Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows: Windows Longhorn Build 5048 Review: Well apparently after being asked to take screen shots of Longhorn down, Paul Thurrott has been allowed to put them back up.
Thurrott presents perhaps the first comprehensive review of Longhorn out and ultimately concludes that Longhorn still has quite a ways to go, “Longhorn build 5048 is hugely disappointing from an end user perspective because it shows how far behind Microsoft is in delivering the next client version of Windows. Also, expectations were high that Microsoft would hit a home run with this build, because it was the first public Longhorn release in a year.
Thurrott goes on, “with my enthusiasm firmly in check now, I can look forward to some June briefings and the expected July release of Longhorn Beta 1. I do expect that things will indeed improve over time. However, that’s not saying much, as things can only improve.”
Ouch!
Being able to search in Explorer by rating — now this is something that I will really love. You can’t do this today and I don’t have any easy way to get my 5 star rated songs (and hopefully photos) from my main PC to my laptop.
I did like seeing that I’m going to be able to search by “rating” in one of Thurrott’s screen shots — but I already knew you were going to be able to do this. I love rating things and think we should be able to rate just about everything rateable, music, pictures, video, etc.
I still didn’t think Thurrott’s screenshots showed how you could enlarge or shrink a thumbnail without launching an application while seeing the contents of a document. This is something that I thought was pretty nice. And I do think that the indexing in Longhorn is more significant than Thurrott might. The ability to find things faster in bigger and bigger digital libraries will be really helpful — at least for me.
Even though Thurrott and I might disagree on how significant some of the functions of Longhorn are (I suspect that coming to this with my digital media bias might make some of the new features more meaningful to me than Thurrott)it’s great to see his kind of detailed reporting get out there ahead of Longhorn’s release.