My experience with Longhorn — II

Now that we have finished installing Longhorn Build 4051, let us explore the interface and see what are the interesting points that make Longhorn worthwhile talking about.

Since Longhorn is in an early stage of development, none of the files have been optimized for speed and hence the startup takes quite a while depending on your hardware configuration and after the initial boot up the screen finally appears as seen above. What strikes the user about the first change that is due in Longhorn is the Side bar that you see in the right hand side with the analog clock.

The Side bar is a big investment by Microsoft and will be the centre of all alerts and notifications that are used by a variety of applications such as email alert, online messenger contact alert, custom system notification etc.

Very often we click on the default button of a popup messages that keep appearing while working without even reading the message properly. With Longhorn all these notifications will now appear in the Side bar and also have a history to retain that can be specified by the user so that all notifications can be tracked down by the user. Items such as Classic tray, Clock, Quick Launch, My Tile, Slide Show, and Synchronization are all available in the Side bar.

Now let us see the "Explorer" that remained the faithful utility of most users for the past decade. Most of the browsing of the computer, customizing views, copying and moving of files between devices was all done from within Explorer. Let us see what the enhancements are in Longhorn. The first view of Explorer is seen below and it certainly has undergone a big change from the past.

Note the header bar at the top of Explorer. The blue button is for browsing backwards and when you navigate further you see a new smaller button appearing next to it and it is for navigating forward much like in a browser. On the right hand side is a magnifying lens which is for Searching among the folders. The Star button is for adding that folder to My Favourites so that it can be opened at a click of a menu item in Explorer much as you would open your favourite web site in Internet Explorer.

 

Below the header bar is the well familiar menu bar that was our trusted navigator in Explorer since Windows 95 but there are some new goodies that have been enhanced in Longhorn. Notice the magnifying lens with the drop down arrow on the extreme right. On clicking it we see that it is a zoomer to zoom the view in Explorer.

On moving the slide up and down the view in Explorer is magnified depending on the position of the slider in the zoomer. Zooming in the current build will reveal the old ugly look because everything is bit-mapped as in the current versions of Windows. Note that as mentioned in the first article everything will be vector based in the final version of Longhorn i.e. whenever the icons are zoomed in or zoomed out they will retain the same pleasant look.

Let us navigate through some of the folders and see if there are any surprises in Explorer. Clicking on some of the folders gives this view as seen below

Observe that the header bar shows "Documents and Settings", but see further that the navigation path to arrive at "Documents and Settings" is revealed right below it i.e. "Computer -> Local Disk -> Documents and Settings". This gives a quick glance the path to this folder so that navigation backwards or forwards is faster and simpler enough merely at the click of the drop down white arrow next to each word. Clicking the white arrow next to the menu item "Local disk" reveals a drop down menu with a short cut to the familiar locations that we are used with in the past. 3 ½ Floppy, Control Panel, Documents, DVD Drive, Games, Network drive etc… Clicking any one of the items in the drop down menu takes us straight to that location and surprisingly the header bar is updated with the new path.

This navigation bar is called the bread crumb because it resembles the top crust of a bread slice when viewed from the top and on moving the mouse over this location reveals that it is a clickable hyperlink. When clicked it reveals the drop down menu as seen below which resembles the menu that is common in Explorer in the current version.

Well we have seen the interface and dived a bit into Explorer and then saw the enhancements that will help the average user when working with files and folders.

Next we will dive deeper into the labyrinths of Longhorn and see what exciting features are there, which Microsoft has gambled on to make the most challenging operating system of the decade.

To be continued…