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One thing that many Vista complaints have in common is that they nearly all say that “it’s not Longhorn.” That’s true, Microsoft made a lot of changes along the road of Vista’s development, and they burned through new concepts faster than a Hummer burns through a gallon of gas.
One concept that Long Zheng pulled up from the grave is a design showing off an extra-tall Taskbar, or what he calls the “double-decker” Taskbar (pictured above). In the design you see a polished interface for what we could be using right now in Vista, but Microsoft strayed from the idea.
If you’re like me you’ll sit there drooling at the image thinking to yourself “now that’s what I wanted to see in Vista!” But it took just a few minutes for reality to set in, and for me to realize what a massive hog that would be for your screen’s vertical space. It looks fine and dandy in a mockup, but when put in a real-life situation would it really make you more or less productive?
As it turns out all was not lost from that mockup. The bottom portion of what you see in the screenshot eventually evolved into what we now know as the Vista Sidebar. And before you go criticizing Microsoft for not even giving this a fair shot, it turns out that a similar feature, though not as polished, was available in Longhorn Build 4015 (leaked on April 28, 2003). Paul Thurrott had a screenshot of the feature in action:
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I’m all for a newly redesigned Taskbar in Windows, but I’m glad that’s not what it turned out to be. I’ve come to love the Vista Sidebar now that there are some really great gadgets being developed for it, and I think I would leave it on the side of the screen even if I did have the option of placing it below the Taskbar. With widescreen monitors I have more horizontal screen space to sacrifice, and I have a hard time parting with my vertical screen space.
I’d love to hear what everything thinks about the Longhorn conceptual Sidebar/Taskbar combination. Before you jump to a conclusion and say that “it’s undeniably awesome,” you should think about sitting in front of a computer and using it. Would you be more or less productive by sacrificing the extra vertical screen space?
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Tags: Software, Windows, Taskbar, Windows Vienna, Windows Vista
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I disabled the sidebar despite liking it very much, its suck a resource hog.
I remember all the concept art developed for Longhorn (Vista) back in 2005. It was dazzling, colourful, mega eye candy and looked so lush and futuristic. Maybe those images, and these ones you have here, should be added to the vapourware list? Cos, they’re pure fantasy.
I hope we don’t go have to go through this again, like, getting glimpses of all these fantasy shots only for them to disappear and there still be the standard UI on Windows Seven.
There is still considerable difference between Windows XP’s UI and Windows Vista’s UI. I still don’t get it why they changed what was perceived by people as good UI in XP? Were there people who were actually not happy with the XP UI? If not for insane and “can’t do anything about it” UI changes, I would have straightaway upgraded to Vista. Now I WILL but I’ll have to hunt down some solutions to my UI issues, especially the mess that the whole Explorer UI has become.
Yeah, that thing looked too big! I’d say they did Vista’s sidebar setup well.
Geez, that looks real familiar. Almost like… KDE’s Kicker.
First they copy OS X, now Linux.
@onlineapps:
Is that a Republican Linux penguin?
Regards,
Omar.-
Well the first screenshot looks awesome but if I’d put that on my laptop right now I’d need a more “vertical’ screen then I have right now. The Sidebar works fine for me since I have a widescreen moniter…
Vista taskbar’s well thought as it is. Many sidebar gadgets work efficiently. The Longhorn doubledeck might not fit users needs on a widescreen laptop.
On a very high and wide flat screen? Not sure. It still would be wasted place.
Yeah, looking at a concept like that makes you think you’d need more height in a monitor. Yet the current aspect ratio trend is doing the opposite. Vista’s sidebar is fitting for the new widescreen standard.
It does use up a good amount of resources, but I’ve finally gotten to the point that I have 2GB of RAM, and I figure I might as well use it.
If they didn’t change it then everyone would be saying “why didn’t they change it.” It’s tough to please everyone, but personally I like Vista’s UI better than XP’s.
Well, this mockup is rather old. So you could possibly look at it as KDE copying Microsoft.
@Ryan, Kicker’s also very old