[runejoha]

Windows Vista look very "eyecandy", at least from the screen shots. Is Leopard expected to be near to Vista. I only talk about the eyecandy here, the propability that they can match the OSX/Linux/BSD on any other areas are very unlikly, at least for my needs :-)

[wtmcgee]

God, I hope not.

They took a cool concept - transparency - and overdid it.

Remember when OS X used to have tons of transparency in all aqua apps? It gets old, fast.

[Horsepoo!!!]

Originally Posted by runejoha

Windows Vista look very "eyecandy", at least from the screen shots. Is Leopard expected to be near to Vista. I only talk about the eyecandy here, the propability that they can match the OSX/Linux/BSD on any other areas are very unlikly, at least for my needs :-)

As long as the eye-candy is functional...Vista should be fine. As soon as the eye-candy is for show...Vista won't be fine an people will be complaining.

Heck...I remember people complaining about window shadows and the genie minimization effect when OS X came out. But these were 'functional' effects to give a sense of perspective (an extra and subtle effect to indicate which window is active) and to show where the heck the window went after you clicked the yellow button.

Without some of these effects, manipulation inside the OS would be quite confusing.

Apple has made sure to remove or tone down the effects that people considered purely 'for show'. I expect the widget ripple effect will disappear or be made more subtle in a later version of OS X...just like menu and titlebar transparencies were severely toned down between 10.0 and 10.2.

[Millennium]

Transparency is, in and of itself, a Good Thing if applied properly, because it can give a sense of what's going on in the background. That said, finding the right level of transparency -enough to give a decent sense of what's going on without detracting from the visibility or readibility of the transparent object- is very difficult. Apple has been refining Aqua ever since 10.0, altering the transparency level in an attempt to find something that works perfectly. The degree of success they've had is debatable.

Either way, the current screenshots of Longhorn seem to indicate that Microsoft is in for a similar process. They certainly don't have it right yet.

[runejoha]

Originally Posted by wtmcgee

God, I hope not.

They took a cool concept - transparency - and overdid it.

Remember when OS X used to have tons of transparency in all aqua apps? It gets old, fast.

Well, the problem with eyecandy is the costs, which OS X does demonstrate with the "lagg". I beilieve most serious users turn off the eyecandy stuff anyway, unless MS made it run smoothly.

[Chuckit]

I liked OS X with more transparency.

[CaptainHaddock]

Transparency is "cool", but making narrow items like window borders and title bars transparent is useless. It doesn't reveal anything helpful, but it does muddy up the interface and make the title bar text and controls harder to see.

Window shadows are the only useful visual addition I see.

Explorer windows are still inconsistent, cluttered, and poorly laid out.

IE7 sounds like only a marginal improvement over IE6. The state of CSS support compared to Safari, Opera, and Firefox is still pathetic, and it'll be dismal 4 years from now when all the other browsers have full CSS3 and other good stuff. Microsoft is doing nothing unique or cutting-edge with IE.

If possible, the new Start menu will confuse amateur users even more.

The overall interface will remain a clumsy program-oriented windowing system, with Word and other big programs using hacks to be more like OS X's multiple document interface. The lousy taskbar is still there. People's system trays will continue to fill up with crap they never meant to put there.

Windows will continue to suffer from the millions of hardware configurations it must work with. It will continue to be the prime target of worm and malware writers. It will continue to be held back by Microsoft's huge, conservative business user base. It will continue to accumulate bloat because they can't abandon Windows 95 APIs and break compatibility with software.

But at least it looks prettier than XP!

[runejoha]

Originally Posted by CaptainHaddock

Transparency is "cool", but making narrow items like window borders and title bars transparent is useless. It doesn't reveal anything helpful, but it does muddy up the interface and make the title bar text and controls harder to see.

Window shadows are the only useful visual addition I see.

Explorer windows are still inconsistent, cluttered, and poorly laid out.

IE7 sounds like only a marginal improvement over IE6. The state of CSS support compared to Safari, Opera, and Firefox is still pathetic, and it'll be dismal 4 years from now when all the other browsers have full CSS3 and other good stuff. Microsoft is doing nothing unique or cutting-edge with IE.

If possible, the new Start menu will confuse amateur users even more.

The overall interface will remain a clumsy program-oriented windowing system, with Word and other big programs using hacks to be more like OS X's multiple document interface. The lousy taskbar is still there. People's system trays will continue to fill up with crap they never meant to put there.

Windows will continue to suffer from the millions of hardware configurations it must work with. It will continue to be the prime target of worm and malware writers. It will continue to be held back by Microsoft's huge, conservative business user base. It will continue to accumulate bloat because they can't abandon Windows 95 APIs and break compatibility with software.

But at least it looks prettier than XP!

Yes, Windows and MS is suffering because it has to make all HW and all their users happy, which is of course a huge task. For people that know what they want, Linux and OS X is probably a better choice. I realize that MS is waiting for year to adopt new technology due to their user groups. Still, most people prefere Windows :-)

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by runejoha

Well, the problem with eyecandy is the costs, which OS X does demonstrate with the "lagg". I beilieve most serious users turn off the eyecandy stuff anyway, unless MS made it run smoothly.

The problem is not so much the eyecandy as the graphics subsystem which underlies the whole thing. Even if you could turn off the transparency and drop shadows, you would not notice any significant increase in performance, because the graphics subsystem has to handle everything as though they could be transparent or have drop shadows. Accounting for the possibility of transparency takes up more computing power than dealing with objects that are actually transparent.

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by CaptainHaddock

IE7 sounds like only a marginal improvement over IE6. The state of CSS support compared to Safari, Opera, and Firefox is still pathetic, and it'll be dismal 4 years from now when all the other browsers have full CSS3 and other good stuff. Microsoft is doing nothing unique or cutting-edge with IE.

You're right in a lot of ways. IE's poor CSS support is holding back the state of Web design in ways that even many CSS advocates don't understand, because the most powerful techniques are only starting to be discovered and don't work in IE anyway so no one bothers with them. For example, Dean Edwards discovered a wonderful cross-browser technique to round off corners in any arbitrary DIV (or other block) with no tables or additional HTML added, but IE doesn't support :before and :after, so it doesn't work there. This is seriously frustrating stuff.

However, the fixing of existing bugs in things which supposedly are supported isn't something that should be underestimated. In particular, the two bugs mentioned in their document as being fixed have been plaguing Web designers for many years, and being free of those will allow many existing layouts to clean up a lot of their code. I would love to see IE support more standards, but even if they just clean up what they currently support I'll be satisfied, because then I'll be able to write clean code that degrades gracefully in IE to something that still looks good (if not completely optimal; for example square corners instead of round ones). That alone will save me many headaches.

[outsourced]

Originally Posted by CaptainHaddock

...The overall interface will remain a clumsy program-oriented windowing system, with Word and other big programs using hacks to be more like OS X's multiple document interface. The lousy taskbar is still there. People's system trays will continue to fill up with crap they never meant to put there.

Windows will continue to suffer from the millions of hardware configurations it must work with. It will continue to be the prime target of worm and malware writers. It will continue to be held back by Microsoft's huge, conservative business user base. It will continue to accumulate bloat because they can't abandon Windows 95 APIs and break compatibility with software.

That's why I recently (yesterday) changed my mind about pursuing a MS certification in *any* MS product. Especially Windows. Now I have to return the books and buy more OS X/Unix/Linux stuff.

On the transparency: I like the current level in Tiger. Subtle, but still usable when trying to see something behind a pulldown menu, for instance.

[Tyre MacAdmin]

Where are these Vista screenshots?

[Fonzie]

Tyler, www.neowin.net has some.

[Stradlater]

http://www.vistaarticles.com/content_images/lh4.jpg

Jeebuss! Who in the hell designed IE 7's interface? Address/Navigation bar above tabs, ABOVE the menubar?

[Stradlater]

http://www.stardock.com/brad/All%20Docs.jpg

More interface no-nos...preview pane below the list?

[Stradlater]

No offense to the thread-starter, but this stuff is ugly. Way too much transparency; way too many design flaws. 10.2 looked better than this. Hell, 10.0 looked better.

[kick52]

this 'eye candy' gıves me cavities. even if they do manage to pull it off, you still couldnt spend ten mınutes wıthout ıt crashıng or IE quıtıng or explodıng OS X ıs far better

[kick52]

just saw IE screenshots, words cant descrıbe ıts uglyness

[alphasubzero949]

More shots:
http://news.com.com/2300-1016_3-5805994-1.html

[Mediaman_12]

http://news.com.com/2300-1016_3-5805994-2.html
So is this an active window?

[mhuie]

The OS just hit beta1. Who cares if it doesnt look good? I hope they work on functionality instead of aesthetics.

[mmintler]

I hate MS but I have to give it to them...

this is their BEST attempt at copying OSX yet. Besides stealing all of osx concepts at least it isn't a blatent copy-they did add their own style to it. Besides the fact its not very usable from a UI perspective...from an aesthetic perspective its the most attractive interface they've done.

[Brass]

Originally Posted by Millennium

The problem is not so much the eyecandy as the graphics subsystem which underlies the whole thing. Even if you could turn off the transparency and drop shadows, you would not notice any significant increase in performance, because the graphics subsystem has to handle everything as though they could be transparent or have drop shadows. Accounting for the possibility of transparency takes up more computing power than dealing with objects that are actually transparent.

That's not quite so. At least in Mac OS X. The API's in Mac OS X will first check the view object to see if transparency is turned on or not. Only if it is turned on for that view, will it attempt to calculate the transparency effect for each pixel, based on the view objects "behind" it (until it hits a view object with transparency turned off).

[Webscreamer]

Originally Posted by kick52

just saw IE screenshots, words cant descrıbe ıts uglyness

Yeah, and the old IE Mac icon looks better than their new Vista IE icon.

[alphasubzero949]

Originally Posted by Mediaman_12

http://news.com.com/2300-1016_3-5805994-2.html
So is this an active window?

Affirmative.

[lookmark]

I would not count on Beta 1 looking much like Vista when it actually ships. This is still primarily a developer release.

Beta 2, let's come back and discuss.

[Squozen]

Originally Posted by runejoha

Yes, Windows and MS is suffering because it has to make all HW and all their users happy, which is of course a huge task. For people that know what they want, Linux and OS X is probably a better choice. I realize that MS is waiting for year to adopt new technology due to their user groups. Still, most people prefere Windows :-)

I think it's more accurate to say that people either don't know about the alternatives to Windows, or they do know about them but need the greater range of software available on their current platform (at least, they think they do, and Microsoft do their best to reinforce this quantity-over-quality thinking).

Pretty much everybody I know that compares OS X to Windows XP back-to-back, ignoring third-party applications, considers OS X far superior.

[CaptainHaddock]

Originally Posted by Squozen

I think it's more accurate to say that people either don't know about the alternatives to Windows, or they do know about them but need the greater range of software available on their current platform (at least, they think they do, and Microsoft do their best to reinforce this quantity-over-quality thinking).

Pretty much everybody I know that compares OS X to Windows XP back-to-back, ignoring third-party applications, considers OS X far superior.

Yeah, what Squozen said. I've never met a single person who loved Windows XP, or liked it better than OS X. Every single one of my friends who has seen OS X on my iMac wants to switch.

Those people I know who resolutely stick with Windows keep saying, "I hope Longhorn (Vista) is good!" Hope all you want, boys.

[siMac]

Originally Posted by Squozen

I think it's more accurate to say that people don't know about the alternatives to Windows

I like this analogy from 'In the Beginning was the Command Line':

Originally Posted by Neal Stephenson

Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them.

There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles--expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.

The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit (the original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled it to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.

Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success. A little later, they also came out with a hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT) which was no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little more reliable.

Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs.

On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come along more recently.

One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market--and yet cheaper than the others.

With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.

Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night. Ninety percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership and buy station wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the other dealerships.

Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek Euro-sedan, pausing only to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy the station wagons and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the opposite side of the road, selling the cheaper, technically superior vehicles, these customers deride them cranks and half-wits.

The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional car nut who wants a second vehicle to go with his station wagon, but seems to accept, at least for now, that it's a fringe player.

The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers' attention to this incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:

Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"

Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"

Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"

Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."

Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"

Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!"

Bullhorn: "But..."

Buyer: "Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"

[Madrag]

The transparency in Vista is over the top...

Also, all the system is far too dark.

very bad, but you bet they'll read some comments over the developers/internet and change it, otherwise it wouldn't be a beta...

[workerbee]

Originally Posted by Mediaman_12

http://news.com.com/2300-1016_3-5805994-2.html
So is this an active window?

I'd really like to see the same screenshot, but with the background windows higher up on the screen, so they show through the active window's top navbar. Oh, and make that more than 2 windows behind the active one... make that, say, 10, just for fun.

[workerbee]

Slightly OT -- not eye-candy, but Vista-related: some nice tidbits from Paul Thurrots Review of Vista beta1:

In other words, to be safe, Microsoft has to ship a version of IE that doesn't work like IE. Cute.

The search window, too, should look familiar, since it debuted earlier this year in Mac OS X Tiger

You can click that button to see the site's RSS feed presented in a friendly way, oh so similar to the way that Apple's Safari Web browser does it

Overall the look and feel of Windows Vista Beta 1 is pleasant and well-designed, with a vague Mac OS X-like look. The use of transparencies and translucencies, however, shows that Microsoft is still years behind Apple, experience-wise. While Apple has long ago scaled back the amount of translucency you see in Mac OS X because of illegibility complaints, Windows Vista Beta 1 is full of rookie mistakes. For example, when you pull an Aero window frame over another window, the text below, as seen through the top window, is muddy and ugly

[Gavin]

Originally Posted by Stradlater

http://www.stardock.com/brad/All%20Docs.jpg

More interface no-nos...preview pane below the list?

Gotta love the folder icons: gaping open and turned sideways to convey that your documents will fall out and be lost.

On the other hand a sortable list view with preview is something osx is missing. However I do prefer the mac's preview style to the truncated and illegible example windows victims are in for.


Why is there a print icon on the window? When is the last time you printed a folder?

This is the frontmost window but you can see through it. Even text parts you need to read.

[tgags]

Well they are definitely following, not leading as far as looks go (but nothing really new there).
Hopefully, if they were really thinking, they will aviod the security flaws that plagued XPs release.
One thing, I hope they are keeping the thumbnail & slideshow preview. That is the one thing I do like about the current Windows OS (use PCs at work, and have gotten used to that little feature).

As far as the new IE look, it appears to be change simply for the sake of change, which is never good IMO.

TG

[OreoCookie]

Originally Posted by workerbee

Slightly OT -- not eye-candy, but Vista-related: some nice tidbits from Paul Thurrots Review of Vista beta1:

I think Thurrot is getting more and more Apple-friendly, huh? Plus, he was right on the Intel switch as well Definitely, something funny is happening.

[chris v]

Oh, and it looks like the official release date just slipped -- again, to "holiday season" 2006.

They're handing the game to Apple on a silver platter. If Apple has shipping Intel systems with 10.5 on them before MS ships Longhorn, it could be significant.

[OreoCookie]

Originally Posted by chris v

Oh, and it looks like the official release date just slipped -- again, to "holiday season" 2006.

They're handing the game to Apple on a silver platter. If Apple has shipping Intel systems with 10.5 on them before MS ships Longhorn, it could be significant.

I agree. Many people I talked to are very interested, because they like Apple's design, some features (the Mac mini is a good machine, beats most barebones for what they are usually used), but hesitate, because they feel uneasy to change platform. If Macs could run a Windows flavor, they'd have the security they'd need (you can always go back to windows, if you want) or use Windows on the same machine if they need certain apps.

[Ji Eun]

Originally Posted by Gavin

Why is there a print icon on the window? When is the last time you printed a folder?

like in Finder you can ctrl+click a .doc, html file, etc and select to print from the context menu.
in windows explorer you can do the same thing, or select the file and click the 'print' toolbar button to the same effect.

[workerbee]

Originally Posted by OreoCookie

I think Thurrot is getting more and more Apple-friendly, huh? Plus, he was right on the Intel switch as well Definitely, something funny is happening.

We're living through strange times.