Various sources are posting screenshots of the upcoming beta release of Longhorn, Microsoft's succesor to Windows XP. IE7 shots are also included. Due to the Slashdot-effect, mirrors are already available. Original source | mirror 1 | mirror 2. My take: Too much transparency.
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Member since:2005-06-29
They moved the close (X) button to the left, so noone can just blindly close the windows by quickly moving the mouse to the right top corner of the screen.
Did you even look at those shots? The window buttons are still all in the top-right corner, so I have no idea where you got that idea from.
Actually, I would applaud if they had moved the close button to the top-left.
Member since:2005-07-10
I think you misunderstood.
The poster is not talking about moving the window buttons to the left corner but about leaving them at the right corner but moving them a little bit away from the actual corner.
The problem with this is that if the window is maximised you can't just move your mouse to the top right corner to close it, but actually have to navigate your mouse to the close button.
Member since:I think he meant that they moved it to the left as in not anymore in the topright corner exactly, not as in moving it to the topleft corner.
That would be a bad thing (tm) when the window is maximized because of Fitt's law blah blah...
But actually, the close button seems to be aligned with the content of the window on the right edge, thus I'm pretty sure that when maximized it will cover the northeast corner of the screen.
As someone else said, though, I'm worried about the readability of a stack of maximized, half-transparent, pixel-shader diffusing windows. We'll see when the definitive UI comes out, for the moment it seems quite tacky and distracting.
Member since:
So, Aero is the new GUI standard? Good to see they don't even respect it themselves (see the media player).
This is one of the worst aproaches I have ever seen UI wise. They moved the close (X) button to the left, so noone can just blindly close the windows by quickly moving the mouse to the right top corner of the screen.
Everything is just too transparent. Even the window borders to make it even harder to resize a window.
I thought, it would be hard to create something that is even worse than the WinXP themes. But they did it ... again ...
If that's the new revolutionary OS (I know, it's a beta, but it should show the way), the so called "innovation", then OSS-Desktops have nothing to fear. Even better: MS shovels its own grave.
I wonder what MS did during the last 5 years (XP was only a better service pack to win2k). Seems like the company became too big to really push out revolutionary new things.