Microsoft has been in the works on it’s new operating system for some time. PC Magazine got a hold of the latest Longhorn build, in order to let us PC users know what lies ahead. Longhorn will be a 64bit system, have the Avalon graphics engine, and Indigo, which end users won’t see or feel. There were plans for a spotlight type indexed search function deemed WinFS, but that’s been postponed due to deadlines not meeting.
Microsoft has taken advantage of file attributes in the NTFS file system already available in Windows XP to make Explorer better at ferreting out documents according to author, camera model (for photographs), or genre or album title (for music files). The operating system lets you create virtual lists based on these attributes so that, for example, you can see every photo on your system or all Microsoft Word files, regardless of where they are stored and without having to explicitly search for them.