Thom Holwerda Archive

Inside the New Windows Vista Build

This week, Microsoft is handing out Vista build 5219 at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. PC Magazine was able to get their hands on it, trying out a number of new features and observing some slick-looking interface enhancements, such as true 3D windows views (with properly skewed video), thumbnail views for desktop apps, and a semi-transparent Taskbar. Take the guided tour to witness some of these new features in build 5219.

Vista’s Sidebar, Gadgets Unveiled; MS Releases Max, Monad Beta 2

Lots of news from the first few hours of the PDC. First off, in the first CTP of Vista, the sidebar has been revived. "The Sidebar will be populated with "gadgets" and will feature an open platform for developers to create their own mini-applications. Sidebar gadgets can be dragged onto the desktop, and interact with standard Windows applications." Also, "Microsoft Max lets you make lists of your photos and turn them into beautiful slide shows to share with your family and friends. Max is the codename for Microsoft's flagship application based on WinFX and Microsoft's new user experience." Images from the PDC here, and you can watch Bill Gates' keynote here. Also, MS released beta 2 of Monad.

Microsoft Expands Vista Testing, Releases CTP

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.

Screenshots of Office 12

Screenshots of Office 12 have been published. You'll be amazed (for better or worse, your call). "As you can see, Microsoft is trying to do away with the 'legacy' menu bar. In newer Vista builds the menu bar is turned off by default (although it can be reactivated temporarily by pressing alt). In Office 12, the menus have been replaced with tab-like buttons. The only 'legacy' menu item that remains is the file menu, but it has completely been redesigned. The file menu now looks like the Windows XP start menu and can be customized as well." You can find more information and shots on Microsoft's website.

Interview: Hans Reiser

In this interview, Hans discusses his background and how he came to create Namesys and Reiserfs. He looks back at Reiser3, describing the advantages it had over other filesystems when it was released and its current state. He then explores the many improvements in Reiser4, describing the plugin architecture and its exciting potential for future semantic enhancements.

PC-BSD 0.8 Beta Released

"PC-BSD version 0.8 is now available! A lot of effort went into improving this version, and many thanks is due to all the people who have tested and provided valuable feedback on our support forum. This version now adds the Online Update Manager, along with many other fixes and enhancements. For a complete list of changes, please refer to the changelog." Release notes are here, download locations here. The various documents disagree with one another on whether or not this is the final or beta release.

The Curse of Xanadu

"It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form. Instead, it sucked Nelson and his intrepid band of true believers into what became the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing - a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair. The amazing epic tragedy." Please note that this is an older article, from 1995, and that it is 27 pages long.

MSDN Subscriber Downloads Now Supports Firefox

A surprising move by Microsoft: "MSDN Subscriber Downloads now supports Firefox! And Opera. Funnily enough, when we were doing the initial planning for our 3.0 platform I got some pushback from the dev team on this requirement because only .5% of our old site traffic was on a non-IE browser. After we realized that they were serious we got the requirement straightened out, only changing it from 'Mozilla' to 'Firefox' since that's the predominant browser."

Microsoft To Offer Windows Code

At Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft is planning to provide programmers with the code for an early version of Vista, as well as Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005, both of which will be released in November. Vista, the client version of the next release of Windows developed under the code name Longhorn, is expected to be released next year. Screenshots of the PDC Vista build can be found here.

KDE Conference Celebrates Success and Looks to Future

"Ten days of presentations, workshops, and chaotic coding sponsored by Trolltech, Novell/SUSE, HP, the local governments of Andalucia, and Malaga can only mean one thing: aKademy 2005, the KDE community's annual conference. Held in Malaga, Spain, aKademy 2005 included a Users and Administrators Conference, a Developer Conference and a Coding Marathon. Users, developers, and local visitors with an interest in open technology were treated to a display of stable desktop software and glimpses of cutting-edge innovations to come."

Review: YellowTAB Zeta 1.0

"The biggest thing they have done is to add more drivers and update the look in order to bring BeOS to users who could not have installed it before and attract new users to discover what made it great. This is a good thing, but I just can't get behind this OS as of yet. There are too many problems and rough patches. If you want the best way to use BeOS, this is it. If you are looking for the best desktop OS, I cannot recommend Zeta."