Here's a sneak view at the next Operating System from Microsoft.
It looks pretty damn cool to me. I can't wait to get my hands on this and pull it to peices :huh:

http://www.flexbeta.net/main/comments.php?catid=1&shownews=14127

I can't say that screen shots of new OSes or new GUIs to old OSes do that much for me. Any idea yet what it's going to do that that everybody is so excited about?

No idea yet :?
I did find an early review of it though:

http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_beta1_01.asp

All the reviews of it up to now I've seen have pretty much slated it (particularly the gui styling), but who knows, maybe it will turn out ok. If I had a spare pc (and it happened to be a 3 mhz or higher :)) I might stick it on and have a play, but OS betas have never excited me that much...

The video is quite funny though... Handheld camera, in and out of focus, it's like watching a badly recorded pirate movie :) All it shows anyway is a couple of windows being maximised and minimised - it worries me if that's the best feature they can find to show off!

Yuk! It thinks it's an OS X Mac!

Originally posted by Abdul
Yuk! It thinks it's an OS X Mac!

And what's wrong with that?! :-) Some of my best friends are... erm..

The styling of the new MS os looks like some of the Linux gui's (and OSX) all shiney.

So as ever the new windows will need a more powerful machine to run, with little or no actual gain - a ploy to get us to keep buying new machines! (imo)

from experience, it looks like its trying to be Mandrake with the same efforts of XP...

what exactly have they changed thats taken 4 years?

Originally posted by Vini
from experience, it looks like its trying to be Mandrake with the same efforts of XP...

what exactly have they changed thats taken 4 years?

Not a lot, they have dropped most of what may have been useful in order to get it out sometime before hell freezes over, WinFS being one of the main bits. I have a couble of alpha release longhorn and that was pretty pants by all respect. Will have a copy of Vista beta soon so I'll have a play, but, I dont expect anything other than fisher price like GUI with sluggish performance. I think they are more concerned with the bells and whistles than making sure everything is nice on the inside.

Joel

Originally posted by Abdul
Yuk! It thinks it's an OS X Mac!

Ah, but where as the Mac GUI is also nice to use, The same cannot be said for windows. personally I prefer my Fluxbox (www.fluxbox.org) desktop, to most. But apple are good at making shiny things that are actually useful.

Joel

from the screenshots, it looks alright, almost nice, but it's still the baby of XP, so silly folder style, wasted ressources on things no one needs, random option that need clicking 10 times to reach the appropriate menu...

Originally posted by Captain_Scarlet
from the screenshots, it looks alright, almost nice, but it's still the baby of XP, so silly folder style, wasted ressources on things no one needs, random option that need clicking 10 times to reach the appropriate menu...
As long as you can turn off the effects that you want, I'm all for them... Some are actually useful, and others just make the desktop experience that little bit nicer - which is handy when it's something you use for 8+ hours a day! That's not to say apple or a 3rd-party X solution couldn't do it better of course :)

Originally posted by Joelc
Not a lot, they have dropped most of what may have been useful in order to get it out sometime before hell freezes over, WinFS being one of the main bits.

No surprises there!

They've been promising us the 'Object Filing System' since the mid-90s :)

Well I had a bit of a play last night, and once you get past the initial Ooohs and Aaahs of the window effects (Very nice, but tends to mash up the screen when you have a few open and any hang). The file browsing is much nicer, some of the improvements in explorer are much welcome, for example, the address bar in Explorer when you click on it you still get the usual editable path, BUT when you click off it, you get a series of drop down boxes, so you can jump back to any folder in any level of the path.

The start menu has a search box, so you can search you documents and they appear in the first column of the two column start menu, very useful.

IE7 is IE6 with tabs and RSS, it still messes up rendering of pages made with proper HTML and CSS2, and it wont let you install Yahoo toobar/Google Bar, or any other kind of bar thats "none m$" but we'll see if thats just an issue thats come about in development.

Virtual folders are quite useful, although partially broken.

All in all, not too bad, there are some nice features that will make administration much easier from a sysadmin respect. Better than XP - Well its looking very promising.

I'll get some screenshots tonight for people.

Joel

Vista is to be based on a new framework: WinFX (as opposed to Win32 thats been around for ages) which is what the current .NET framework is part of. That will make developing windows applications much better, plus the finished apps could be run on other platforms such as Linux, you can run ur current .NET apps to other OS'es using Mono as I write, but not all the functionality is developed. All the cool things that are finaly :rolleyes: available on the WinFX such as support for vector graphics will make things much better looking too :D