longhorn build 5203
Screenshots here. Some thoughts:
- Glossy! It reminds me of something else, I can’t… quite… put my finger on it…
- In Longhorn, IE 7 is apparently used mainly to browse the “linux-noob” forums. Odd choice by Microsoft, but good luck for the owners of lunix-noob.com.
- I hate Windows’ new-since-XP tiny system font. It’s just a little too small and weak. Tiny system fonts never got too much better than Geneva 9.
- From a user interface and usability perspective, those transparent window title bars are godawful atrocious; and the white diffused drop shadow under the text only serves to make the readability even worse.
- Nice glass recycle bin. Shiny, shiny.
Otherwise, it’s looking (and presumably working) exactly the same as XP, except with a suspiciously familiar techno theme. But, hey, anything that makes Windows’ UI better, I’m all for; there’s already too much rampant ugliness in the world these days.
~jeff
July 20th, 2005 at 11:49 am
For god’s sake, lay off the ray tracing, people. The same thing goes for George Lucas. Nothing is that shiny, unless it is coated in vaseline, and I don’t think that is what they are going for.
And the command line window only serves to remind you that the whole thing doesn’t run *nix, and if you want to get in behind the gui, you have to remember DOS. Freaking DOS!