My Gawd, even the trash can is OSX like.

Oh well, as far as "Vista" goes, Apple can only say,

"you're welcome"

It is also worth noting that when Apple first unveiled Dashboard at the 2004 World-Wide Developer's Conference, they were calling their mini-apps "gadgets", and the files even had a ".gadget" file extension in the early developer previews of Mac OS X 10.4. Along the way they changed the name to "widgets".

Aside from the notes in the article, that menu bar has to have the worst implementation of translucency I've ever seen. So interferring and jarring. Especially the gaussian effect it has on unfocused windows. One can only imagine the multi-layered fudge of several menu bars overlapping.

Thanks god they finally adapted tabbed browsing in IE 7!! That would've been fun.

I'll stick with Tiger thanks.

And Ian, It's also worth noting that Arlo Rose created Konfabulator (and coined the term widgets in this context) in 2000.

Actually if you want to go back to the original idea, it was called DA or Desk Accessories back in the glory days of MacOS 6 and up.

I'd call this pretty if I hadn't seen OSX (or even Enlightenment for that matter) before and the fact that Vista will take 10x the hardware to run half as smoothly.

and this is exactly what I was talking about on my site, where MS has no innovation, other than addng RSS to XP, like Retsyn. I mean, Ballmer even had to defend their lack of innovation to analysts.

Response to Mike: Actually, Desk Accessories (DA) go back to Mac OS 1.0 (of which I still have a copy 8-).

Widgets actually go back to Apple's Lisa OS (pre-1984).

http://www.guidebookgallery.org/extras/spotlights/lisa/photos/dersch31

A sidebar ! Holy Moly, and I thought the 3 Billion for Microsoft Research was just money down the drain!

Man, you guys just /reek/ of the words "Think Tank"!

It's easy enough to gloss (pun intentional) over old interface convention disasters, but why doesn't MS take this opportunity to fix them for good? Double-tiered tab bars are a usability nightmare from way back, no matter how shiny they may now be. And arbitrary configurations of tabs, breadcrumbs, and popup tab cluster thingies? Hey, I'm sure it's learnable, but there's no way that mess is intuitive. And by the way, MS, your folders are backwards and sideways (tabs go on the left). No interface is perfect, but I just mourn the fact that younger UI pups will be cutting their teeth on this visual hodgepodge, and I'm (speaking as a UI guy) the one who will have to clean up after them.

And Ryan.... Stardock's Object Desktop for Windows preceded Konfabulator and they coined the term "widgets" long before Arlo did.

the new taskbar with window preview = lame attempt to copy the dock.

Erm... MacOS 6.0? MacOS 1.0?

That's System 6... and before that, there was no such thing as a "System" release.

Besides, all of those OS releases are freely available... Apple did not charge for an OS release until System 7.1 came out. System 7 Pro, and System 7.5, were the first full releases at full prices.

The latest invocation of Windows is going true to form: "Make it more like the Mac! -Bill Gates"

Fortunately Bill Gate STILL doesn't get WHY if it doesn't WORK like the Mac, with multiple users on-line at the same time, with security options that Windows users can only deam of, with a whole bunch of stuff, like executable and read-write group and user permissions, it ISN'T very Mac like.

Let Mr. Gates still never look below the surface and Apple will keep on being his R&D firm.

Why can't Microsoft develop products of their own instead of ripping off other's far superior products?
Maybe they should be focused on actually creating something or their own, instead of their current 'smash and grab' philosophy.
The list of products they try to rip of is endless! What has MSFT ever really created???

fine, I'll be the dissenting opinion here.

if you REALLY want to claim "oh, we had this idea first" then you might want to read up on the Microsoft Research paper put out back in 2000 outlining the idea of the sidebar, then called the "sideshow" (bearing, of course, no resemblance to the auxiliary display now dubbed SideShow).

they've also had working demos of this product since the very first Longhorn alpha builds, predating anything by Apple, with original "gadgets" being called "tiles."

it's just like the desktop search. no, Microsoft didn't steal either concept. and even if they did? if we play the blame game here, nobody wins. this is about furthering the computer experience, not limiting the kind of software people write.