According to a leaked video, two documents and a PowerPoint presentation at MsBetas.com, the next generation of Windows, codenamed Longhorn, scheduled to be released sometime in 2005, is introducing a number of new features. Most notably, as seen in the video is the “task shelf” concept and the replication of a window. In the documents you will also find information about the 3D-based technology to render the desktop (please do not confuse the 3D composition rendering technique with a “3D desktop/interface” – different things) and its formula. According to the bandwidth formula including in the docs, for 1024x768x32bpp (refreshing at 60Hz and composing at 30Hz), the required bandwidth is, 0.93Gb per second in the local graphics card memory. Please note that this information has not been officially confirmed by Microsoft, and until then should be treated as you would any other rumour. Notice: This happened to be our 1000th news story at OSAlert! Thank you for all your support during this second “birth” of OSAlert since August 2001. We started serving less than 700 pages per day back then. Six months later, we were already serving more than 30,000 page views per day, with an average of 15,5 comments per story! Thank you everyone!
Windows Longhorn Video and Documents Leaked on the Web
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
after watching the video, extreme sadness came to me:
Why? Why?? Why??!! Why do we have to use the recycle bin to close windows?? Are we a mac clone now, so we do everything with recycle bin?? Why does MS have to simplify everything down to this level?
That really does look like a Mac wannabe, that “shelf” seems to be more like the MacOS X Dock than the taskbar, and the rendered effects scream out OS X as well. I guess some people are impressed with OS X’s looks and MS is trying to catch up.
BTW – Am I the only one that thought the titlebars on the windows looked hideous?
I like the idea of using 3D accecelerators for createing the GUI. I think it will result in some very cool apps.
When has MS came up with their own ideas concerning UI? They have been taking Mac UI concepts since windows 1.0. And, to NeoWolf, yes, it is extremely grotesque.
Maybe Apple will try to sue again for idea stealing…
Well, i am missing out on the fun again
If anyone wants to convert this video to something a little more – say beos – friendly.
thanks
I second that, an mpg would be smashing.
Amen to that, i just didnt want to be the first person that asked for a different file format. MPEG is about the only thing i can watch, so if someone could convert it to an mpeg i’d be very happy.
For a video that lasts less than 30 seconds I really don’t think I would consider that you can come to the conclusions that some of you are coming to. All that we see is a shortcut to a folder open, the folder get minimized back to the “shelf” as it’s being referred to and it being minized to a preview view, and then duplicated three times and then dragged to the recycling bin where it appears to disappear. The poor resolution makes judging the video even harder. As for the complaints that it demonstrates MS ripping off Apple I would say that is pretty bold. Apple bought an OS from NeXT and made it feel more like the classic mac. Other than adding pretty animations that suck cpu cycles, some apple logo’s, copying Win2K’s transparent window effect, and removing some of the better elements of the NeXT UI I would say OSX is just a fork in the NeXT Step OS. Buying someone else’s OS and forking it isn’t exactly innovative! Other from rounded windows and ugly colors I don’t see much in WinXP that was taken from OSX. Other from the Luna theme I don’t see any aspect of XP that makes it feel like Mac OS. XP’s UI clearly works more like previous verions of windows than any version of mac OS.
Ha, thats a laugh. NeXT bought out Apple, this was Jobs move back into Apple. Look at the shakeup w/ the staff, it was NeXT’s ppl put into places of power… Mac zealots know this, I know this and I’ve not used a mac since 7.6.
Using your highly enlightened analysis we should go after any version beyond the first for copying off of the previous ones. No OSX isn’t an apple fork of NeXT any more than 98SE was a 98 fork which was a 95 fork… Its called progression.
you wrote “XP’s UI clearly works more like previous verions of windows than any version of mac OS.”
Wow, we are not talking about XP’s UI! We are talking about longhorn.
This UI is not like XP’s, to bring XP into this (when again we are talking about Longhorn) is a non sequitur…
Well, I think OSes should take resources as little as possible to do any tasks. ( BeOS is one of them.
)
But Longhorn (demo) seems to be resource hungry much more than XP like MacOS X. But it probably should not be stable like MacOS X though.
Therefore Longhorn should be a failure one in that way. Even though, many people should use it happily, after buying new computers or upgrading existing computers that should be still quite decent as past.
I know It is very dangerous to talk about anything such unknown-source-preview-resources (video, docs and ppt)
So this is all I can say for now after watching the video.
Yes, it seems that MS is following Apple’s Mac OS X like Dock style feature and etc.
Anyway, congratulation to OSAlert and Eugenia!! I love this site. Lots of cool OS news and techs. Thanks Eugenia and maybe other staffs for creating and maintaining this wonderful site. I visit here several times a day
Congrats Eugenia, you’re doing a great job on this site. It’s at just
the right level to generate good discussions.
If Windows is once again doing bad imitations of Mac, there’s a good
opportunity for Amiga to do something different.
The idea of using the 3D in a graphics card to handle window layering,
drop shadows etc, has been obvious for a couple of years. It would
particularly make sense for the QNX Photon engine. As somebody said,
using the 3D hardware doesn’t imply perspective and kiddies playground
interfaces.
You beat me to it dammit
Congrats Eugenia………
I agree with most people here that the bandwith requirement sounds like this is going to be graphics intensive. The document makes no mention of any current video cards that meet this standard, but I bet that a signifigant number of video cards in people’s machines right now would be incapable of that. On the flip side I have trouble seeing the similarities to OSX’s Dock. The Dock’s trashcan is on the bar not the desktop. The minimize animation looks nothing like the genie effect, but admittedly it looks a bit more graphical than the current zooming effect. From what we can tell the “task shelf” only contains programs running in the background(no icons for programs in view or shortcut icons), unlike the Dock. No thumbnails of the programs in the “task shelf” either. The window duplication “feature”(I personally don’t know of anything good to use this for except suck hdd space) isn’t a feature off of OSX. There appear to be 4 buttons in the top right hand corner(thumbnail view via contextual menu/ min to shelf, another button that looks like the old min, max, and close) so it’s is unclear what exactly the x looking button does or the other two that weren’t clicked on. Since I can’t read the entries on the on the contextual menu in the thumbnail window view I have no clue what the other 3 options do. Clearly there is some point to thumbnail windows other than to duplicate the window. I think calling this beta a OSX ripoff is a little bold based on the small amount of evidence to that claim.
they now have an extended version of the video!
It seems that for pretty much any OS these days (especially Windows), all the new features are designed simply to ‘idiot proof’ the OS so that those who have used it for awhile have to spend more time turning off all the bloatware and added ‘idiot proof’ layers to get the functionality that we’re used to.
I’m in agreement with the two previous commenters… proprietary file formats suck. That said, and with the disclaimer that I haven’t actually been able to view the video, who here really believes MS is on the cutting edge of UI development anyway? They have a shown history of borrowing ideas, as do most companies, though they are guilty of it more than most. OSX borrows from NeXT which borrows from the original Mac UI which borrows from the Xerox Parc… etc etc.
Truly revolutionary UI development has not been done since the Parc. Everything since has been natural progression, and spiffy extras.
Congrats to all the OSAlert crew on their 1000th news story!
Blah! Looks like a waste of resources. Windows Longhorn requirements:
512 MBs ram
1.5 GHz processor
15,000 RPM SCSI harddrive…
well, mabye not.
has that company not a shred of creativity or orginality? I have a better idea for the next windows. Why not just port OS X and inject MS logos and bugs everywhere.
Thank you all for your comments regarding OSAlert.
BTW, about the requirements that Kevin posted. I do not believe that these are the actual requirements (especially the hdd), but even if they are, Longhorn is going to be released at the end of 2004, or in the beginning of 2005. By then, faster machines will be more than common, so there is not a real issue.
if this is more of just explorer. It looks very much like explorer in XP, maybe/hopefully they just have the deskbar hidden, course if this is really I would assume this is just a computer animation of it since i doubt much of anything of the real longhorn exist at this point. If this is how it works i don’t see the improvement, so you have differant ways to open windows not a huge gain. It looks like having a big monitor may be important by the looks of how it splits windows into more windows. Also if the thing up the side is just the explorer i’m sure it goes away, or can be made to look differant. In which case the GUI starts looking much like XP. Hell i can just change some of my preferances and make XP look rather like the demo, just can’t do the spliting and shaded window thing. also did anyone else notice the build number, looks like 322 and it seams to change part way through, odd. If it is real, seams like a build that low especialy witha whole new GUI would not be at a usable/running level. whats XP like 2600. Question, do they do a build every night and that gets a new number? or do they give it a new number when something significant changes? if it was daily i can’t belive they worked on XP for 7 years. I know NT and OS/2 was around before but if they counted those the number would be much higher.
Wether the NeXT people took over high positions at Apple or not, they did NOT buy out Apple Inc. NeXT was in debt, and sold every bit of its self to Apple where part of the contract would be that Jobs would become CEO.
You dont buy a company and take their name. Why dont we go saying that DEC bought Compaq, took their name and continued on, it would be just as crazy/stupid.
While OSX has a lot in common with NeXTStep, its really not it. NeXTStep wasnt powered by GNU Darwin last time i checked.
that taskshelf looks similar to the shelf constructs in qnx
NeXTStep wasn’t powered by GNU Darwin last time you checked, because they hadn’t named it that then.. it used to just be the nextstep kernel which was based off an old system5 kernel.. just because apple changed some stuff and called it darwin doesn’t mean its not 90% the same thing that powered nextstep.
The contextual menu used with explorer reminds me of BeOS’s tracker as there seems to be more functions than just “new” and “properties” and such.
replicants? hmmm….
I wonder if Microsoft DID take Be seriously once.
One word:
FAKE
Hm? So why did Jobs return to apple, Moron!
I don’t see how it’s a rip off, it’s missing the most important part, BSD.
hey suppafly, perhaps you should check before saying wrong things :
from the NeXTStep/OpenStep FAQ :
MACH is the the basic OS layer NeXT uses for NEXTSTEP. It is a micro kernel, which means it is extensible at runtime.
http://www.channelu.com/NeXT/NeXTFAQ-html/NeXTFAQ.030.html
mach never was an “old system5” kernel. And Darwin is an implementation of a mach kernel.
Jobs founded Apple. When he left Apple he founded Next and Pixar…now Jobs has returned to Apple and sold Next (that had financial problems) to Apple, who used next technologies. For the new OS Apple hade 2 options: next or be. Apple decided for next. It’s normal that nextstep technologies have been integrated in the OS X/Darwin project.
SSA said:
“On the flip side I have trouble seeing the similarities to OSX’s Dock. The Dock’s trashcan is on the bar not the desktop.”
Oh please don’t say that… on X thrashcan is on the dock because this feature is activated by default….some free utilities let you place the thrashcan on the desktop (like macOs 9)
“The minimize animation looks nothing like the genie effect, but admittedly it looks a bit more graphical than the current zooming effect.”
Os X has 3 options for windows minimization: Genie, scale and suck…..look closed if you don’t see similarities betweeen one of these effects and the longhorn miminization effect….
“From what we can tell the “task shelf” only contains programs running in the background(no icons for programs in view or shortcut icons), unlike the Dock.”
It’s true, but the dock contains also active applications…like the task shell. And is not less interesting to put aliases of applications in the dock…in win98 you can put shortcut of programm in the taskbar…and is useful.
“The window duplication “feature”(I personally don’t know of anything good to use this for except suck hdd space) isn’t a feature off of OSX. ”
That’s right for Os X 10.1. I don’t have seen the betas of 10.2…i don’t know if Apple has integrated this feature in the new version. But the feature of minimizing the windows on the desktop (not only in the dock) will be present in 10.2.
I can say that longhorn is not a ripp off of X but i’m using X and it’s difficult to think that MS has not been inspired at all from X.
I would realy like to know why any of those fetures add functionality to windows.
when Apple came out with OS X, the new OS added fuctionality and changed functionality. nothing in OS X was a waste, except all the flashyness that would be nice to have a configuration over. but the basic features of the OS were all usfull.
what I saw in the extended video were features that seem usless. they are realy cool and all, but what use are they for increased productivity?
Damn… can’t wait to get my hands on this baby. The GUI looks awesome, but will the performance be as great as XP? You guys are right about one thing though… It kindda looks like the Mac OS… but that’s fine by me…
Someone asked for a more OS friendlt version of the video.
I got it. MPEG = 10MB, i can mail it, just drop me a mail..
[email protected]
Keep up the good work.
Congratulations and kudos all ’round
Regards,
Joe Moshier
aka [email protected]
http://www.webwarrior.net
AFAIK, Darwin is not the kernel but the entire tree with drivers, parts of the NEXTstep APIs (mostly Foundation Kit), command line utilities and shells. The kernel is called xnu and is a version of OSF Mach with a BSD single server running in kernel space, it has a pretty neat driver API called the IOKit which provides a EC++ framework for driver and kernel extension development. The entire Darwin distribution carries a lot of kludge, legacy and redundant effort compared to a “clean” operating system kernel such as the Linux 2.4 family.
The new things in Darwin is mainly the IOKit, HFS+ support and of course the graphic subsystem (unfortunately no source available).
You know, they actually admitted that, too, partly.
There was a fairly recent Apple developer event where one of the kernel engineers basically confessed that one of their hardest jobs is getting the old NeXT code to work with the new code for OS X. And don’t forget that there are still quite a few engineers committed to Classic MacOS, though I believe that number is dwindling. A good example of their problems is the fact that for the long time, modem connections in OS X were “flaky” to put it politely. This was actually related to several issues all over the place which took, like, forever to root out and required the assistance of an outside developer aggressively profiling it (because it affected other things too). It’s fixed now, as of 10.1.4 (that’s right, 4 revisions) but it shows you what kind of problems Apple is running into.
OF course, I’m personally hoping that 10.2 will knock my socks off, being as 10.1.x was a huge step in the RIGHT direction. I’m also hoping that it won’t be a pay-update, or if it is, it will at least be a CHEAP one (less than $50).
–JM
sorry if no one has recognized it but this video is fake! look at http://www.neowin.net ; http://www.oc.com.tw/article/0204/readgoodarticle.asp?id=691)
http://www.oc.com.tw/article/0204/readgoodarticle.asp?id=689)