Longhorn Vista Pics & Movie

senne

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Check it out here.

The close/minimize/maximize effects are very similar to Tiger's effects.. A problem with their version is that the difference between the minimize effect and the close effect are minimal, which results in confusion! They just don't get it...
 
its seems like Vista is using the Scale effect to minimize programs... :rolleyes:

i heard IE 7 might cause a fuel to switch people to firefox
 
Not too impressed with that little effect. I wonder how fast his computer is, it seemed like it took a while for stuff to load in those windows he opened.

To me it looks like it still has all the annoying things that I hated about XP + a slightly nicer looking GUI. Looks may be decieving though. I will wait till I can actually try it to judge.
 
Frankly, I'm not impressed at all with Vista at the moment. So windows fade in and out...big deal. Mac OS X had been doing effects (and better than Vista) for a long time now. Looks as though Microsoft is losing the battle. It gets uglier with every release.
 
Not that great of a scaling feature but its not "to bad" either. It'll be enough to please the windows folks I guess. But Apple's scaling makes that one look like a OS version behind...which it is...or is it 2?
 
nixgeek said:
Looks as though Microsoft is losing the battle. It gets uglier with every release.

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...
 
Actually, I'm impressed. I thought Window transparency was retarded, but Vista isn't just doing that. It's actually blurring the background and even appying "shine streak" effects to it. It's actually pretty neat. I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple do something similar now that they have Core Image, and I guess this means MS is keeping up and has a Core Image-like technology of their own (either that or the UI will be a terrible processor hog).

As for the effects, I don't know. I've never much liked Apple's effects at all. I have to say, Vista's combination of scaling + fading makes a bigger impact that OS X's scaling. Since both are little more than eye candy, I say Vista wins out.

Then again, the problem I have with OS X's scaling is that it's often choppy in real-world use. I imagine the same will be true of Vista, and that'll probably be even worse with it fading as well.

The "pop" effect of opening windows is a little excessive, IMO. I do think there should be some animation, though. In the classic Mac OS, we had zoom rects for this kind of thing, and they did a great job. But now zoom rects would be a fashion faux pas, so we get nothing. :( Well, okay, you can optionally have the Finder zoom its windows open and closed, but the effect is too complex and creates lag. These things need to be kept very simple to be effective. Apple overcomplicated it, and Microsoft is overcomplicating it even more, it seems.

Should windows fade closed? Err....no. Again, we're creating unnecessary lag. I know that Vista will be running on much faster hardware than OS X has been for the past 5 years, but even so, I expect this to cause a lot of lag in real-world use. OS X's lag has trained me to almost never minimize my windows. But no amount of training can make to stop closing windows. Please don't introduce lag potential into mundane activities.


For the first time ever, I feel like Apple should be concerned. MS is going a few things that Apple hasn't — effect layers on top of transparency and window opening effects, specifically — and these are things I feel like Apple probably would have done if they could have. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see something similar in Leopard, now that Apple does have the technology (Core Image), but now it would look like a copy of Vista.

I guess that's one advantage to Microsoft's more open policy regarding software development. Apple likes to keep everything secret for as long as they can, whereas MS trumpets every planned feature long before they even know if they can do it. So to the public's eye it'll look like MS has a jump even if they don't.
 
It seems to be have the side bar effects to, just like OSX except not using borders

this pic http://www.flexbeta.net/images/vistabeta1/solutions_to_problems.PNG Windows Registry Not Working, already? Gee, I spent a night on my friends XP thingi, fixing 186 Windows Registry problems. And I couldn't finish it because the shareware demo version app had a minimun of how many registrys it will fix. Plus of course I had to clean out the Viruses, Infections, Spyware, Trojans, Adware, and the computer still runs slow.

Notice how big the notice for AntiVirus is, not installed of course, you'd think M$ would put it some antivirus stuff. It's their OS, they should protect it for their customers, so many people out there who don't run antivirus because they just can't afford the updates and not realise of the free one AVG and Spybot for spyware.

The movie had some sort of notice coming out of the taskbar at login, may have been the antivirus notice or an alert for the Key registry LOL

The looks not to bad I guess when you look at those pics. The icons look massive and seem they did that to give the shadowed details.

I don't really understand if it's got new features or just looks. Maybe just the Spotlight feature and RSS feeds, who knows? Yet the Parental Control for games, yeah good idea if you have kids that jump on the computer while you're not around, there are to many violent games out so that's cool.

But over all, It's gunna be another, Mac had it first debate with Windows friends, show all ya Windows friends your Mac, send em screenshots, little movies, anything, put a signature Made on A Mac with the date and time stamp :D
 
JonKemerer said:
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.
 
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... :rolleyes:
 
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.
 
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.
 
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!
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
As was said - there didnt seem to be anything all that different from XP sp2 in those screenshots. I guess there must be something other than just visual/eye chandy changes behind the whole thing? TBH I dunno what Id want it to do extra... Exposé features would be a godsend for windows users, even with the taskbar, to see what windows were open. They had what looks like a spotlight search box - if its as fast as or faster than spotlight, thats a great thing, if not :S ...

Surely, there must be some kind of novel selling point? Longhorn releases a good year or two ago looked very different from that - Id almost be tempted to say that that looked more like a modded XP system than the Longhorn Id come to expect.
 
I sent those links to my bro-in- law(a windows user)to let him know what's on the horizon.Either he's getting paranoid in his advanced years or things are worse than I realized for Windows users. He wouldn't go near them for fear of spyware or some other maliciousness :confused:.
 
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