On 4/26/05, Rex Baldazo <Rex.Baldazo at cnet.com> wrote: > Bill Gates did a sneak peek of Longhorn, our reporter took a couple > snapshots: > > http://news.com.com/2009-1016_3-5683877.html > > The scuttlebutt is that a lot of the Avalon graphics stuff looks a lot > like what we've got already in Aqua.
(oops, turned into a mini-rant..sorry) Windows XP was a lot like Aqua already. The latest KDE (Linux) is very cutesy and Aqua-like. Admittedly the Gnome group (2nd place to KDE on Linux atm) were probably cutesy and liquidy ahead of Apple, but it's embaressing to see how many OSes have had to work on making the OS need a higher-powered graphics card just to try and compete with the Apple OS. The linspire.com (formerly lindows) site is a terrible example of that; Linspire exist at the low-end of the market selling the cheapest newbie-friendly OS on the market (they sell through Wal-mart for one) and they've felt the need to make everything look like a gum-drop. OS X looks nice. The machine comes with a powerful graphics card and Apple have done well to make the most of it, but the real win is the amount of time their competitors have thrown into trying to compete. The Longhorn pictures look terrible by the way :) Translucent windows are a waste of time (they murder productivity) and the increasing nature of showing the content as the icon is terrible (as I watch my Win machine lag yet again while Windows Media Player decides that it doesn't understand the file). Virtual folders are interesting; though really it seems that they are just canned searches and would metaphor'd better as a 'saved search' than as a 'virtual folder'. Hen | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be April 26. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
