Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

To some desktops atleast (the real operating system release – what is known in the MS world as “going gold”- is a ways off, don’t get your hopes up for that thing being uncaged before 2H2006), which would not have made a big splash in my little corner, have I not glanced at the above linked article (forum post actually).

Here are some excerpts from the post:

• On boot today, you will notice my PDA is recognised.
• MS Paint has not changed that much, although it does support PNG files… it defaults to it when saving files. Oh well, at least its not defaulting to BMP’s anymore.
• As you can see, you can change your AERO colors from a gray to a light rose color. You also have the ability to adjust your brightness and color to suit your needs.
• Also by default, 5270 does not allow you to see where you are dragging your windows or files to. You can trun this on under personalization.
• Vista 5270 is becomming a little more refined, Items on the taskbar are magically lighting over them as your cursor hoovers over them.

But one of the replies really cracked me up, here it comes:

This is an excellent example of what MS is capable of.
The standard expected of the Operating system has just gone up.

ouch!! :-). Yes – having your operating system come with a PNG capable drawing program and have the taskbar items highlight as you mouse over them it really inovative, and it ups the bar on what is expected of an OS… NOT!

All these “features” have been in every desktop I’ve used in the last 5 years (or more, not sure) and only the die hard MS crowd can think of them as new. And before people mention the Aero window decoration as something new, I would like to remind everyone that I had a semi-transparent win deco in KDE since before last year, and since 3.4.2 (released july this year) KDE supports fully transparent windows (not just the win deco), or just transparent win decos on any win deco style w/o special theming. I’m not even going to get into the “Items on the taskbar are magically lighting” thing 😉

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 22nd, 2005 at 03:24 and is filed under Evangelism, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.