What? we said this already, but our "buddy" Paul Thurrot has taken it upon himself to educate the Windows tech-site community by confirming that Sideshow (that 1.5mb leak from Oct 2001) isn't Longhorn! Wow, good work Paul. heres the blurb from his otherwise informative Wininfo website:
- When your only source of information is user feedback on a rumors site, you know you're in trouble, but that didn't stop an otherwise respectable tech publication (which shall remain nameless) from publishing a story this week erroneously tying some current Microsoft beta products to Longhorn, the next Windows version.
These products include "Sideshow," a Microsoft internal test product that places Internet links in a locked toolbar on the side of your screen; and MSN 8, which uses a new Dashboard component (incorrectly called a "task shelf" for some reason in the report) to provide MSN services-based links either in the MSN browser, or directly on the desktop.
So what's the connection to Longhorn, you ask? Well, Longhorn will reportedly include a Start Menu replacement that will, yes, change the menu into more of a shelf or docked toolbar that's always on-screen, providing links to local services and .NET-based Web services. The report cites "tester sources"--who are apparently people that downloaded these leaked products--who say that these products are all "based on the same technology."
Well, that's quite a leap of faith, isn't it? Sure, they all basically perform the same function, but then that function is a solution to the fairly obvious problem of Active Desktop: Back in 1997, when IE 4.0 shipped, Active Desktop was supposed to be the product's big new feature, but all of the live Internet content it exposes is hidden by on-screen windows.
So moving this content to a pane, shelf, dock, or whatever you want to call it--some interface element that's always on-screen--solves that problem nicely, in a very obvious way. This is the same reason Web services are exposed through Windows Messenger today in XP, and not via Active Desktop, incidentally.
And it's the reason all these disparate solutions are in the works now. But they're not related in any concrete way or based on the same underlying code at all. You know, "tester sources" notwithstanding. Oh the shame.
News source: Wininfo Short Takes
