Longhorn Beta 1 Screenshots

I haven’t been this underwhelmed with a set of Longhorn preview shots…since the last round of them. What I find disappointing is the proposed Avalon graphics subsystem in Longhorn is actually extremely capable and has some really cool ideas behind it, unfortunately this capability is best shown with transparent window borders. Avalon is a new graphics subsystem and API built on top of Direct3D. Avalon elements are vector-based, they will scale to whatever resolution you need/want them to. Windows themselves are composed off-screen in a buffer and then composed in a back buffer before actually being displayed on the screen. This lets you do neat effects like real transparency and shadows. It also lets you render the contents of individual windows independently of one another so a window will update regardless of what other windows are doing, a video will continue to display in a window even with other windows on top of it, if one of those windows is transparent you’ll be able to see the video playing through the transparency. Ohh, ahh. Quartz on MacOS X has had this capability for years now.

Overall the look and feel of Longhorn is pretty much the same as Windows XP, maybe with a few more fancy window effects. The actual content of windows has not radically changed and you still have the unpolished look of “Windows” inside of the fancy wrapping. Look however isn’t everything. With Longhorn Microsoft is making some large steps away from traditional Windows architecture. For starters they’re trying really hard to get developers on the .NET bandwagon and for good reason. Win32/MFC programming is complicated and for many extremely error prone. For many things the .NET is many times simpler which means less complicated code. Simple code is maintainable code. .NET also has a spiritual successor to VB Forms, Windows Forms. Laying out a form-based interface is relatively simple so what can start as a prototype can quickly become a full fledged application. VB developers have been doing this for a very long time, as has everyone else using nice GUI layout tools. Again, this isn’t exactly a new idea.

So fancy transparency effects aside I’m not all that impressed by these beta shots. It’s still the same underlying Windows curmudgeon. While I’m sure some people will be all over the Longhorn betas the rest of us have seen OSX.