I'm redeveloping the old Milestone 1 Gallery (some of the members who've been around more than a year might remember it).

You can access the current development version at Lab Tom, though it is an active development site (this time I'm building the gallery system from the ground up, rather than using an off-the-shelf package) so expect quirks and downtime.

However, I'm currently looking for people who can contribute screenshots. I plan to get every leaked build (and if you have others, I'm happy to accept anonymous donations) - the only requirement is that the screenshots are 1920x1080 and lossless PNGs, since I intend this to be a gallery for the new decade, not something that assumes people still use a 15" CRT.

Also, feel free to post feedback on design/functionality/structure.

Great, can't wait for it to be up and finished. The layout looks very nice and clean.

That may be the case, but there are plenty of people who have decent-sized wide-screen monitors. And I would like to see these preserved for the future, and making them in a format more accessible to the modern age is never a bad thing.

How strict will you be with this policy? For example, it would be just about impossible to get Windows NT October 1991 Pre-release running at 1920x1080.

Obviously, where it's an impossibility or it's an unleaked build with no chance of obtaining better-quality screenshots, I'll accept lesser resolutions.

For the moment, I'm not focusing on these because the thumbnail generator is hardcoded to generate 16:9 thumbs. I'll get round to rewriting it soon enough.

Will it eventually support 16:10 ones? The reason asking is I've got an old laptop I don't use with a 1920x1200 screen.

Sure, 1920x1200 will be perfect.

I'm pretty sure most people have at least 1280×1024, if not then 1024×768 (which is pretty low for today standards). But yeah, I like the project...

Why so strict? A old german saw says: "Was nicht passt, wir passend gemacht!" (What doesn't fit, will be made to fit!"). But don't go this strict line! As bigger the resolution gets , as smaller the icons get. I , as a guy who has the newest stuff and the best for pc, only got 1680x1200 ,which is really big! You should let it be like the pic is. You cant get that big resolution on MS-DOS and Windows 9x. I think when you go Windows 2000 upwards you can do this high resolution. And you don't have to wonder if the thumbnailing costs much of CPU and Code. I know many people but no one has a 1980x1020 screen, maybe as TV Monitor but who watchs Windows Pics on a PC.
So I would think about that strict line....
"Ist doch egal ob's klein oder gross ist, wenigstens IST es da!" ( me, 8.11.2011, guess what it means)

9x can't do that res? Are you kidding? Windows 95 called. It disagrees.

Now I accept that some of the oldest stuff simply can't go that high res, and I've said I'll make an exception for them on the grounds that the screenshots still use the highest resolution possible.

Thumbnailing's not an issue. My server's generating a page of thumbs on demand in less time than it takes to read a forum page from a database. Resolution has less of an impact than you seem to think anyway - the compression/decompression is the bigger operation, and using lossless PNGs and low-quality JPEGs keeps overhead to a minimum.

Whilst 1080p is still relatively rare (though increasingly common), I did want to future proof this a little so we don't just face the same problem in a couple of years time. 1080p is obtainable, futureproof and not so large that it scales down poorly.

No one's forcing you to use it, if you don't like it go somewhere else with 640x480 screenshots instead. I think it's about time we had a gallery with decent images that are high res.

Well, Nathan Lineback (toastytech.com) was able to do the same thing with his copy of Windows 95 (almost certainly, again, Windows 95 OSR 2.x, as opposed to any of the original releases), upon having purchased a new widescreen monitor, however, as far as I'm concerned, much of this depends on the drivers of which are being used.

While some older video drivers can handle such a resolution, others may not be able to. If it was me, and I wanted the largest resolution, I would go with whatever was the highest that such virtualization software as Virtual PC, VMWare, and/or VirtualBox could handle (the highest of which the default Windows drivers used for these virtualization packages could handle, that is).

VMWare can do some insane resolutions, I think on the later Windows it tops out at something around 4000x2500 now. You can get 1080p right back to Windows 95 at least though - that 95 screenshot was done in VMWare.

One tiny error: I think you mistyped "Customisations" on the main page (first 's' is missing).

My personal opinions:

• The ".." (upwards) could be a bit more prominent.
• The same for the header with the build number etc in the "Details view". It's barely different from the image captions.
• On the pages with the thumbnails, a fluid or multi-column layout would use screen space more efficiently and look better than the current layout. I use a quite small resolution (1280*1024) but I guess on widescreens the simple list you use looks somewhat lonely.
• Larger thumbnails would be more visually appealing (something like 240px wide)
• It would be nice for (visual) orientation if the header (and maybe footer) area was somewhat more distinct from the content. Only a bit, maybe a 3px black line or a slightly darker background.
• A visual change on link/image hover would be helpful.

Other than that, I like it. Well, there isn't much to do wrong on a gallery site (no offense).
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My opinion to the image sizes: While I think you have a point, I also think large screenshots don't have much of an additional value. There either isn't much to look at (Plain Win95 desktop anyone?) or the image shows lots of stuff that better were separated into multiple pics, where a 16xx- or maybe even 12xx-resolution would suffice.
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Assuming someone wanted to contribute screenshots, where'd he have to go?

Its perfect on a 1920x1200 monitor as you can nicely fit the picture in without resizing anything and still have your taskbar and address bar showing

By Normal not with [censored] Virtual-Addons... *poof*
I like that project, but why everything so big. It doesn't help me to see a giantic screen , with Icons so small that you have to look close and not seeing the startbar. It's good to show many features at once, but for a normal Startscreen screenshot lower resolutions are perfect.

ViennaXP, the resolution issue is non-negotiable. Don't like it? Don't use it. There's plenty of small-screen galleries out there.

As for others who like larger, but not that large a screenshot, I agree to an extent - I do think 1080p is a little on the large side, but my intention is that since this is such a large undertaking, I want to get as much life as possible before I decide it needs redoing larger. I'm probably going to introduce a compromise anyway whereby there's an intermediate quality level with a scaled down (720p) JPEG that pops up before you get to the full-size PNG which can be quite large of course. This should help the casual browser a bit without compromising the commitment to quality.



I'm accepting PMs with links/zips/rars of the screens. You can also provide me with a name and a link and I'll add the credit in the footer of the relevant page.

Icons and the taskbar are exactly the same size. If it's zoomed out and you want to see an icon, then zoom in.

Perfect

While some of the time for some people, it may be a tad difficult to get to those large res', but on most Virtual and on most peoples Graphics cards, you can extend the Screen Res to past your Monitor's Supported Res, the only difference is, you have to move the cursor to the side of the screen to get to the other parts of the Desktop, it does not do any effects to the Screenshotting process.

First, thanks for taking your time to answer my suggestions. For the captions, couldn't you wrap each image/caption pair in a fixed-width div with 'display:inline-block' or 'float:left' set? The caption text would just wrap and also the "column" count would vary with screen size.

Yeh, I think that'll be the compromise I go for. Originally, the captions were underneath the image, hence the constraint issue. Keeping them to the right, but having fixed width columns seems like the way to go.

There is a video presenting the old gallery.

It's worth mentioning that the old gallery was an off-the-shelf PHP Gallery that's not been updated in some time. Also most of the images were just ripped from various sites around the web with a great variation in quality. I intend for this one to be very different in character.