OT: Microsoft Windows Longhorn Screenshots

sweetjesus · Post by **sweetjesus** » Mon Jul 11, 2005 8:02 am

http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2005 ... reenshots/

New screenshots. Meant to be the new Beta1, some people say the shots are accidental leaks of Beta2 which won't be for some time.

Still I think they look great.

raapie · Post by **raapie** » Mon Jul 11, 2005 9:19 am

don't like the looks. I am a xp user but disable all the fancy stuff. never liked anything Microsoft did on the way it looks. bad designers or bad supervisors.

Michael-SW · Post by **Michael-SW** » Mon Jul 11, 2005 9:42 am

I'll readily agree with you. I always run XP in "classic" (Windows NT/98 ) style. I want lean window borders and small menus, not the bloated stuff they put in as default.

Martyn · Post by **Martyn** » Mon Jul 11, 2005 9:54 am

completely re-skinned mine, I can't understand why microsoft don't hire some tasteful designers, they've always needed a shot in the arm designwise. I thought longhorn was supposed to have all this new fangled 3d window stuff.

This looks a bit better than XP's default but what people really want is 3rd party skinability. They never advertised that this was possible with xp until 3rd party reskinning apps came out.

Is it ever going to come out, or is it just a modern day urban myth?

MarkH · Post by **MarkH** » Mon Jul 11, 2005 11:10 am

I think those screenshots look better than XP. I've run tests with classic mode vs. standard XP and it has 0 effect on performance on my computer. My graphics card is a PCI-Express x16 so maybe that has something to do with it, but I think those screenshots remind me of something, yeah, somewhere between Gnome-meets-Safari.

vince watson · Post by **vince watson** » Mon Jul 11, 2005 5:38 pm

oh look.....a start button. how innovative and new

we dont even need leopard then...tiger's good enough

braj · Post by **braj** » Mon Jul 11, 2005 5:48 pm

It looks better than XP anyway, but they are definitely copying OS X quite a bit. I also turn off the XP themes in Windows and wish I could do the same in OS X.

Meffy · Post by **Meffy** » Mon Jul 11, 2005 8:27 pm

I agree with those who don't care for display frou-frou. Transparent caption bars and window borders? Hm, that's useful. =9_9= Hope it can be set for the "retro" look of Win9x, or at least no silly transparency.

And the grass wallpaper is out of focus. O_:-}

Finally, from one of the screenshots: "linux-noob"...? :-D Good idea there. Linux is mighty and grand and proud and free. Love it.

Meffy

P.S.: skinned longhorn = LOTS OF STEAKS! Mmmmmm... steak...

braj · Post by **braj** » Mon Jul 11, 2005 8:44 pm

The eye candy is only good when it is useful. For instance, I use the basic old-style Windows theme to save CPU, but then I use YzShadow to give a drop shadow, which helps me feel the depth of windows and makes me just feel 'better' somehow.

Mac OS X was designed to use the eye candy in this sort of way, some of it was successful like drop shadows IMO and some wasn't, like the transparencies of window title bars when in the background. It's funny to see Longhorn adopt these after OS X has abandoned them.

shanecapps · Post by **shanecapps** » Mon Jul 11, 2005 8:55 pm

they missed the blue screen of death screenshot....

Livewire · Post by **Livewire** » Mon Jul 11, 2005 11:34 pm

lol they probably skinned the blue screen too. so at least it looks good WHEN YOUR COMPUTER CRASHES

Martyn · Post by **Martyn** » Mon Jul 11, 2005 11:52 pm

Livewire wrote:lol they probably skinned the blue screen too. so at least it looks good WHEN YOUR COMPUTER CRASHES

Crashes? this is the pc platform we're talking about, dont get many crashes these days, if at all, you must be still thinking we're on win 98.

silly sausage.

(can't seem to get my cpu meter above 50%, i think i need more plugins)

Angstrom · Post by **Angstrom** » Tue Jul 12, 2005 12:09 am

They took all the fun features out .. remember when they demo-ed the 3d windows that you could grab and flip over (Avalon?)

on the back of each window was lots of preference info and the like, it looked pretty damn good to me. they had a rack of open windows that looke like a toast rack ... instead of all windows on top of each other like now.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1 ... 262,00.asp

ah well as long as it is stable

Martyn · Post by **Martyn** » Tue Jul 12, 2005 12:19 am

I don't think it's ever coming out anyway, how long have they been going on about it? I'm not really a fan of all the whistles and bells sort of stuff, transparent menus, windows that swish around your screen etc, I don't really want to know there's an OS present at all, i just want it to run my apps as well as possible on my choice of hardware.

To be honest, I'm so happy with my present setup i couldn't give a shit how long it takes to be superceded, by the time it is I'm kind of hoping that all my apps will run on linux.

Machinate · Post by **Machinate** » Tue Jul 12, 2005 12:24 am

i have a suspiscion that:
1: These pics are actually pre-beta - since it basically looks like skinned XP
2: That I don't give a rats ass how my OS looks. Live in fullscreen mode, people

3: Longhorn *will* be a stable OS. No drivers in the kernel means no BSOD. But hey, six million ways to crash - choose 1