From Microsoft-Watch: “While Microsoft has been touting the Aero Glass interface as one of the main selling points for Windows Vista, there will be another new interface – one for users running Vista on less-powerful systems –too. Microsoft hasn’t said much about its final plans for that interface until now. Microsoft has posted some screen shots of the non-Glass theme for Vista, which officials are currently calling the Standard or Basic theme. Vista experts have plenty to say about the Basic theme.”
Microsoft Shows Off Vista Interface for Glass-Less Users
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I have been wondering about this. I thought they might use a windows95 look since it is old enough noone will remember it AND it could be sort of retro.
Looks okay to me but I doubt I wil be using it…
another post about it
http://hive.net/Member/blogs/the_insider/archive/2006/07/05/New-Non…
The blog page has the image shrunk on the page. In firefox you can right click on the image and select ‘view image’, then click on the image (pointer will be a plus) to see the full size version.
Regarding the shrunk image, in Internet Explorer, take the image and drag it to the title bar. That does the exact same thing as view image in firefox and allows you to actually look at the screenshot.
firefox – drag the image to the addressbar
then of course if you have shrinky-images turned on then you need to click to expand, i personally dont have shrinky-images on
Sure its relatively easy on the eyes, and shows some consistancy and polish
but..
Besides the $200 graphics card, the only difference between Aero Glass and Standard theme is some translucency in the toolbar, titlebar and window borders and Flip 3D?
Ummmmm……….
Edited 2006-07-10 06:53
and I bet the basic theme is still faster without the DirectX acceleration.
Actually no, in Beta 2 at least, the Basic UI uses way more CPU (as Aero is mostly done on the GPU).
See: http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2780&p=13
Basic certainly feels a lot slower.
and that is just silly. my old 486 had a ati card that did 2D acceleration. why on earth does drawing something like the basic UI have to be done by cpu?
Sure its relatively easy on the eyes, and shows some consistancy and polish
Relative is certainly the keyword there isn’t it? I personally dislike the bluring of objects. The transparency and dropshadows look to be more of an eyesore than anything. I keep trying to bring the blurry bars into focus.
What? The screen shot in question here (the basic theme) does not have transparency, dropshadows, or bluring. As a matter of fact that is the entire point of the basic theme. Your opinion may or may not be valid for the Aero theme, but from your complaint it sounds like the basic theme is everything you want…
http://blogs.technet.com/photos/blog_photo_gallery/images/440505/or…
It may not look all that different, but it sure will be nice to let the 3D card in the computer handle all the GUI tasks and free up the CPU.
Judging from the required specs, youre gonna need every last megahertz available to run Vista! LOL
at least it looks ab it better than XP..cause XP looks like microsoft employed fisher price designers for the theme.
Wow, what an innovative and amusing joke that has _never_ been used before. Do you write your own material, because I mean WOW welcome to 2002. Are you gonna make blue screen jokes next?
I’m all for informed Windows bashing, but using stale insults that don’t directly apply to the article is a waste of time and space.
Since my comment current counts as that, I’ll add that I hope the performance of the basic theme is as fast as the Windows 2000 could be. It would be nice if they had a technical comparison of the two, such as “Xmb of RAM used” with basic or full, etc.
It would be nice if they added a third option for the “classic” Windows look, or maybe they are trying to phase out the gray and blocky buttons (although it was responsive at least).
It’s allready implemented in Beta-2.
I think it looks very smart.
I personally care more about seeing the interface (what ever it is) than seeing the crash interface of explorer.exe which plauge every vista till now.
Who cares about the subtle changes the author mentioned to the interface if there is no harm or benefit from it?
We would like to see real new improvements to our windows computing not visualization!
I suppose It looks ok. Hopefully I’ll be able to switch to the classic (Windows 2000) type look. Can’t really see how all that 3D stuff would make me more “productive”.
Hey, I’m not bashing. To each his own right?.
You can switch to the Windows 2000 classic look, however it looks really odd and out of place. You still have to use the Vista style tool bar, and it looks a mess. I suppose we will all eventually have to grow out of the Windows 2000 look and get used to Vista (Or simply never upgrade ;-).
I suppose It looks ok. Hopefully I’ll be able to switch to the classic (Windows 2000) type look. Can’t really see how all that 3D stuff would make me more “productive”.
Hey, I’m not bashing. To each his own right?.
The new user interface engine, Aero/Avalon, is more than just cool effects, its also about resolution independence etc. Also, all will benefit, regardless of whether they use basic or the glass theme as the whole GUI will be powered by their graphics card.
How does this benefit you as an end user? apart from the obvious of having a snappy user interface as your graphics card is handling the load rather than the processor, if you also upgrade your monitor to something larger, the user interface will stay consistant in how things are rendered.
I had my doubts in the beginnning, and now I’m outright convinced that the entire ‘glass’ theme design MS has worked on so far is a wasted effort. If you ever had a hard time resizing a window or grabbing a frame edge – semi-transparent blurry texture’s really gonna help those of us who are already going blind sitting too close to the screen. All the world needed was a crisp, well-designed, efficient frame handle – and MS delivered luxury sedan trimming that requires heavy horsepower and provides no functional advantage aside from ‘ooooh’-ness.
Aero has sucked up waaay too much effort that could’ve been spent better – I dunno, maybe in resource management, hardware compatability, memory footprint, something, no ANYTHING but candy?
A key difference between business and politics is that in business, you’re better off attacking your competitors at their weekest point, whereas in politics you want to attack your opponent’s strongest point. Microsoft insists on playing politics.
Vista’s UI will not be as nice as Mac OSX’s, and Vista security won’t hold a candle to either Mac OSX, Linux, or really any other viable desktop OS. Why is MS devoting so many resources to these two unwinnable battles? Because they already lost the battle they should have won: the development platform.
The most important effect of the disastrous Vista development cycle is that ISV buy-in with regard to their new WinFX platform is hovering just slightly above zero, a nonstop ticket to Itanium-like ROI. Admittedly, there’s some cool technology in there that would make developers’ lives easier and applications richer. However, the long Vista cycle has caused more ISVs to question a Windows-only business model, and how are they going to develop for WinFX and then get that working outside of Windows? They really can’t, and that highlights the issues surrounding open standards and interoperability… ooh, another sore spot with Microsoft.
Microsoft has lost the platform momentum that kept developer’s programming for Windows, and they completely missed the boat on web services. They now must fight Google at their strongest point. I sure hope MS likes playing politics, because they’re surrounded in all directions by competitors that have stronger positions.
If Microsoft has lost the platform momentum that keep developers programming for Windows, please, tell me, what platforms have they switched to? What you’re stating sounds very much like “If I say it is so, it is so, regardless of actual reality before I say it” mentality.
It doesn’t actually matter at this time whether you feel they’ve lost momentum or not, because the reality is that in excess of 90% of users use Windows, and that fact alone is enough to keep Microsoft and developers developing more things for Windows with high momentum than any amount of wishful thinking, because the only developers that develop for platforms where the users don’t demand products that they’ll pay for from developers are the ones that don’t earn them an income sufficient to make it worthwhile. In other words, the money is on the side of numbers for scale, and that scale is tipped very heavily towards the most used platform, and that platform happens to be Windows at this time: it means nothing whether another platform may be superior to the one that’s the 800 pound gorilla, if the number of people using that superior platform aren’t enough to make sales of the applications profitable for the developers.
Where the applications are almost entirely vertical and have a very limited set of potential users that don’t need to integrate data with other commonly used business applications or home applications (depending on the customer base), it won’t make as much of a difference what the underlying platform is. Where there’s no desire to actually survive off of something that has sales of multiple copies, but instead only relies on making modifications and being paid for that work (and if it is truly OSS, that’s absolutely no guarantee for the original developer that *they* will be the one to get that work) then it makes no difference which platform(s) it was developed for, either, because they aren’t into mass marketing their product.
What will drive long-term adoption of anything different in Windows Vista is the very fact of numbers: more people will end up using Windows Vista by default than all the alternate operating systems/platforms by intent of end-users, so WinFX, etc. will become a platform with lots of development, unless Microsoft really screwed the pooch and it blows chunks for programming it, or it is unreliable, or an outside factor like Microsoft locking things down with DRM gets so restrictive that people revolt. Other than that, reality and history indicates that Microsoft will still have a huge developer momentum if only by pure inertia: it takes a lot of time and energy to convert over to a significantly different platform, and that costs lots of money, all for what, a much smaller potential market, often populated by people that insist all software should be free?
It seems logical that your entire post is purely politics
Oh yes the one thing I kill in XP is the show more programs widget. > Sure you have your most recently used applications there but it sucks. Active desktop is still better.
If even Active desktop is better it must suck really, really abyssmally badly…
I look at the requirements for Vista and it pains me:
1) 1 Gig RAM
2) 1 Gig Hz CPU
3) GPU latest graphics accelerator
It is simply too high. In terms of just working and getting documents typed up, sending out emails, surfing the web I would be willing to ditch the transparency effects and stick with plain old solid old-school windows. I can see how the transparency effects will become standard in the future but I bet I would lose performance updating my old XP box. I will stick with linux, XFCE and wait until XGL is integrated.
and thats just for running the os.
the requirements for any software you want to run on to of that adds to said requirement…
Keep in mind that these requirements are primarily for Aero. The reason that Aero requires so many resources is because the new Windows driver model virtualizes the GPU — so that textures can be swapped back to system memory based on LRU. You need more system memory in order to store the swapped textures until they’re used again. But, if you don’t run Aero, you don’t need such heavy resources. Make sense?
But this should have been finalized agers ago, no wonder Vista has took so long.
If Aero Glass is one of the main selling points of Vista then thats rather sad.
> If Aero Glass is one of the main selling points of
> Vista then thats rather sad.
What is rather sad for Microsoft is that they’ve trained their customers to think that all innovations are GUI innovations. From what I seen, Vista’s key selling point for businesses and home users would be the push to finally try running programs with the least user privileges. If they get this right (and don’t let the “integrated DRM” misfeature turn your PC into a nightmare and don’t let the basic requirements get too high) they’ll have a winner, since it’s one of the best ways to get rid of the damage spyware and viruses can cause. From the reviews I’ve seen of it a few months back, they’re not having much luck with it — there were too many popups for too many obscure context sensitive errors. If you have too many popups, people just click yes to everything just to get rid of them, making your system less secure than with before. But it’s a start and they still have some time to work out the kinks.
But regardless, it’s good that Microsoft is at least *trying* to catch up with Linux (and supposedly the Mac) on security. It’s sad to think that an entire population thinks that spyware and viruses are an unavoidable part of computer life.
Microsoft having security as key selling point would show off Microsoft is only competing with it’s own former products.
I don’t find the Windows 2000 UI particularly slow on my old 400Mhz Celeron, it certainly doesn’t seem to use the CPU much, yet people are complaining about Vista’s Basic UI feeling slow on a fairly modern PC?
Why on earth should it be slow if it doesn’t have all the graphical gimmicks of Aero Glass?
I like the Win95, “Classic”, is much better. The puny window min/max buttons, no visual transition from app to frame, it’s just plain, blah. This is what’s supposed to put down tiger? Can’t even say good effort.
Am I missing something, or are they only showing the windeco here? I had hopes of seeing widget themes too…
I’ll give them one thing, it’s not ugly like Luna.
I believe the widgets are the same across both themes.
Both Aero and Basic: the lack of window titles. Now, on many windows, there’s a location box with some indication of what the Window contains, but generally there’s no mini-icon decoration and no title. When you minimize a window, sometimes you get the last component in the location box, sometimes not.
I suppose it’s not a big deal if you’ve only got one or two Windows open, or if you’ve got a woody for their expose/kompose equivalent, but it makes managing a number of open windows annoying.
I’m not entirely enamored with meta information related to an object being provided at a distance from the object. It’s fine if you’ve got a tiny display, but with a big display, you’re constantly flitting back and forth.
This has to be the technology equivalent of the statement “seperate but equal.”
…fairly simple and clean. Don’t like the shadow on the active “back arrow” button. Makes part of the arrow seem like it is missing.
*looks at the screenshot* So.., they turned the grey to blue!? o.O