Unfortunately, these days people seem to not be able to keep… any ‘secret’. Longhorn 4015 has leaked and Neowin has aquired some tailor-made screenshots showing off a few of the new features taking shape in what is becoming known as Milestone 5. Also, Apple-X.net claims to have the first leaked screenshots of of MacOSX Panther 10.3, clearly showing the “piles”. UPDATE: Gsurface writes: “A quick look at what’s new in the new 4015 build. To my surprise, it was actually an upgrade rather than the full version. Luckily, I still had my Longhorn 4008 installed on my D:\ drive. Continue to read with tons of screenshots here.”
Longhorn M5 4015 and Mac OS X Panther 10.3 Screenshots
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Imagine how these thiing ‘leak’… I would rather call them ads.
For sure, longhorn will look a lot different whenever it debuts
When i first saw Longhorn screenshots especially My Computer. I noticed 2 things that address bar on the explorer was missing and another shocking aspect was that there where no drive letter assign to harddrive and removable disk drive. Seeing these screenshots i dont know what to expect!!!
Note how all the items move to the centre, like the Mac OS X dock. But wasn’t this, having icons moving about, one of the supposedly worse bits of usability in OS X ? The XP taskbar was very good so why change it to a LESS usable version? At least in the dock you can add items permanently so things only move about when you use an app that you don’t normally. However I think it would be better if you could pin it to one of the corners, more like the Be or NeXT docks.
At least all blue makes it look less like a Fisher Price toy and in fact really quite nice.
…Longhorn looks amateurish when compared with Panther.
I know this wn t be the final theme but the problem is elsewhere : new features added exist elsewhere (the new bar is everything but new) and/or are useless and bloat the user experience (look : now your big 19 inch screen is resized to a 15″ because of that bloody bar!!!). Where all DE go for a clean UI (Gnome 2, OSX, Zeta, XFCE…), Microsoft persists on adding more and more useless and annoying tools.
That is sad, the NT kernel can do great things, 2k is a good example.
Don’t worry ussualy you can strip everything down and get the old and fast look
Why does microsoft insist in making windows default look uglier
and uglier? Seriously, there are hundreds of agencies they can hire to improve the look of it, or even make the compete or something.. but they have to go with a new all-is-blue look that makes users think their RGB cable broke or something?
Ugly!
Honestly. All the toolbar icons are blue or gray. They would be more easy to distinguish with varied colors. The buttons in the titlebar got a far too low contrast. Same for the blue menu of the MediaPlayer (think about a laptop or panel pc in bright sunlight).
And I can’t begin to understand what the screen space is wasted for. The “n items in this folder”-bar uses lots of space and seems to provide little functionality. Same for the analog clock.
I agree. Longhorn looks like sh***. However, MS did the same thing with Win2k, they changed the default look they were using in the betas, only a few months before release, so people wouldn’t get too accustomed to the looks and get bored before they actually buy the software. 😮
While I’m at it: Reading bright text on a dark background tends to be slower than with black on white. At least a heavier font should be used.
Am I the only one who when they hear piles thinks of hemorrhoids? Just an observation.
Personally, I think this theme, while garish, is at least a step up from the garish RGB motif of XP. Microsoft hit their peak with the late Whistler (.NET) themes. It’s all been downhill from there.
I’ll say one nice thing about Apple. They’re not afraid to take advantage of spare pixels. Look at that huge expanse of empty desktop. Most people don’t fill more than just part of their desktop with icons. Now look how large and spread out the piles icon is. It makes complete sense to have large, highly detailed icons so people can take advantage of their screen real-estate. The trick, which Apple does better than most, is to do all of this, while at the same time preserving the real-estate when there are other more important uses for them. Note how the Apple menus, by and large, are short and simple and toolbars are large, clear, and concise. This is something that Microsoft really has a hard time doing.
I think you summed up Apple’s strategy perfectly. They utilize screen space extremely effectively while making everything nice and big, however making it extremely uncluttered. Although I do think piles is an inappropriate name…
Oh dear, and the text in all the dialogs is starting to look real old and computery isn’t it?
why does anyone want to use this? oh wait, nobody really does. they just have to run their machines and software
>Why does microsoft insist in making windows default look uglier and uglier?
They don’t. Its just you OS geeks who thing its ‘ugly’. Different people have different tastes but most people have one specific taste: we call these people the “mass-market”, the “joe does”, “average people” etc. pop music is written for them. And these people – the people MS wants to sell their product to – surely like it. MS does extensive tests on the end-user to see what they like / what is useable for them. What you call ‘ugly’ is really just ‘pop’. Of course most ‘alternative’ people (the not so average ones) hate pop. That’s normal but that doesn’t mean that pop isn’t a big commerical success and that’s all MS cares about.
BTW: I want MacOS X but without the price tag of a Mac. I’m sure I’m not the only one. Maybe some bored programmers
could start writing a clone for x86 hardware? I mean after 15 years or so the FreeDOS people finally getting close to reaching the goal of cloning MS-DOS. How long it might take to clone MacOS X or BeOS? Calculate it yourself…
recent changes in both OSes ( linux and windows) makes some interesting points
windows is famous for its user(joe)-friendly and linux, for its stability. Now linux wants to be user (joe) friendly and windows wants stability ( move towards win2k,xp, longhorn etc). Multiple logins and a super user ( administrator) even for a joe’s OS makes me thinking of an OS running towards more security and stability ( win2k and xp). Directl login in to root ( lindows) and recent more candy and userfriedly nature of GNOME-2 and KDE-3.1 shows a stable os wishing to be user friendly.
Quite interesting. Lets see the race. I will go and have some popcorn
is it just me or can anyone else not get the the apple-x site right now?
Visual tastes don’t vary nearly as much as musical tastes. I find it really hard to believe that “alternative” people would find WinXP ugly, while “pop” people would find it nice looking. Think about cars. Both car enthusiasts and the “average joe” find a silver XK8 to be a great looking car. You don’t hear a lot of car enthusiasts complaining that Mercedes is dumbing down the look of the SLK roadster for the “mainstream” public. You don’t see the Japanese cranking out ugly cars to appeal to the mainstream. I don’t have a lot of faith in the “average joe” but I highly doubt his asthetics is WinXP bad.
…are fake. If they were real, why would one still say 2002 in the window? Also, Apple never said it was 10.3….and even though it will more than likely be 10.3, the official OS # in Jaguar (10.2) never showed up until the late late GM builds.
Actually, I take back my earlier statement about Whistler being the peak at MS. I think the peak of GUI ashetics was the interface in Encarta. That’s was really pretty. Nice, flat, clean, unobtrusive. Looked good in dark black and blues.
Is it just me or does the look of Longhorn never change?
The answer to “it looks horrible” is always “it’s a beta”, “it’s an alpha”, “it will change”, but it still looks the same. It doesn’t seem to change either. I think MS is quite satisfied with that look.
longhorn02.jpg
That’s not pop, that’s just ugly.
It’s obvious that it won’t stay like this. When I saw the first screenshots of Whistler (XP), I was amazed how ugly it looked but the final XP seems to be quite nice actually (judging from the screenshots, I never saw it life unfortunately).
Let’s see and wait… Microsoft will do there best to get a huge lead to Red Hat and co again, but they will have to come up with something really new or they will get into trouble soon. I’m still wondering what it will be. A database driven filesystem and 3D acceleration for the desktop wouldn’t be too bad if that’s all (considering that Longhorn still has a way to go).
>Is it just me or does the look of Longhorn never change?
It is just you. Longhorn is supposed to come out in late 2005. The previous time they had a big release, they changed the look only a few months before release!
Please do not directly link to screenshots, for legal and other reasons.
I’m not sure, if those are fake.
“About This Mac” says 2003. This is propably also not the final version.
Remember: The last leaked Longhorn Alpha screenshots said 2006 in the About Box.
having read the piles document from ’92 now and thinking about it, I still don’t get it. It has to be one of the worst interface ideas apple has had since the top menu bar. could someone give me ONE SINGLE advantage piles has over folders? cause it just seems messy to me
I’d like to quote Rygel from Farscape:
“Goodbye, you big, beautiful, blue bitch!”
I could see one good use of piles. First, it’s like a transparent folder for the most part. Have you seen wallpaper that provides sections, purported to place particular files? This worked a lot better when the finder maintained spatial relationships between files better. Well, piles would allow for you to group things transparently unlike folders, which groups things opaquely. Also imagine that piles have plenty of options regarding how they’re displayed. The image they give looks like “cluttered” pile. Piles could also be “stacked” or “laid out.”
I hope that this innovation is a sign that Apple is going to invest some more effort into the Finder. Maybe we’ll get a filesystem with user-defined meta-data or emblems.
May I remind you all that at this point the programmers are working on this and NOT the UI designers? If you haven’t noticed, this build doesn’t LOOK all that different from previous builds, however I’ll bet that on the inside, the kernel and guts of it are drastically different. It’s apparent that this is the programmer’s work by the horrible UI glitches. Sure, everybody dismisses them as “just in alpha/beta,” which is true, however when you say that you must realize that EVERYTHING is in alpha/beta. More examples of the programmers doing things are the fact that “My Documents” and “My Music” are “Document Library” and “Music Library” (or something like that). I guess that’s just easier to work with from the programmers’ perspective and it only takes 5 seconds to change when the UI designers take over. At this point the UI designers have not taken over, so please be understanding. It WILL get better. Yes, it might only get better in the two weeks up untilt he release, but when it’s released it will be polished like the 95/98/2000 and Luna interfaces. Stop commenting on anything but the general UI feel (that probably won’t change). Yes, I realize that that’s all there is to those screen shots, so it makes one wonder why these are all that important (Microsoft isn’t going after them, possibly because it’s revealing very little actual information).
Because of course, Windows 95/98/2k/XP were highly polished. Am I the only one who remembers the mid 1990’s or what?
FFS it’s a goddamn placeholder, what’s so hard to understand to that? Don’t expect that one to change before RC1 either. They use ugly themes for the same reason car companies uglify their prototype models that run in normal traffic.
“May I remind you all that at this point the programmers are working on this and NOT the UI designers?”
Do you work for Microsoft? Do you know this to be a fact? Do you honestly believe that a company with the development resources of Microsoft doesn’t work on their operating systems in a concurrent fashion — ie kernel code + gui code is being written at the same time?
An operating system like windows is a fairly modular thing. If you honestly think Microsoft’s gui designers/coders are just sitting on their butts waiting for the ‘guts’ of the os to be done before laying their touches on the gui you are a fool.
Don’t expect the first windows release based on Longhorn to look too much unlike this.
Good to see that newer windows releases are just mindless hacks to the API to extend the graphical-klugde.
Actually. That’s what they’ve been doing since 95′.
Windows 2000 was (and looks like it will be) the top of the bell curve for quality coming from redmond. After and before that is just junk.
Hm. I actually like it. Hope Microsoft will keep Longhorn drive letter-less.
Remember that Longhorn still has years left until the release. The UI wil change a lot. The XP look wasn’t created instantly. It takes time. Just wait until the interface crew gets a hold of it. Just chill out and give it time.
that is a realy cool idea with the document piles. I wonder why no one ever thought about adding that to a DE before…unless BE or Amiga did it or something.
you have no clue about UI design because you said this
“It has to be one of the worst interface ideas apple has had since the top menu bar.”
the top menu bar is the best UI design for new users and usability. you always have it in the same place and people read from top left to bottom right so the most important places are the top corners…notice what are in teh top corners, the menues and the clock (and the pager in the pre-osx interfaces)
as fro piles…who nows until you play with them. perhaps when you use them you will find it nce to have a documents flder and then to pile the documents that are related to each other like you would in an office (even had to close on a house?) sure you can use folders for that but that adds directories to go throgh, this you go into documents and find the pile you need and select from a list that pops up or something the document you need from the pile. it makes it easier to have a lot of documents in one folder for the user.
hell, they don’t even have to be related…say you want all your documents on your desktop well it looks like crap to have them all over the place, so you pile them all up in one nice icon and select the document you want from the list.
The XP look wasn’t created instantly.
>>>>>>>>>>
Are you sure about that? Because I sure wouldn’t want to imagine somebody for whom creating that Crayola commercial took more than five minutes. I’m sorry, I just have to blow off some steam about it. I’ve been forced to use Luna for a couple of days on a locked-down machine, and it’s really getting to me. The “Silver” style isn’t that bad, and some of the XP themes out there are pretty nice, but the Red/Green is garish to say the least.
PS> I agree with debman. The top menubar is absolutely cool. I found this really cool KDE kicker applet at http://www.liacs.nl/home/snijssen/kmenuapplet/
It gives you a MacOS style top menu that can be set to auto-hide. It needs a little polishing (can cause Konqueror to crash at startup occasionally) but it’s really nifty. I find myself rarely ever using the menubar, especially for stuff like web browsing, so I save some pixels this way.
Just because it says 2003 doesn’t mean jack. I can hack the low level system to say 2004 if I wanted to please some people.
sweet!!! that is exactly what I was looking for /trying to do in KDE. now that you can have a floating kicker I wanted my open windows/time/menues to be in a top screen bar so I could get a MAC OSX feel.
hey to all those who want OS X on X-86….use KDE with this thing.
Wow, you can “hack the low level system to say 2004?” That sure sounds intelligent.
Hm. I actually like it. Hope Microsoft will keep Longhorn drive letter-less.
Welcome to 1984 : )
To all that want OSX on x86.. you can’t have it.. BUT you can fake it! Check out http://www.aqua-soft.org and http://www.aquaxp.com
If you want an OSX dock try
http://www.objectdock.com
There are a couple others
MobyDock and YZ-Dock but I like ObjectDock better.
You can find all this stuff out at the first 2 links I gave ya.
My XP looks like Aqua and i’m in the process of aquifying KDE
u’r right, nisse butt, it’s all about marketing. They get much more attention when they say that the info you read is actually a “secret” which has “leaked” through.
Human nature, mate; whatever is prohibited or secret gets our attention ….. but hey, MS is not doing anything illegal and neither does Apple.
BTW, this advertising or marketing tool has been used for ages by the car industry and others …… nothing new under the sun
enjoy the screenshots before you spend your hard earned $$$ to satisfy the urge to buy it …..
mythought
Intelligent enough to not be anonymous. Moron.
Will Windows ever get anti-aliased fonts at the normal sizes? I am using KDE right now and I really like the anti-aliased fonts everywhere, while Windows only does this starting at size 14.
Yes, it might slow down the system, but if KDE can do it at usable speeds on my P350, Longhorn should be able to do it fast enough on say a P1000, as I guess something like that will be the average system in two years.
Btw. About user-friendly operating systems: ever looked at Microsoft BOB? http://toastytech.com/guis/bob.html
The reason you haven’t seen Piles on other operating systems, whoever it was who asked, is that Apple patented this idea a long time ago. This is their baby. Now, that doesn’t mean that someone else can’t implement an almost identical feature on their own, but for now, Apple’s got this one locked down.
I’m looking forward to piles. Might just be the thing that gets me to start putting icons on my desktop again.
Anyone got a mirror of the Panther pics? The site seems down.
Marco Alanen: Is it just me or does the look of Longhorn never change? The answer to “it looks horrible” is always “it’s a beta”, “it’s an alpha”, “it will change”, but it still looks the same. It doesn’t seem to change either. I think MS is quite satisfied with that look.
Remember the LUNA interface? Do you also know when in the product development cycle that MS revealed it? Quite late. Remember Aqua? Same here, revealed when development had gone quite far and Developer Preview 3 was the first to include the Aqua interface.
Now with the lauch of Win2003 Server do you really think MS is that stupid that they’d risk removing attention from that launch by having paople discussing the Longhorn UI?!
yerma: Don’t expect the first windows release based on Longhorn to look too much unlike this.
Longhorn will have a new graphics subsystem/API called Avalon that will have 3D acceleration (window compositing or whatever) and you can bet serious money the actual look (or skin if you so will) of the interface will be quite different. That said, MS is now testing/developing new UI aspects (sidebar etc) and those I imagine will not radically different in their arrangement but their skins will.
Now both the Aqua and the Luna interface was aimed at the Johns ans Janes out there (“lickable buttons” anyone?!) and you should not expect that trend to go away. For MS and Apple the one thing to remember (and Red Hat as well) is this: not two people like the exact same things and thus choice is guuuuud. We need to be able to choose and change the look of our interfaces or we’ll simply use the interface that works best if it is not optimal.
That said, my personal opinion of both Aqua, Luna and the “current-Longhorn-interface-that-will-be-radically-different-when-rele ased” is they are still lacking in some aspects for me
Actually I ran the demo using that Flash application and with all due respct to the developers but if that’s what “Piles” do, well I think it sucks. Why do I have to hold down the mouse button in order to get details about icons/shorcusts when I move the mouse over them. It would be way better and more convinient if you can simply click on the icon which activates the “drawer” and then instead of holding the mouse button and moving, you can just move over the icons without holding the mouse button and get info about each icon displayed as you move the mouse.
Microsoft scares me. Looks like they are really into this blue idea. Have you noticed that the Windows Media Player 9 is also blue but it is the type of blue that resembles the Longhorn interface? If this is the case then looks like these guys are serious about this but we’ll see. Also the latest Office is blue isnt’t it? It all makes sense.
It’s amazing when every time a new build of Longhorn is created, the build is leaked. It makes you wonder whether it is leaked after all or MS just sends it to them, doesn’t it?
on http://www.kde-look.org there has been quite a bit of excitement around Karamba (and SuperKaramba)… it’s incredibly early alpha at the moment, but they’ve implemented a Mac OSX Doc in Karamba, and it has icon zooming that works pretty well. It also has a Mac OS X bar thing at the top.
Configurations can be created in Python. I’ve played with it and it looks very nice… not terribly useable yet though.
( I can’t seem to get used to the non-windows way of doing things, so I just use Kicker with a taskbar – boring I know)
God, its ugly. Maybe I’m just used to the elegance of Apple products, but it seems that Windows is becoming more hideous with each subsequent iteration. It looks cluttered, confusing, and is extremely visually unappealing. Nothing would ever entice me to switch from OS X.
http://www.apple-x.net/panther/pantherpiles.jpg
http://www.apple-x.net/panther/pantherfilemenu.jpg
http://www.apple-x.net/
That other icon in the doc is actually Sketch from the developer tools package.
Firstly, for your information, it is not ALL people on this planet that read Left-to-Right, Top-to-Bottom. This is a group, only. Not everyone. You have apparently caught on to this issue as a buzz-phrase to use in your arguments, but your information is incomplete.
Secondly, the Apple method of putting the menu bar along the top of the screen was invented when the OS was a single-task OS (one program at a time). When it was like this, the menu bar design was a good idea. It was sensible. Ever since the OS began to offer multi-tasking (regardless of technical means), the whole ideal behind the menu bar’s concept was lost and it became an obstruction to ease of use instead of a benefit (count the number of compensations in the UI to come about since then, such as the name of the program showing up in the Finder upper right corner and now as the Application menu).
If you aren’t a human-machine interface expert yourself, which you’ve just proven, don’t go bashing other people for not being one.
Just because you are used to something and know all about the designers justifications for their choices does not mean that design is ideal for most people.
” Yes, it might only get better in the two weeks up untilt he release, but when it’s released it will be polished like the 95/98/2000 and Luna interfaces”
If you mean that Luna looks “polished” in the way that Fisher Price Toys look “plastic” then I totally agree with you. I also love the way that people say about XP “you can always change the look back to Windows 2000/98 if you want to”.
Meaning, you can go back to a bland, boring, 10-year old garbage, instead of Microsoft actually making something that looks good, not like Teletubbies (haven’t they heard that mixing Green and Red is a bad idea, unless you are designing traffic lights or Christmas decorations?).
But, just like they ripped off the term “luna” from “aqua” (just a coincidence, I’m sure), they will, in the end, try to copy OS X, but it will still look like crap.
So just admit it, you’re cheap.
Hey, I want a Mercedes, but I can’t afford it, I wish that somone would make a cheap Mercedes.
Nice things cost more, some people are willing to pay more for them, and some people aren’t, but you’re not entitled to something just because you want it.
Buck up, or shut up.
I sure would expect that Mercedes to be faster than my Toyota Tercel.
My 1978 Chevy Malibu Classic is faster than my 2002 LandRover…which one do you think I’d prefer to drive?
My eyes, my eyes… oooh… they are hurting because the Panther hasn’t got rid of it’s awful gray stripes.
Apple, please give me something alse, anything, but not those stripes. Even metallic look goes better than this. Where is all that good UI design Apple used to be famous of?
*Help me*
…that men are not good enough to judge this kind of stuff:
http://microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/apr03/04-03WomenViewPR.as…
I get very dizzy with 3D games… when I used to play Doom back in the day, I had the need to throw up after 30 mins of playing time… Never quite threw up of course, but many times I got close.
[i]My 1978 Chevy Malibu Classic is faster than my 2002 LandRover…which one do you think I’d prefer to drive?[i]
Wouldn’t they both handle about the same, get the same milage, and either one stops just about as well as the other?
Now…. make that a 02 Audi A4, and a 78 Chevy Mailbu, and you can answer that question much easier.
It’s extremely easy to change the windows interface using applications such as WindowBlinds, StyleXP, etc… Because of windows large desktop share, there are many many options regarding what you can do to change it’s appearance. Check out http://www.deskmod.com for just a few examples.
So it’s blue, calm down.