The company is launching a “community technology preview” program for Vista, offering interim updates of the operating system in between its official beta releases. Microsoft has increasingly been using such previews as a way to offer more frequent test builds to developers. The first CTP was released today at the PDC. Elsewhere, ActiveWin has obtained screenshots of this latest Vista pre-release.
It starts to have a very professional and sharp look. Let’s hope that the product is going to be a good one also. I’m not a Windows user but I really hope that they’re able to do a nice and quality work on this – I think that good competition from windows OS would be very good everyone!
Yes, I agree with you. I was very sceptical at first about all this- but that scepticism is slowly starting to give way to a bit of excitement– the OS enthusiast in me is waking up!
Read more about what I think of Office12/Vista here:
http://cogscanthink.blogsome.com/2005/09/13/office-12-looks-neat/
I’m still too mystified by the number of versions that’re going to be released to care much about how it looks
You mean, they ported apt-get / urpmi / smart / portage?
😀
What in the hell is this in reference to? Seriously, do you just post shit for the sake of posting it?
“offering interim updates of the operating system”
but actually, I think I misread it. I guess it just means they’ll release more freezes, not let you update your beta gradually.
They made Minesweeper ugly!
“They made Minesweeper ugly!”
Minesweeper didn’t want to be left out
…and confusing (and that’s much worse than ugly). It’s really gone downhill: I did not think they’d manage to make something more ugly than Outlook2003 with the light blue theme, but this…
It looks like they scattered randomly the icons on a “semi metallic looking” (read: cheesy as hell) theme.
Urgh… give me ClearLooks any day!
The above comment was for the Office12 thread, actually, but… Vista looks ugly nonetheless, and to think of it with Office12 AND legacy apps… it gets uglier and uglier 🙂
You know, we sometimes give MS crap for not giving the user what they really need, but from the screenshots I’m confident that they are truly allocating their development resources according to popular usage models. MS customers don’t want a secure and intuitive OS: they want Solotaire. Screw everything else, can you make the cards look more realistic? Sweeeeet…
My former boss is going to love this new Windows!!
I think the codename for the next release of Windows (due out 4Q2011) should be “Needs More Cowbell.”
awesome!
vista looks bad and is going to require most of your cpu’s attention just to run it’s bells and whistles!
but, at least it’s powerfull enough to run minesweeper and solitare!
the MS hype engine is cranking along.
//vista looks bad and is going to require most of your cpu’s attention just to run it’s bells and whistles! //
Really? How did you get a gold master version of the OS?
Oh, wait … this is a *BETA* we’re talking about — the final version will likely run just fine on your hardware.
“vista looks bad and is going to require most of your cpu’s attention just to run it’s bells and whistles!”
Vista is slated for release at the end of 2006. And with this release, they are finally letting go of some of the old legacy crap that has encumbered the OS for years. Even an entry-level PC purchased in late 2006 should be able to handle the Aero UI without any problems. High-end games of today do far more elaborate 3D work than what Aero does. Those types of things (such as Stardock’s WinFX) run so slow even on high-end PCs today because the Window GDI was not designed to handle such complex graphic tasks. Windows Presentation Foundation, “Avalon,” or DirectX 10 — whichever name you want to use — is one unified graphics API. Aero won’t run on any video cards that don’t support at least DirectX 9.
At one point, Microsoft was considering not selling Vista at retail, and only selling it bundled with new systems. If you’re still using a Pentium II with a TNT card in late 2006, then Vista is hardly the only program that is going to run like crap.
this is kinda funny if you think about it for a second. oo.org v2 takes forever to get released (bet it will be released around the same time office 12 will be released).
the funny thing is, oo.org ripped off most of the old office ui design (and all its flaws) to make the transition easy for the users. ironically, microsoft finally abandonned it for something that looks way superior (and it is really).
what will oo.org v2 people do? ignore the ui changes for now and release v2 in a while or release v2 asap and start working on some v3?
Is the chess game included in the final version?
Well I think an OS is much more than just looks, in fact looks are (or at least should be) of least priority.
While I’m not aganist them, Microsoft people tend to trade security, usability and system resources to bloated UI.
Anyway, it looks nice, lets wait till the product is finished then judge it
Don’t matter what Microsoft lovers would say, of course, it is just my humble opinion (no one disscuss other style).
Sorry, but I don’t need operational system anymore who would look like some comics book page. I need stylish, yet very functional and minimalistic look. And I guess this is the main goal for all operational systems. Even KDE with all this “too-much-for-me” visual functionality beats Windows Vista in clean look.
And it doesn’t look nice. Some parts only, but games looks really ugly, sorry, It is just first impresion, but AFAIK Microsoft style of work, my pick is that design of interface won’t change.