so...

I am absolutely serious. Even now with XP (once called Whistler) I can't stand the default Luna themes. They are too bulky and too ugly. I always end up back withthe old Classic look. At least THAT was cleaner!

Mac OS X has always had a nice clean look, even with the aqua-ish details. And to be honest, some of the themes that are available to OS X from third parties look even better than the original. Even the third party themes I've seen for XP are not that great. They just don't impress me at all, and it's more of the same with Vista's themes so far.

[nixgeek]

To add, all I see right now from this video is a lot of eye candy...even more than Mac OS X has. As was mentioned earlier, how much will this eye candy tax the system? Is it really necessary in an OS? Can't too much of a good thing be a good thing?

Personally, I would prefer the performance than the excessive eye candy. Just run my apps fast and snappy. Not like all subsequent releases of Windows, which make your computer feel slower than before. At least with OS X, each OS release increases your computer's performance to a certain degree...

[smithy]

Haha again the GUI is totally wacked. Have'nt Microsoft learnt their lesson with XP? Personally it just looks like XP with a few changes or just with a visual style in Windows talk. Sure okay OS X looks somewhat like OS X 10.0, but theres a difference in that OS X has been updated far more frequently in the past 5 years of which XP has been the latest MS OS in that same time frame.

The window trasnparency is not really needed but it is pretty cool-ish. Like said before this is only beta-1, there is going to be alot of changes, but from the looks of it at the moment, it isn't anything fancy. I think the minimize/restore window effects are in good taste. However to be picky, in user affordance the window looks to be minimized in a different direction to where the window is on the task bar. However that would look like the jenie effect of which looks like it at the moment in vista. I think the whole blured motion effects in Vista is well thought of however woudl be hardware intensive.

Personally sometimes i prefer the Windoes GUI look over mac and vise-versor. I think the task bar is actually really nice, however the quick launch icon area - the icons displayed there in those pics actually blend into the background. But the task bar and windows aren't unified at all.

Still icons and text look dodgey, in some of those pictures the icons look terrible while resized. And text obviosuly is not completely anti-aliased via the solutions to problems screenshot.

Overall we shouldn't be that picky since it is in early stages. However it is becoming more and more like a mac.

[WinWord10]

That looks terrible, and surprisingly unprofessional for Microsoft. It's like XP with an ugly third-party theme, Windows Media-style explorer Windows, and elements from OS X. The whole thing looks half-baked, and Microsoft apparently has no idea of what direction their OS should be headed. Unless they add something phenomenal, or unless I'm missing something, nobody is going to be able to justify switching from XP. I predict that Vista will be a huge flop, especially among business customers.

Yes I realize it's only a beta.

[lilbandit]

Whatever about the rest of the UI they seem to have stuck with that system tray in the bottom right. This usually turns into half a dozen tiny icons (3rd party and system) flashing, popping up and driving the user mad with messages. The user in the video got two popup messages within ten seconds of use. I also noticed the dreaded "Safely remove hardware," green arrow icon! That always drove me around the bend when using XP!

[btoth]

Well, at least the shiny black taskbar looks better than the default XP taskbar.

I did find the annoying notices funny, I hate turning on my PC and having to wait for 10 notices to show... windows update, virus updates, spyware updates, printer updates... etc. It basically looks like XP with a redone interface. Though, that way it does stay familiar.

One thing I've been interested in with it is the system-wide integration of .NET. I haven't been keeping up with my windows development, but I did like working with .NET and would like to give Visual Studio '05 a try.

[Convert]

I think it looks okay. There are some things I really don't like, like the "OK" buttons, they look nasty. And the font still looks really blocky.

I do like it though. Although it seems to have this design in which it looks really good in some places, but REALLY bad in others. And the guy just seemed to want to show off the little effect he had there, like he was saying "Haha mac users!" but in all honesty, it wasn't that amazing. I'm sure he could have shown more interesting things.

[Shookster]

It's got some good features but really not enough to justify the 4-5 years it's been in development. Mac OS X was released in 2001 like XP and in that time it has improved in stages whereas XP has improved very little. This would require Vista to be a massive jump in order to catch up with Mac OS X, which it doesn't look to be at the moment. Maybe it would be if they hadn't delayed some of the more promising features like WinFS. Interestingly, these features will also be available as upgrades to XP upon release, which makes you wonder whether Vista will really be worth the money.