Leaked Screens

When we searched public announcements, reports on leaked alpha code, white papers, and developer conference sessions—and threw in informed speculation—the possible outlines of Microsoft's next OS release emerged. Of course, given a tentative release date of 2005, things are bound to change—but here's a look at likely elements of Longhorn's core feature set.

Buyers of new PCs will get Longhorn preinstalled, but for users who want to upgrade, Longhorn will be distributed on a bootable CD. After the CD image is copied to the hard drive, the system will boot into the Windows Preinstallation Environment. Installation time should drop to as little as 15 minutes.

Given the recent emphasis on security, we suspect Longhorn will ship with tighter default security settings than Win XP does; for example, the Internet Connection Firewall may be enabled by default. There's also talk that Microsoft may provide antivirus capabilities, though we think this is a misinterpretation of plans to extend the APIs so third-party AV vendors have better hooks into the OS. These hooks might help support such capabilities as allowing corporate servers to scan client PCs remotely.

Longhorn promises dramatic changes to Windows' user interface. The new UI, code-named Aero, is designed to exploit true 3-D capabilities and to provide dramatically enhanced scaling, translucency, and animation. In Aero, each application can behave as if it owns the entire display canvas, when in fact multiple canvases can be overlapped, scaled, and warped by Longhorn's Desktop Compositing Engine to produce the final monitor output. This will allow the OS to perform tricks such as handling window minimization by progressively shrinking a window to a thumbnail with its contents shrunk but intact.

Aero will be hardware-intensive, so Microsoft plans to allow multiple tiers of behavior. The most complete Aero environment, known as Tier 2, will require heavy-duty 3-D graphics hardware; current estimates are 64MB to 128MB of video memory and DirectX 9–equivalent hardware 3-D acceleration capabilities. For environments where the hardware is insufficient, a Tier 1 experience will offer scaled-back capabilities.

Other graphics-system enhancements include support for high-dpi displays, high-bit-depth graphics subsystems (with more than 8 bits per color—red, green, and blue), and possibly integrated color management capabilities. There will be new APIs and a new driver model, purported to improve stability and reliability, and Tier 2 experiences will apparently require signed graphics drivers.

Given Microsoft's mentions of BroadBench wide-screen displays and its studies on the productivity benefits of multiple-monitor systems, we expect that Longhorn will also boast some kind of improved multimonitor support.

Aside from the Aero eye candy, Longhorn will likely introduce other significant changes to the basic UI. For years, Microsoft has been talking about (and gradually implementing pieces of) "task-based" user interfaces. The idea behind a task-based UI is that instead of launching an app and opening a document, you indicate what you want to accomplish: write a letter, send a fax, whatever.

We suspect that task-based activities will show up prominently in places like the My Pictures folder. Instead of explicitly launching an image editor and loading pictures, you might navigate to My Pictures and be able to edit images, create slide shows, and otherwise manipulate your files without any sense of leaving the file-browsing interface. In fact, some leaked alpha releases apparently include Libraries, or collections of different types of objects (pictures, documents, games) from multiple folders placed in one easy-access virtual bucket.

Longhorn may also include a My Contacts folder to parallel the My Documents, My Pictures, and My Music folders. Microsoft has hinted that it's looking to tie together information from different sources, different people, and different devices—to link document revisions to users, kick off IM or telephone conferences from a single PC-based interface, and so on.

Demos of UI concepts have many new components defined using an XML-based configuration language reminiscent of earlier efforts to integrate HTML into the environment through Active Desktop. One such item is the Sidebar, a panel on the desktop containing "tiles" that can be connected to local or remote resources. Programs can opt to have tiles instead of tray icons. Leaked alpha versions have included tiles such as Synchronize, Most Frequent Apps, Windows Media Player, and Search. New Control Panel settings include parental-control options, such as restricting log-on hours and restricting games to those with specified ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board) ratings.

Longhorn also promises multimedia-oriented improvements. Longhorn will include a UAA (Universal Audio Architecture) driver architecture. The idea is to have implementation-independent audio capabilities controlling basic audio functions just as the default VGA display driver controls basic display capabilities with any graphics board. UAA is also designed to provide simpler audio-peripheral installation, support for digital rights management technology, and supposedly "glitch-free" audio.

Microsoft is also aiming to simplify the OS's audio controls. Longhorn will have a single, central audio control panel with a GFX (global effects) feature enabling render effects to be inserted between the system mixer and the audio driver. It may let users set audio profiles for different circumstances and provide hooks so that applications can behave appropriately in context. For example, you could turn up your music without being blown away by a loud IM notification.

Longhorn will also provide a framework for content security as well as more direct interfaces to portable hardware audio devices via WMDM (Windows Media Device Manager) and MTP (Media Transfer Protocol).