As we reported earlier Longhorn 4015 has leaked and is becoming widely available through IRC and Newsgroups. Neowin has aquired some tailor-made screenshots showing off a few of the new features taking shape in what is becoming known as Milestone 5.
First of all we have the new Bliss wallpaper as found in build 4015, the rest of the screenshots have been optimized to save bandwidth but are still a pleasure to look at.
Longhorn has a new boot screen, it no longer displays Windows XP Professional version 2003 like older builds did. First start of Longhorn also looks different to XP, expect more of these changes. The desktop looks tweaked with its thinner taskbar and start button and explorer has seen improvement with the description area, you can also see a windows flag on the harddisk indicating the system disk. Theres a new tab called positions in the Taskbar & Start Menu properties that allows a user to choose where the sidebar will appear on the desktop. As you can see from this screenshot the titlebars start in the middle and work there way out to fill the taskbar. This I suspect is because stuff like systray icons and Quick Launch is now moved to the sidebar allowing the taskbar to focus on tasks alone, the positioning makes sense. Another interesting point is the new notifications, it seems Microsoft have moved away from ballons in favour of a more stylish alert, this might be an extension of the new "desktop notification" of Outlook 2003. Its also evident that Microsoft will again need to seriously look at the icons, even the new XP icons need a work over to look ok in this new Windows version. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
The sidebar has seen some improvement in this build and again we can see the MSN type tabs that will most likely dominate the usability of the Longhorn Sidebar. We hope you enjoyed this short walkthrough of this new Windows version taking shape right here on Neowin.