Screenshots of Windows Vista, the next version of Windows

I found this on Tablet PC Buzz.com today and thought I would pass it on.  Longhorn, which was the code name for “Windows Vista” has been around the geek media for a long time.  Microsoft just released the beta and these are some of the first screenshots that I’ve seen of it.  Why am I posting it here? Well, I just think it’s interesting.  I’m looking forward to seeing if it meets expectations (both of those who expect it to fail AND those who expect it to rock).

 

Since there has been all this Buzz around Windows Vista lately, I thought I would post a few screenshots here that have been publicly released to the press, and also to online community leaders via a new Microsoft web-site called the Hive. The Hive is a site that Microsoft has launched to help solicit more interaction between community leaders and Microsoft. TabletPCBuzz is one of the featured community sponsors of this site, so hopefully you'll hear more cool stuff coming out of that in the future. Anyway, back to the Vista screenshots...^ This first one is a shot of one of the new methods of browsing files in Windows Vista. You will note here that no longer is the word "My" going before the pictures and videos folder names, and you will also notice that the path to this folder mentions "Virtual Folders". This is a good example of how directory structure is no longer the only way to organize your files. With Vista I found it quite easy to sort and browse files the way I wanted to. Here is another shot that shows off virtual folders. The icons in Vista don't have to be this big, you've actually got a slider style interface element that lets you change the size and display to what you want. When the folders are this big though, you can see another really cool effect. The folder icons now show "snapshots" of the files that are within them. So, if you drag a new file into a folder, the icon will refresh showing that file's thumbnail too. It even works if you create a shortcut to a folder or file, something which shows a bit of the attention to detail that is going on here. Here is a shot of using Vista to browse documents. The major thing to point out here is the search feature, which works in a similar fashion to Windows Media Player 10 searching. It filters as you type each letter. It can also do more advanced searching, and they finally include support in Vista for searching by keywords and file properties! One more picture here, this one of the new start menu. You will notice it also has a similar search feature, which actually filters through all the programs in your start menu. Again, you can also see the lack of the word "My" in front of Pictures, Music, Video, etc. (finally!) Anyway, hopefully that shows a little bit of Windows Vista to folks out there who will not have access to the beta. I don't have any pictures of Tablet PC related stuff, which really isn't in beta 1 anyway. Whenever tablet stuff is available for it though, I'll try and get some approved screenshots for you (although that is likely easier said than done).