During early Longhorn development the Aero theme was kept a good secret and remained off-limits even for most shell developers. The Jade visual style file includes all resources for both Jade and Aero. That’s absolutely right, but really Jade IS the Aero theme in disguise. I hear you think: “But there is no Aero theme installed by default”. The only theme that is actually capable of drawing it is the Aero theme. Both Jade and Slate cannot draw the aurora on the preview panel. Part of the problem of aurora not working is that none of the default themes actually supports aurora. Moreover, I will go one the steps needed to manually enable the Animated Preview Panel Aurora (APPA) in build 4074. In the remainder of this article I will explain more about Aero and why the aurora which is available in build 40 doesn’t work in the first place and how it works at all. Only some years ago a modded 4074 image was released under the name The Way It Was Meant To Be (TWIWMTB) which added the fully working aurora effect to explorer. The effect was found and applications were made to show what it would look like when working. Although the “WinHEC build”, 4074, does have a working DWM engine, at first it looked like it didn’t have any aurora at all.īut it did. Most of these features wouldn’t be seen again until the next year at WinHEC 2004. The particular demo shows us working WinFS, content-based thumbnails, Aero Glass and an animated aurora effect in the preview panel.

At first sight many people thought the demo was just a flash mock-up, but Hillel Cooperman was fast to debunk this. Aurora in the preview panel was first shown at the PDC 2003 conference when a private build was showcased. Using the powerful Avalon presentation engine, Longhorn was able to draw fancy animations, like Aurora, without any significant performance hit on the processor. Aurora is one of the eye-candy features which is best represented in Milestone 7 builds.

Windows longhorn slate wallpapers