g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

On My Blog Menu:

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Friday, May 7, 2004
17:18 - Longhorn on the Free Range
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1586601,00.asp

(top) link
Looks like Microsoft has released a new alpha of Longhorn, and PC Magazine is all over it with a visual tour.

Lots of "neat ideas," says the article, "loosely tied together with baling wire". Yeah, that's a pretty fair assessment. To keep in the "Old West" theme, I guess.

The trouble is, those "neat ideas" give one the impression of being the kind of ideas that defiant defenders of modern art insistently claim will "make you think". Like feces-smeared crucifixes and saggy Nerf World Trade Center sculptures.

Check out the tour; click and be amazed! Thrill to the Avalon Window Manager, which "offers Mac OS-like effects when launching and minimizing windows"! Chill to the groundbreaking "contact list", which is "not attached to any particular e-mail client"! Ooh and aah at the inch-thick vertical sidebar, taking up screen real estate with that huge analog clock that still hasn't gone away! Be amazed at "more view types than in Windows XP"—Lord knows we need more ways a folder full of files can be represented! And enjoy the new Giant Blue Back Button in iTunes-Like Indentation that appears on every single window, and the new Huge-Font Window Title With Wasted Space Technology™, so in Internet Explorer you've got three inches of menu bars to scan past before you get to the actual web content. Minimum resolution required: 1280x1024! Oh, and yes, they've got Apple's "brushed metal" look dutifully copied. Rounded top corners, gradient that gets brighter in the middle, and everything. Good for them.


"How do we one-up Safari? I know: Staple about six Safaris together!"


As Samuel Johnson is apocryphally attributed to have said, "Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."

Keep on truckin', Microsoft!

UPDATE: CapLion has dubbed this interface "Mad Cow".


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