OSNews posted a link to some screenshots of LongHorn.
All I can say is...Is this it? I mean, besides the fact that it looks like a naff theme from Skinz.org or something, no thinking seems to have gone into how all of this should be used! If I count correctly there are no less then 4 different explorer modes in the screenshots. Each looks completely different. From the screenshots it isn't even clear how you get from one mode to the other. If this isn't immediately obvious, how are average users going to do this? I can imagine it is the huge pulldown-menu...but do you really need an element of that size?
Also, it seems that virtually everything except the new explorer-modes and the god-awful skin hasn't changed at all, down to the low res icons in a hodgepodge of styles. In the screenshot where they are showing the drives, they have even blown up an icon to beyond its resolution, giving it a blocky appearance. The message reads: Number of files: 12, Size unknown. Great! This'll get the punters to switch pronto!
And don't even get me started on the fact that even the system settings now seem to have grown so big, it doesn't even fit on the (admittedly smallish) screen. The indexing options panel is another helplessly useless idea. "Pause (until resumed manually)". What for? "Don't stop working when user is busy". Sounds like a message to be found in a hidden config file...I AM the user! This makes it look like they are talking about me behind my or something. And what is a "Custom set of starting points"? Sure I can imagine what they are talking about. But my mother would be totally lost. An average user doesn't know what indexing even means!
The longer you look, the more sad it becomes.
Sure, you can say that this is normal, as it is a pirated copy of an internal developer prerelease beta sneak preview build (not for general consumption). But if it is (supposedly) a year from release and they have been working on it for several years now, shouldn't some of all these amazing features and UIs we've been hearing about be visible by now? Where are the promised advantages of a 3D compositing engine? The new way of working with information? And what ever happened to this sidebar we've seen in every other shot of LongHorn? (Not that I care particularly)
My point is, that unless you have a clear view of where you want to end up, before you start, you probably won't get there. I genuinely hope Microsoft is going to pull a rabbit of the hat on this one, otherwise users everywhere are going to be in for a loooong winter.
