I was up one night and it dawned on me, the Windows Longhorn sidebar made a comeback in Windows 8. If anyone remembers the Longhorn Sidebar, it basically was the Taskbar's sidekick, it would had been amazing if it made to vista, oh well though. But to keep things to the point, look at the Longhorn and 8 pictures and the sidebar. It's interesting I think. The major difference though is that the Longhorn is the Taskbar sidekick whereas the 8 sidebar is more a utilitarian feature, maybe one could see as though it really is the Taskbar's sidekick.

To me lately, I'm really starting to discover how true the saying is that Windows 8 is really the Longhorn dream reiterated for our time in this decade. Bill Gates once said that Longhorn was just too far ahead of its time, well, its time is now...

I like that. Well said.

Originally Posted by Coke Robot

I was up one night and it dawned on me, the Windows Longhorn sidebar made a comeback in Windows 8. If anyone remembers the Longhorn Sidebar, it basically was the Taskbar's sidekick, it would had been amazing if it made to vista, oh well though. But to keep things to the point, look at the Longhorn and 8 pictures and the sidebar. It's interesting I think. The major difference though is that the Longhorn is the Taskbar sidekick whereas the 8 sidebar is more a utilitarian feature, maybe one could see as though it really is the Taskbar's sidekick.

am I missing something? Vista has a sidebar, that was the result of the longhorn sidebar, I see no resemblence to the longhorn sidebar and windows 8 sidebar (one contained widgets and the other contains open programs and shutdown options) it's more like a taskbar.

Ha, looks like it nice find

Hi all
Does it matter
I'm sure W8 uses probably some code from even Windows 3.11 -- so what -- I haven't done programming for Donkeys years but I'm sure any decent I.T developers would use re-usable type of code.

W8 works just fine IMO wherever it came from.

Cheers
jimbo

The only resemblance I see is that they are both on the side....

I'm looking at this from a general perspective. Of course there aren't any widgets. I'm looking at more at what they have in common. In Longhorn, the SideBar autohides itself, it could had be configured so that all the system tray notifications are on it. In 8, the SideBar hides itself when you click out of the bar, and it has all the system tray notifications on it. We'll see if it gets further developed...

Also, When Windows 8 is launched, it'll be almost nine years after the scheduled release of Windows Longhorn...coincidence? Or Windows Longhorn reborn? You be the judge.

I'm going to continue being a nerd about this.

Longhorn was one of the MOST animated operating systems I've ever encountered. I mean, every window in Explorer had an animation. It had the Libraries concept in it and when you go to Videos, it would have a header that animated to red and a filmstrip that came in.

Windows 8 is very animated. Honestly, I play with the Bump feature or whatever it's called when I switch between Metro and Desktop interfaces. But there probably won't be anything like in Longhorn for the Libraries, but we'll see where that goes.

And oh yeah, both operating systems introduced totally different coding standards. Longhorn's was C++ and 8 is HTML5 and CSS3, go figure...