A few days ago Kevin Rose pointed out the some what disappointing screen shots of the new Longhorn beta. Well here are some more courtesy of this man and his virtual pc.
This one clearly shows the sorting of the My Music folder is now going to be heavily based on ID3 tags as opposed it just reading the raw contents of the folder. Fair enough. Oh no, I can also see that dreaded red icon in the tray “Yes I do have a god dam virus checker!! And no I don’t want automatic updates!”
The wireless wizard has been separated from the main networking settings. Notice on all these shots how the the menu bar has now been moved below the tool bar, now MS are really messing with us.
This is the best example of everything you don’t do in interface design. In main window we have a white bar with headers (Name, Type, Total Size, etc.) but there are no columns with that information on this screen. Also notice the pixelated icon in the bottom left. Now rather than using a sidebar for additional info or links to related apps there’s a new labelled tool bar running below the menu bar, very inconsistent.
Alpha transparency on the start menu, there also seems to be a search bar just beneath the all programs button, handy.
In all honesty this looks like Windows XP after someone has tried out a few different icons, installed some random themes, decided they didn’t like what they saw, so went through the registry trying to remove them, only getting rid of half of it and mangling the rest. I know this isn’t the final version and it’s completely unfair to judge the OS at this stage but this is horrible. Have they learned nothing from Apple? Nothing from the open source community? My Gnome 2.10 desktop at work looks a thousand times better than this and that’s a freely available desktop environment that’s a mishmash of hundreds of independently developed packages. Consistency is the main thing done wrong here along with an overall lack of innovation.
I can feel Steve Jobs breathing down the back of my neck harder than ever now. If this is where the Windows platform is headed, this is where I get off.
Today I started shopping for a Mac.
![Futurama - Bender's Big Score (with Limited Edition Lenticular Sleeve) [2008]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61THJCbOxwL._SL75_.jpg "Futurama - Bender's Big Score (with Limited Edition Lenticular Sleeve) [2008]")
![Futurama - The Beast with a Billion Backs [2008]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/511PW90lDhL._SL75_.jpg "Futurama - The Beast with a Billion Backs [2008]")
Did you have to slag it off so much? A lot of the comments were on graphical interface, but remember we are still in early beta. Yes the control panel looks fucked up but I think that they will pick up on this and do something about it, the problem is that the control panel is potentially a complicated thing for the average user to be exposed to. And over simplifying it just infuriates advanced users.
The post was just about the interface, I didn’t go into anything else because I haven’t personally tested it and only had screen shots to go on. A good way that the control panel problems you bring up can be easily solved is by better user management. In future releases of Red Hat and Fedora Core the control panel dialogues and options presented to the user will depend on their assigned level. So an admin gets a feature rich, deep interface whereas a normal user will get a more filtered and simplified verson of these controls.