Interesting never seen before beta Vista screenshot

[Valerio]

Hi! I was wandering around the Internet today until I ended up reading Paul Thurrott's Vista build 5231 review. As I was reading his review about the revamped interface of Windows Media Player 11, I noticed he posted a link to an article which was talking about the latest innovations in WMP 11's user interface and it showed me this screenshot, which I found very interesting as I never saw it before. I'm not sure if it's a mockup or a real screenshot (because of you know, missing build tag, those weird looking fonts and spacing between items in my opinion, but apart from that it could be legit), but either way, you can see the desktop resembles that of early Vista builds in the beta 1 range (build 5112 style, with no transparency in the taskbar), while WMP 11 looks almost like the final one, which was never seen like that until build 5270 and later. The reflection of the Aero glass window is the one present in builds from 5112 to 5270 (I think), but the minimize/maximize/close buttons look like the one we see since build 5259 and afterwards, a little mixed up with the 5112-5231 style caption buttons. If this is a real build I'm pretty sure it's one from the vbl_ux lab or something, this reminds me of that build 5212 with the Start orb. Oh, notice also the Windows Sidebar icon in the system tray. Well that's just it guys, I just wanted to share this with you, I'm sure that very few people know about this screenshot. Here's also the link to that article, from Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060101023 ... ce3ec.aspx

[TinaMeineKatze]

Very interesting find. I'd tend to say that this is a mockup because though everything looks longhornish, it's unlike every build I've ever seen, but I am not sure, too.

[LarryTN7722]

I think it's fake, because 5252 has 5231's Aero theme. Look at the publish date in the article, which is October 17, 2005, the same day 5231 was released to the public. 5252 was compiled on October 26.

[DBlake]

That is most definitely a mockup. The text isn't ClearType-smoothed, but is Photoshop-smoothed.

Plus, there's no desktop watermark.

[Valerio]

Exactly, those are not ClearType fonts. Anyway it's still a very interesting mockup, a cool mixture of old elements and new ones. It would be nice to find more mockups like this one.

[Splitwirez]

Indeed, quite an interesting find. I can't help but notice that while the wallpaper blurred by the glass frame, the desktop icons are not. Additionally, the 1px white border on the outside of the frame has a bit of a bite taken out of it by the minimize/maximize buttons, and the Close button actually looks more like its final appearance...when hovered over, albeit lacking the glow seen in the final appearance.

Cutout showing both oddities in closer detail: