I just installed the WinHEC build of Longhorn. It didn’t seem any different than the PDC version I had previously. Before the install, I was aware that there were some spectacular changes available, but I didn’t know if it was part of the new WinHEC build.
Then, a colleague told me to run “sbctl.exe start” in my \Windows\i386 directory and I instantly saw what all of the gasps and awes were about.
Holy cow!
The shading effect below all Windows is neat. The fade/scale-in technique used by appearing dialogs is neat. The Alt-tab 3D task-switch stuff is also neat.
There are all sorts of new UI tricks for standard stuff like Wizards that MS is playing with. Some of it’s kind of icky, IMHO. I saw a lot of different UI styles in a lot of different Windows. I think each team must be experimenting since the experience seems a bit of a hodge-podge.
This made me think of a danger Longhorn poses to the user. I think that standardization of UI’s will start to fall away once the developer starts XAML‘ing their way to UI Nirvana. Each application will be as unique in Longhorn as each web site you visit on the web.
I don’t think I like that.
I think there is a productivity gain, an intuition, in knowing that the Tools menu has an Options item and that the File menu us used to save and load files. Obviously a menu bar is probably one UI element that will stay around in the Longhorn world, but I feel so much will change from application to application that the user experience will suffer.
Perhaps this isn’t true. Perhaps the tools in place and the UI guidelines will be clear enough that I’m worrying about nothing. I’ll just have to read more and see for myself.
Posted by Nick Codignotto at May 14, 2004 04:38 PM | TrackBack