Geeky Info

We seem to have been waiting for ages for the successor to windows XP. It is hard not to become negative in the wake of Apple’s release of Tiger.

Adventures in home working has an interesting post on Longhorn.

I guess it is fairly widely know that we have only seen a few hints of the Longhorn user experience. What do we know:
It will be built on a very powerful graphics engine
This engine will enable effects that have previously been unheard of outside of games, and has been designed to take advantage of increases in GPU and CPU power for the next 10 years. This is a platform that is primarily forward looking, but that degrades gracefully on older hardware and shipping operating systems (XP and 2003)

It will use this graphics power, combined with further improved indexing and search to greatly improve our ability to navigate and visualize large quantities of files and images.

The shell will also provide improved facilities to view document thumbnails, and full scale renditions of documents using Metro
Sharing of information with peers will be easier

Working with collections of things will be easier, files, RSS feeds, web browser tabs, collections of URLs etc

File location will be increasingly irrelevant as properties and associations become first class objects for access and grouping

Predictability, reliability, flexibility, integration, context, ease of use and easy collaboration will be the order of the day

Go and read the whole article.

For me the following is critical for longhorn and will make the wait worthwhile.

1. certain tasks need to be easier - in particular working with data needs to be application independent. The application level needs to get out of the way so that using a computer is easier and more intuitive.
2. it need to look cool and be a joy to use
3. configurable

Did I say it need to look cool? Are you listening Microsoft?