A public preview of Longhorn demonstrated the new Windows platform’s similarity to Mac’s OSX, with translucent windows and composited graphics. The search option allows for rapid parsing of data just by typing a few search words, like an author’s name or common phrases. The "hits" are then collected in folders.
Search is available on both platforms now, but the advanced options in the companies’ upcoming rollouts are new. They allow for quicker results, customizable collection locations and "overtype" mode, in which documents are immediately ruled out upon the introduction of more specific phrases.
Apple’s Tiger includes Spotlight, which is an amplification of its older Sherlock search application. Sherlock was introduced with OS 9. Spotlight claims to be able to search for text and phrases within emails, contacts and documents, even in embedded PDFs. Tiger's new Dashboard is a higher-tech version of the classic Launcher, which debuted with Mac OS 7.5 in the early 1990s. Dashboard is a customizable collection of "widgets," mini programs that retrieve such information as stock quotes, weather forecasts and flight information.
Microsoft representatives say Longhorn will be available by the 2006 holiday season, with a server version to be released by 2007. The debut could be delayed by a suit from networking and storage software vendor Alacritech, which says that Microsoft used the San Jose company’s intellectual property to create its Chimney, which sluices TCP logs to a network card in order to speed up the OS. This technology seeks to eradicate "stack-dump"-related crashes.
Microsoft lost a similar intellectual property suit in March against Burst.com, which said Microsoft incorporated its intellectual property into Windows Media Player. Both Alacritech and Burst had presented their ideas to Microsoft prior to Burst’s breaking off negotiations and later releasing technology similar to what was discussed.
Microsoft’s Jim Allchin acknowledged that Longhorn’s release might not be greeted the way its groundbreaking ancestor Windows 95 was, with stores selling out of the product, but he said that the new OS would have “something for everybody.”
