OpenSolaris

New Start button and Start menu

You'll notice subtle improvements to the Windows Vista desktop as soon as it appears. The ugly Start button has been replaced by a prettier round Start button that loses the "Start" text but includes the Vista flag logo. The Start menu itself has been thoroughly overhauled as well, with a new layout and, on systems with Aero Glass, an icon preview that sticks up above the top level of the menu and animates as you mouse over items on the right side of the menu (Figure ).

Now, recently used applications are given more precedence in the Start menu, and that left half of the menu occupies about two-thirds of the total menu width. Navigation is as with previous Vista builds: There's no more All Programs pop-up menu. Instead, the left portion of the Start menu displays everything in place.

On the right side of the Start menu, all of the options have completed changed, though it's not obvious at first, and they lack icons now. As you mouse over each item on the right side, the top icon preview changes to display the icon of the item you're about to select. At the top of this right side of the menu is an entry for your home folder, though it's not called that, and is named per your user name (mine says "Paul"). Below that are a list of commonly-accessed personal folders (Virtual Folders in previous builds, and special shell folders in XP), commonly-accessed file system locations (Library, Computer, and Network), and other options such as Recent Items, Control Panel, Program Defaults (formerly "Set Program Access and Defaults"), and Help. At the bottom right are buttons for locking and shutting down the computer.

The personal folders in the Start menu bear some explanation, since their use has changed. In Windows XP, you're probably familiar with special shell folders like My Documents, My Music, and My Pictures that appear in the Start menu. In previous Vista builds, the equivalent items in the Start menu (Documents, Music, and Pictures) pointed not to physical folder locations as in XP, but rather to Virtual Folders, a new UI construct that aggregates content from all over your hard drive and presents it in a single place. So, for example, the Documents entry in the October CTP actually brought you to a Virtual Folder called All Documents. I found this confusing because there was actually a physical folder called Documents as well, and you could get to it from the All Documents Virtual Folder.

So how does it work in 5270? When you select Documents from the Start Menu, you're actually brought to the Documents folder that sits under your home folder. In other words, it works just like XP. You can still access various document-related Virtual Folders from the left-mounted Common Places pane in the window that appears, however. This is, I think, more logical than the previous system. And, as it turns out, it's something that Microsoft has struggled with as it moves towards a truly virtualized file system.

"We actually considered at one time not having folders," Microsoft lead product manager Greg Sullivan told me during a recent briefing. "It was all going to be virtualized storage with search queries and so on. We would just completely abstract the file organization stuff from the physical folders and disk structure. But that was too much of a leap over the chasm, too confusing for users. But what we have now will probably evolve over time as well."

Sullivan agreed with me that the previous system in Vista, where Start menu items linked to confusingly named Virtual Folders instead of similarly named physical folders, had proven to be too confusing as well. So the company began working earlier this fall to simplify the interface. "The namespace stuff has been simplified in a lot of ways, but the rationalization of what you just talked about, where you have a Virtual Folder and a physical folder with the same or similar names, that's going to change," he said. "We're doing a bunch of usability testing on the whole thing and it's changing. The idea that we can abstract the physical folders is still valuable, however."

So Virtual Folders are still there. They're still the results of search queries, and you can still create your own custom Virtual Folders. Now, however, the Pictures item in the Start menu actually launches the physical folder called Pictures. Likewise, Music launches Music, not a Virtual Folder. But each of these folder views does include access to various Virtual Folders, and you can open the new Library item in the Start menu to view all of the available Virtual Folders on your system. It will be interesting to see how (or if) users take to Virtual Folders. Microsoft is, in some ways, betting that they will, but I think this switch is inevitable, thanks to the massive storage devices we now have, and because much of the content we access is not stored locally, but is instead found on networked drives or even Internet-based file stores.

<pre wrap="">Unfortunately it appears to be really hard to grab a screenshot of the menu, even assuming I had an app that would capture the image (perhaps gimp would) as soon as I select an app the menu disappears. The only thing I can think of is to capture the entire video stream, but I don't have the equipment. Next time you (or anyone else) is in the vicinity of Santa Clara I'd gladly give you a demo. Rgds Paul Glynn Foster wrote: </pre>

<pre wrap="">Hey, On Thu, 2006-03-09 at 10:43 -0800, Paul Byrne wrote: </pre>

<pre wrap="">We should also be mindful of what MS is doing with Vista as this will influence future users muscle memory etc. The start menu in Vista is different from XP (at least in the current beta). </pre>

<pre wrap="">Could you provide screenshots, or pointers to some screenshots? I can host them if you don't have webspace? thanks, Glynn </pre>

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