Microsoft do brushed metal

lix

Here's Microsoft's take on brushed metal. Screenshot from http://www.neowin.net/comments.php?i...&category=main showing the latest builds of Longhorn.



http://www.neowin.net/staff/creamhac...51/desktop.jpg



An attempt to spread FUD given the Panther/brushed metal Finder release?



[edit by Brad: don't post huge inline images!!]

macusers

for what this operating system looks like now... i dont know what they are spending time on... there is nothing revolutionary i see, and it just looks like the plain old other windows stuff with a face mask that is ugly, and is covering up something ugly as well

pscates

Honest to goodness, you'd think someone there would wise up and go "you know guys, we should set out and raise the bar...or at the very least, do our own thing. This is getting embarrassing...".







Of course, such common sense and dead-on reasoning would most likely get him fired, a la Jerry McGuire.



Truly, does anyone there think that had Apple gone with a, say, green plastic look to their interface, Microsoft would've done anything REMOTELY approaching a metal-looking design (brushed or otherwise)?



Hell no...they'd come out with a TEAL plastic look, just different enough from Apple so they can delude themselves into thinking they'd not going on second decade or so of looking over Apple's shoulders and "borrowing" extensively from them.



Just for giggles, I almost wish Apple would "leak" an advance look at OS X 10.4, done up with an oak or cherry interface...JUST to see how long a wood-based design would find its way into Microsoft's newest releases or builds.







You know it, I know it, the entire world knows it: they would do it!



And THEN, they'd trot out some ridiculously lame comment on how they just stumbled up the idea of equating a "computer with nature...that the computer is the modern equivalent of a life-giving tree..." and other astounding nuggets of horsecrap.



Idiots.







I can't believe that company/system rules the world. That just goes to show you how backwards things are.

wrong robot

Quote:

Originally posted by CrackUsers

for what this operating system looks like now... i dont know what they are spending time on... there is nothing revolutionary i see, and it just looks like the plain old other windows stuff with a face mask that is ugly, and is covering up something ugly as well

Isn't that what windows has always been?

macusers

Quote:

Originally posted by Wrong Robot

Isn't that what windows has always been?

ya... but they are spending time to work on it until 2006...



I guess they are waiting for 10.4 so taht they can get even more stuff to steal.. and make ugly... and ruin... and rip...

wrong robot

Quote:

Originally posted by Mack Floozers

ya... but they are spending time to work on it until 2006...



I guess they are waiting for 10.4 so taht they can get even more stuff to steal.. and make ugly... and ruin... and rip...

hehehe, Microsoft's new slogo should be



Rip. Ruin. Make ugly.

ghost_user_name

Where exactly is the FUD in that UI?

macusers

look at the people posting in that forum...



First Person:

For people like me who likes to fix stuff, when your PC runs 50 days without reeboot or crash then that sux!





Second Person:

I guess you have chosen the proper software company to follow then, mister.



First Person: yes



__________________

Well, at least they know...

wrong robot

Snitching aside, what's the deal with windows taking up so much damn Monitor space?!





I'm sure something CAN go in a lot of those dead areas(under the clock, top bar) But why make your windows feel cluttered?







that is one thing I've ALWAYS loved about apple, since 8.6(when I first was a mac-geek) is that the desktop felt open, and boundless.



It's hard to describe, but I always felt TRAPPED when I was using windows.



even when using windows on a BIG monitor(17-19") it still feels trapped and cramped.



very bad fung shui

dog almighty

It looks very ugly and unrefined. Why no anti-aliased system fonts? Looks old.

wrong robot

You know what though, I actually like the start menu shade of green mixed with that shade of gray.



it doesn't look good in that context, but they are nice shades, green/gray is my favorite color combination.

macusers

woah those people in that forum are REALLY smart!!



here are some quotes i found down at the bottom...



Quote 1:

eeeww another ugly, Plex was too blue and slate is too grey, Cleanness, we need a clean theme like MacOS X has. Aero shows some promise, but they need to make it less blue.



I hope MS come up with something nice before its release. Although I like the new windows explorer







Quote 2:

Looks ok, can't compare to Panther's beauty though. But style was never a strong point of MS. And what the hell is up with IE's GUI?

ast3r3x

Definitely not brushed metal but is reminiscent of brushed metal.



I don't just think it isn't as good as OS X, but man I think that looks ass ugly. Dark grey...ew.

trick fall

It's good to be a mac user.

dmband0026

It's funny how some people on there are talking about weather or not the upgrade will be worth it. To me, that shows that no one has faith in M$s ability to do anything worthwhile. If Apple today announced that their next new OS was coming out 3 years from now I would crap myself. If Apple had three years to innovate, improve, and experiment than we would see OS 11 with the ability to wash our dishes, do our laundry, clean the house, drive our car, do our job, eat for us, and even breathe for us. It says a lot about M$ when their customers don't even have faith that the new OS will bring about a change in what it can do. Very sad. Such is the world that 97% of home PeeCee users are living in. Makes me love Apple more

amorph

The IE screenshot that combines the dark grey, curvy gradient top with the flat blue Copland-style scrollbars is teh winnar.



That has to be the most space-inefficient GUI I've ever seen. There are vast tracks of gradient fill with bits of pictures and the odd widget adrift here and there. Downright bizarre.



I see they kept the worst of XP, too, with the Start Menu That Ate New York and those evil little reminders that pop up out of the task bar to pester you with information you don't care about.



It's not like there's any shortage of brilliant people at Microsoft, so it must be their corporate culture that produces these baroque, self-conflicted interfaces.

buonrotto

Actually, the dark grey looks better IMO than the electric blue or the pale gray/silver of XP. I'm shocked that the taskbar is still so big. I assume MS will of course include a million and one ways to alter it, but that's really not much of a solution IMO. The filters in Explorer are interesting, something a bit like the instant search in the Panther Finder and a tiny bit like the much sought-after "smart searches/folders" people were talking about a few months ago. I'm not sure it's that powerful compared to those devices, but I'd like to see more of it to get a better idea. The file path thing in the fat title bar is interesting, sort of harks back the the NeXT shelf, not a bad idea in all, though perhaps a bit one-dimensional. It's amazing how many horizontal and vertical UI elements are in one Explorer window: the title with some navigation and the window widgets, the path and search button, the menubar and tools in the next line, the properties and some other tools/options in the next field down, then the filter thing on the left plus the tree view, all leaving a postage stamp for the actual window contents (obviously, the "postage stamp" effect depends on the size of the window and the monitor too).



It generally needs a clean-up, possibly at a conceptual level, though maybe in practice it makes more sense. Certainly all the fields feel daunting at a glance. All of this is like the rational for the honking big taskbar: MS gives you plenty of options to turn things on and off and even re-arrange them, but it's a poor start/default if that's in fact how they plan on presenting this. If this were an Apple release, I wouldn't sweat it because they tend to do that graphic and UI tidying up late in the process. MS tends to stick to things once it throws them in, except for XP's Luna appearance (the UI was the same) which went in a totally different direction once Aqua was unveiled. So maybe they're waiting for the next big step in Aqua before committing to anything. But again, they have plenty of time to fix things up and this is after all a leaked pre-release version, not even meant for public consumption. I wouldn't get too worked up one way or the other.

lix

Quote:

Originally posted by LoCash

Where exactly is the FUD in that UI?

The FUD is that days after Apple launch 10.3 with the new brushed metal Finder interface, screenshots of a "leaked" build of Longhorn mysteriously find their way onto the web.



Or perhaps I'm being a little cynical?



P.S. Sorry for the inline image, I knew I was going to get pulled up over that

rageous

There is abcolutely no end to Microsoft "interpretation" of Apple ideas.



Wonder where they got the idea for this graphic?

ghost_user_name

Quote:

Originally posted by lix

The FUD is that days after Apple launch 10.3 with the new brushed metal Finder interface, screenshots of a "leaked" build of Longhorn mysteriously find their way onto the web.

That's not really FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. That's more like letting Apple's design inspire their own. There's an old saying... "Good artists copy, great artists steal."



Now I know you guys are going to cry foul with that quote and say that Microsoft isn't a great artist because they're bastardizing an idea from Apple. If that is how you interpret the saying, you need to read it again. If you're still having problems later, I'll explain it.

ghost_user_name

Quote:

FUD /fuhd/n.



Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products." The idea, of course, was to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or software. See IBM. After 1990 the term FUD was associated increasingly frequently with Microsoft, and has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.