There’s an interesting writeup over at ZDNet summarizing the anticipated featureset of the operating system formerly known as Longhorn, which has been widely discussed for about 3 years now and is expected to arrive in late 2006.
Among the features in the OS are security improvements, some snazzy new graphics, and a new means of searching and organizing information. Rather than having to remember the single folder where something is stored, users will be able to put documents in any number of virtual folders. They can also establish folders that will automatically update, such as "files edited in the last week" or "documents from Jane."
The virtual-folders part excites the heck out of me for some reason, probably because I think it’s a really media-centric kind of feature, and I appreciate how Windows is putting a whole lot of focus on how we organize the things we love. If you think about it, we already see this selfsame virtual-folder functionality in the current crop of media devices — we call them "playlists." (A single song can appear several times in any number of different playlists, each instance simply referencing the same file, and that, in a nutshell, is essentially what virtual-folders are all about.)
The reason why we only see this on media players and photo organizers right now is simple: although this scheme is incredibly handy for your average user, it’s a real bitch to implement when you’ve got hundreds of gigabytes of data to index and reference. Of course, by the time Windows Vista arrives, we’ll be well in to the dual-core revolution, with little else to challenge our twin processors other than the occasional simultaneous Halo 2/Photoshop sessions.
So yeah, I’m pretty excited about Windows Vista. I haven’t given up hope on the idea of having a stable, crash-free Windows experience, and I think they’ve been steadily improving with each new release (although Window Millenium was a troubling step backwards, imho). Who knows, maybe its 6th revision will be the one that will finally let that dream come true.