Longhorn WMV videos at WinSuperSite: Longhorn user experience scenarios: “Longhorn addresses the needs of all users, whether beginner or advanced.” Latest Aero prototype: Cool Start Menu animation and media player Sidebar tile.”
Longhorn Videos Show Latest Aero UI
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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… but this stuff looks awsome. I think everybody should goto MSDN Tv and check out some of the programming features with XAML.
Link?
they have finally figured out how to get fade and grow effects to work the same way every time!!!
to those who think this is useless junk, you are wrong.
would you use a toaster that required you to stick a pen in the lever slot to push down the toast tray? or would you use a TV that required you to set the screen coloration for every channel when you changed the channel?
how about a car that had no power steering and no heat?
the new GUI is about polish and making the OS more professional. having a tool that does not act that same when you mouse over is very unprofessional. also, the use of the GPU to render the GUI means that the use of effects can now be harnessed to make the user experience better, easier, and more enjoyable.
I only wish Apple would render its entire GUI in the GPU, but I guess there has to be some sort of technical reason dealing with display PDF or something that is keeping them from doing so.
“I only wish Apple would render its entire GUI in the GPU, but I guess there has to be some sort of technical reason dealing with display PDF or something that is keeping them from doing so. ”
They do. Every modern windowing system has hardware acceleration at this point, and it works. That’s the reason XF86 feels slow as hell with standard VGA drivers, yet smokes the competition with nVidia’s.
-Erwos
Debman doesn’t talk of the same kind of acceleration Erwos.
to those who think this is useless junk, you are wrong. …the new GUI is about polish and making the OS more professional.
You can polish a tarnished ashtray all you want, but in the end, it’s still an ashtray. What a GUI ought to be about, is useability, not polish. Neither of the videos demonstrates that Longhorn will be any more useable than previous versions of Windows. I am not enthused.
Well call me illiterate but what exactly were these videos demonstrating? I heard the guy talking and I saw a background, but I couldn’t make out exactly what he was trying to do with desktop and applications. Could someone explain it a little better than what the voice on the video said?
“Cool Start Menu animation and media player Sidebar tile”
Wow, now i really need to switch from Linux to Longhorn?
Any chance of some JPG screen grabs for those of us unable or unwilling to download and run WMV’s ?
>I only wish Apple would render its entire GUI in the GPU, but >I guess there has to be some sort of technical reason dealing >with display PDF or something that is keeping them from doing >so.
Umm, Quartz Xtreme?
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartzextreme/
Quartz Extreme renders each window using the CPU into separate surfaces, and then uses the GPU to “compose” the screen by drawing them on top of each other and blending in shadows etc. Aero uses the GPU all the way, almost no CPU involvement.
“Wow, now i really need to switch from Linux to Longhorn?”
I’ll bet ya you dont even use linux.
Figa
Well it everything goes as Microsoft plans, it gives Apple at least a year to get Quartz Extreme to be completely run through the GPU. I Think that with modern GPU’s this would be the smartest way to do it. Plus you’d have regular Quartz Extreme for people who don’t have cards that can handle it. It would definitely be nice to see.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. The videos were much too short to provide any significant reason to be excited about the usability potential of Longhorn. On top of that, the whole sidebar idea is simply atrocious! At least they seem to be moving away from that chunky plastic Fisher-Pricey looking Windows XP look.
http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/pdc2003_hillel.asp
More videos and screenshots here:
http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/pdc2003.asp
When Longhorn comes out, maybe it will take another 2 or 3 years for KDE to rip off its features, and then Linux can reap the benefits!
Always playing catchup and then acting like the superior OS…
It looks stupid to me. All this ‘eye-candy’ will get in the way. You dont have multiple workspaces like in X. So with more bars how are you going to manage your space on the desktop?
What is Microsoft demoing in these videos, Mac OS X.3 or Longhorn? Its getting harder and harder to tell them apart. Good work! Keep on innovating Micr$oft!
😉
“When Longhorn comes out, maybe it will take another 2 or 3 years for KDE to rip off its features”
What makes you think it takes KDE developers 2 or 3 years? What makes you think KDE doesn’t have unique features and rips everything off? What makes you think KDE wants to rip Longhorn’s features? What makes you think KDE developers are thinking about an OS which will not by any means come out Anytime Soon?
Why post here on OSnews anyway about an OS which isn’t coming out Soon? Are we gonna discuss what Apple is going to do in 3 years from now too? For now, it’s vaporware. I don’t think concurrent developers really care about vaporware…
“and then Linux can reap the benefits!”
Linux is a kernel. How can a kernel reap the benefits of a GUI?
a good gui should have both usability and polish. and longhorn is still due for a long time, so things will get changed pretty much for the final version imho. so you don’t like it? fine. afaik, i don’t care about the details right now. what i see is that m$ overhauling windows as of the moment. wait till a beta-grade sample comes out and let’s stay quiet until then.
Thanks for the screeny link
I noticed on Sat that PCWorld (UK retail chain – think CompUSA for a parallel) are selling among their line of monitors, a “widescreen” TFT panel which has the same range of resolutions as a standard monitor – 800×600, 1024×768, etc
IE, it isnt a true widescreen it just has pixels that are wider than they are tall
I foresee a lot more of this sort of fraudulent misrepresentation in the coming years as Longhorn approaches.
I really didn’t want to like the Aero interface: But I do.
I just booted into WindowsXP to watch these movies. Wow.
The guy in the movie talks like he’s high on crack but then again, you should be, to appreciate the true innovation behind this wonderful product we will not be seeing for 3 years to come. Come on, why do we have to see these Longhorny promo’s on WindOSnews every darn day ?
Booting back into something nicer for me.
I am impressed! Just imagine how great Longhorn is going to be in three years.
Its really hard to tell whether Apple will be able to leverage the GPU for their GUI. The GUI server in OS X actually does very little server-side. Quartz and Aqua are just shared libraries that draw into the window bitmap. The GUI server just handles window bitmaps, without knowing whats really in them. To use the GPU, you probably have to do it server side — getting dozens of clients to smoothly share the GPU is not something that current hardware is up to the task of doing.
http://www.winsupersite.com/files/pdc2003_longhorn_desktop.wmv
http://www.winsupersite.com/files/pdc2003_avalon_transparency.wmv
http://www.winsupersite.com/files/pdc2003_sidebar.wmv
I have no idea if OSNews has featured the above videos, but they really show a whole lot more of Aero. It’s looking REALLY nice, but I don’t know how “wonderful” it would be in 2006.
I like how in the longhorn_desktop video, he mentions that he hopes it looks “exciting and beautiful and PROFESSIONAL”. Professional is essential for me. It’s difficult for me to work with a desktop that looks like it was designed for a kiosk at a KBToys.
CDbee:
“I really didn’t want to like the Aero interface: But I do.”
I saw these quick glimpses, and I too think I might change my mind about Longhorn when it comes out. I’ll need to tap my MS friends for a trip to the MS Store.
Nicksan:
“Come on, why do we have to see these Longhorny promo’s on WindOSnews every darn day ?”
If it’s an OS and it’s news, it’s here on OSNews. If you don’t like it, don’t read or comment. Furthermore, if it’s a movie from Microsoft, it’s going to have an extension .wmv
All Oses are taking inspiration from each other. The Open source side seems to be able to move faster. I watched an internal training video from the Office division of MS two years ago, and the author was saying they need to take Open Source seriously. He was saying that StarOffice was about the Office 95 level, but not to take any comfort in that. He finished the video by saying: “Oh, and by the way, the presentation you just saw was made using StarOffice”. Since 2001, StarOffice/OpenOffice has moved from Office 95 to being able to open, edit, and save Office XP documents.
Are you confusing OS X with X server all of a sudden? I don’t know of a way of configuring OS X to serve the GUI for multiple clients. Each client renders its own UI. No?
Soon something like that will be available on wincustomize.org (or was it .com?)… That always happens.
Man there is so much innovation on that first screenie,Apples Brushed Metal interface tacked on top of ACDC or Compupic Pro. I am so stunned by this revelation in GUI interface design and how it: “addresses the needs of all users, whether beginner or advanced.”
Come on, why do we have to see these Longhorny promo’s on WindOSnews every darn day ?
So the news can be balanced and so that its not LinuxOSnews every darn day.
I can’t believe how physically blind people are. I always come here and read news about Linux. Then there is one MS article in ten Linux related articles and suddenly the name of this website has changed.
Note: This last comments is not about Nicksan.
I once read someone calling Eugenia a whore. You people who do that are the whores.
Mod us.
The first thing I do after installing Windows 2000 and Windows XP is to turn off all of the fading in, out and other visual effects. Why? They get in the way. All the fading in, zooming out, yada, yada, yada reduces the responsiveness of the system. When I click the start menu, the last thing I want to do is to wait for it, and any subsequent menus, to appear a fraction of a second later. When I click, I want it to pop up when I click it.
It’s all eye candy as far as I am concerned…
Yeah. I’m going to play with Longhorn for a few days, then probably turn it all off and use classic, if I can.
I mean clients in the OpenGL-sense — as in the applications drawing stuff into windows, irrespective of where they are running. In OS X, all the drawing logic is on the client-side — the window server just manages window pixmaps. My point is that current consumer-level OpenGL hardware is not geared to having multiple clients using the renderer at the same time. They can do it, but performance suffers. So to get really good performance out of the setup, Longhorns window manager probably acts as a single OpenGL client to do most of the rendering. I’m not sure that OS X’s architecture really lends itself to such a setup.
The idea is that when it’s all directly rendered by the GPU, this kind of effect WON’T reduce system responsiveness. Yes, it would now, because it’s handled by the CPU, and so is sucking cycles from what you’re doing, but it won’t be in Aero. At least, that’s the theory. Oh, also, Aero will look nothing like that, i’d be pretty sure. 3 years off, nothing like the final product…
I wouldn’t care too much if my car didn’t have heat…. but then again I live in the central Florida area.
According to Microsoft, everything is going to be rendered by the GPU. They even said off-screen objects (like Windows that are covered up by another window) will be rendered, despite the fact that it is not seen, in order to reduce/eliminate visual ‘tearing’.
Now, say you start up a game, what happens here? Is the GUI still being rendered? Is it going to effect game performance?
Also, I see nothing spectacular about these movies. I do not know what the big deal about them is. Heck, I can’t even tell what they are showing.
Linux user should deliver something that match longhorn, before 2006, or you guys are just bull shit.
im a linux user who likes eyecandy on his desktop (no, the two are *not* mutually exclusive!)
anyone who is similar to me is waiting with baited breath for someone to pick up the ball and force some innovation back into the XFree project. havoc pennington, im looking your way……
i have little to no knowledge (beyond the user level stuff) on how X actually works, could someone with a bit more insight tell me, just how far away are we really from a 3d rendored desktop?