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Longhorn pre-alpha M3 - a user perspective..... - Page 1
Posted by Colin Walker on 24 November 2002 (20025 views) Rating: 2.59
Windows Longhorn. So, is the fuss all worth it?
Well, it's nice to have it from a collectors point of view and to see what's happening, but it's nothing to write home about yet - so I'll shut up now! No, seriously, it's not worth all the massive hype that's been surrounding the leak but let's take a look at what's there so far.
The current leaked build is 3683 - pre-alpha M3 (Milestone 3). Milestones are frequently used in development circles to indicate the stages a product goes through until it reaches a certain level. Later builds exist but as yet have not found their way to the wonderful world of the web, so we'll just deal with 3683 for now.
Just as the Office 11 beta has XP plastered all over it so Longhorn also has XP littered throughout it - it even shows in the boot.ini as Windows XP Pro!. But the desktop build does show as Longhorn XP Professional.
You've seen the screenshots, you may have seen the video but, all hype aside, what does it do?
Visually, whilst the new Plex theme is quite nice - it obviously isn't finished yet as there are a number of rough edges, especially around menu bars and buttons. And I must admit I don't like the toolbars. A number of dialogs (such as the standard browse dialog) have altered leaving you at first glance wondering where to go for some items, but just as with Windows XP you soon get used to it.
Sidebar:
A lot of talk prior to the leak has been regarding the sidebar. Being a big fan and frequent user of the MS research project Sideshow this was something I too was looking forward to it. So far I am disappointed. Available tiles to be added to the sidebar include: the infamous Longhorn Clock, Desktop Manager, MFU, Quick Launch, Search, Slideshow, and User tile.
From first appearances the user tile does nothing except - guess what - display your user name and picture. Unlike the user pane from the XP start menu the User tile does not take you to the properties of your username when you click on the picture.
The slide show is - yup a slide show. It scrolls through the images in any given folder which can be changed through the customize option of the tile. Whilst this is all well and good there is no functionality yet attached to the tile such as opening the image in the default image editor, so currently this is purely cosmetic and, I presume, merely an illustration of what the sidebar is capable of.
The Most Frequently Used (MFU) programs list is the same as on the start menu, but does not yet appear to update correctly. There is currently no option to remove items from the MFU list from the sidebar tile, and if an item is removed from the MFU on the Start menu the change is not reflected immediately on the sidebar. The quick launch tile performs better and updates immediately - the only criticism is that items cannot be moved on to the tile.
OK - the clock looks good but, c'mon people, it's a clock! and it takes up a lot of room. Nuff said.
Finally, the Desktop Manager acts like the Windows XP desktop manager powertoy in that it gives you access to four independent desktops in thumbnail view. One interesting little quirk I discovered whilst playing with this is that you can actually drag open program windows in the thumbnail itself! Weird!
As the sidebar can be used as the taskbar it is obviously expected that open tasks should appear on the sidebar, but no. This does not appear to have been coded yet. This means that currently it is impractical to use just the sidebar on its own.
OS functionality:
Longhorn is and will be based on a new file system "WinFS" or Windows Future Storage Services. Rather than use a form of FAT Longhorn bases teh file system around a derivative of an SQL database, which is designed to provide faster file look up and searching. The reality at present is that WinFS is SLOW, but the good news is that it can be uninstalled (not that it makes that much difference).
One nice touch that results from the new file system is the option to insert Access/SQL style display filters to the columns in the Windows Explorer Detail view - very nice.
The big slow down under Windows Explorer is the breadcrumb bar - the new preview section at the top of each folder view which gives details of selected items. This can be turned off in Folder Options but the Folder Options don't always appear to work correctly. Luckily the breadcrumb bar can be sized by dragging a separator between the bar and the rest of the folder view. This, however, is not consistent on a folder to folder basis.
Other nice touches (but currently system slow downs) are the remaining view options in Explorer. The Explorer toolbar includes a zoom feature, enabling the user to set the size of icons easily. In conjunction with this Folder Options contains a setting to change the folder view when resizing icons so that the most icons possible can be viewed in the windows based on the icon size. Additionally a setting exists to "Choose smart icon size when opening new windows" which I presume is designed to again provide a best fit for icons based on the size of the Window, but in practice I haven't found this to operate.
Additional Explorer functionality comes in the shape of file "Pivots" - the ability to group items by more specific criteria such as author or "Pictures grouped by date taken" but on my system these all gave blank windows - perhaps it is just that correct properties are not assigned to files.
Problems:
Let's face it - this is a pre-alpha, it's going to be buggy as hell. IE (build 6.05) crashes when you try to download files, the new XML Display Control Panel either fails or says "This functionality is currently under construction", it takes an age to switch between themes. But this is early days and Longhorn shows promise.
The GUI is going to be powered by the graphics card not the processor so you're going to need a decent card to utilise it properly (I haven't...yet) and I couldn't get my sound card working (similar problems to some of the .net server builds) but I expect problems in something as early as this. It's currently a concept piece and will change - a lot and many times. It's going to be an interesting journey over the next couple of years.
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