Trilight Zone

[digital8]

By: Paul Teodorescu
Posted On: 6/3/2005

Longhorn had been available for MSDN subscribers sometimes last year and after several months has been removed from the download list. Luckily, I had “burned” a CD which I use to build my test desktop with Longhorn.

Recently it has been announced by Microsoft the removal of the advanced filing system WinFS, which was one of the attraction for beta testers like me.
There were several new features that caught my attention and gave me a reason to discuss it with my peers. One was the scrolling list of the installed programs that is built in a sub window on the left side of the start menu. And since my list is pretty long, once I start typing the program name, it auto-fills up, guessing as to the name, making the scrolling list shorter as you type.

Another neat feature has to do with the document view in Explorer, which has been refined. You could use “lists," which are collections of documents you can create on the fly. Lists are really ad-hoc collections of shortcuts used to create customized file groupings. Since you're not making multiple copies of documents, just building shortcut lists, it's very efficient. The advantage of creating lists? You can have multiple shortcuts to the same document in different lists.

While browsing around I have found the current MSN desktop search, which is aimed at competing its rivals, Google and Yahoo. In order to speed up the search process, Longhorn has the capability of building indexes of the file system, which I found extremely useful.

Last but not the least, a sleek look of the Control Panel that makes any techie out there to grasp for it. I am attaching a screen shot here to better visualize my finding.

Overall, Longhorn brings new intriguing additions to Windows, as the most used OS moves into its third decade.