johng Blog

Previously I commented on the screen shots taken of the WinHEC build of Windows Longhorn. The interface left little to the imagination but after watching the WinHEC keynote I am a little more upbeat about the situation.

Obviously a large amount of the graphically rich features that were demoed in the keynote were withheld from the distributed beta. Transparent menu bars, smooth distortion effects and clean minimising animations were all shown during the presentation fully utilising the powerful graphics cards we all have in our systems.

The search tool was also impressive if not a bit too similar to spotlight from Apple. There are now search bars all over the interface and on the start menu so programs and more importantly files can be quickly filtered and found. Microsoft are employing heavy use of meta data or tagging and will be encouraging users to fill out property fields on documents so they can be found more easily when it comes to search. The whole approach seems to be to get the emphasis of strict directory structures and onto dynamic organising and sorting of data no matter where it exists on your pc or elsewhere in the network or over the Internet.

Lists can be generated, creating a kind of pool of shortcuts and links to different data that can be distributed using a variety of means. Amazingly in nod to recent trends they are making all these lists RSS capable, allowing you to subscribe to the feed of these files. Whether or not Microsoft release their own aggregator remains to be seen.

In a move that I’m sure Adobe won’t be too happy about they were heavily pushing their new portable file format called Metro. This is clearly an attempt to take the fight to the Acrobat format as not only will this become the standard for printing (a la Postscript) but is actually a new open standard based on XML. Excuse me while I faint.

So things aren’t as bad as I made out before, but the release is still along way off and Tiger has many of these features already available today whereas Longhorn still has a good 20 months of development left.