Friday, February 24, 2006

With the latest release of the Windows Vista CTP build this week. I was doing some recap with some of the changes made in the history of windows and one of the things that I didnt pay much attention to lately is the Windows 'start' button. Most of you will probably know that the start button was a big talk within HCI for it's inconsistency with user actions - clicking a button called start to shut down - end - a computer ... etc. With a bit of search I found the following link with all the windows buttons from Windows 95 to Vista build 5259 (2 builds back I think) but the button in this build is still the same. So by the looks of it, in the last 3 builds of vista, including the one released this week 5308 the word 'start' is finally no longer going to be present. I think this will make HCI guys happy now :-)

For a recap on the start button in the past 10 years I've included the images I found in the link above.

Windows 95/98/NT 4
Windows 95/98/NT 4
Windows 2000/ME
Windows XP Build 2250
Windows XP Build 2257
Windows XP Build 2410
Windows XP Beta 1
Windows XP Beta 2
Windows XP
Windows Server 2003
Windows Media Center 2005
Windows Vista Build 3683
Windows Vista Build 3718
Windows Vista Build 4008
Windows Vista Build 4015
Windows Vista Build 4051
Windows Vista Build 4083 (64-bit)
Windows Vista Beta 1
Windows Vista Build 5219
Windows Vista Build 5259-5308