Hi Harpo and Derry,

I think that you guys read everything, but thought that I would pass along this speculation on the development of "Longhorn 2005/2006."

"Longhorn promises dramatic changes to Windows' user interface. The new UI, code-named Aero, is designed to exploit true 3-D capabilities and to provide dramatically enhanced scaling, translucency, and animation. In Aero, each application can behave as if it owns the entire display canvas, when in fact multiple canvases can be overlapped, scaled, and warped by Longhorn's Desktop Compositing Engine to produce the final monitor output. This will allow the OS to perform tricks such as handling window minimization by progressively shrinking a window to a thumbnail with its contents shrunk but intact.

Aero will be hardware-intensive, so Microsoft plans to allow multiple tiers of behavior. The most complete Aero environment, known as Tier 2, will require heavy-duty 3-D graphics hardware; current estimates are 64MB to 128MB of video memory and DirectX 9–equivalent hardware 3-D acceleration capabilities. For environments where the hardware is insufficient, a Tier 1 experience will offer scaled-back capabilities"

...from "Inside PC Magazine Online"

Muzz

Thanks for posting this Muzz.

- Derry