Caramon’s muscles ached. Blood ran down his arm from the wound to his shoulder. The fighting had finally stopped. He looked up to the heavens thanking Paladine for his escape. He scoured the heavens for the group of stars that made up Paladine’s symbol, the platinum dragon. Caramon’s heart lurched. All he could make out was an eerily blank skyline, the only constellation he could see was not that of Paladine, nor of any of the other Gods of Krynn. It was of a hourglass. The mark of his twin brother Raistlin. “No… Raist” he muttered, knowing that the arch-mage had done the impossible, he had defeated the Gods and now ruled over the heavens and all of Krynn.
“It is true, my brother”, a whispering voice came. Caramon spun and saw the hem of velvety black robes next to him. He looked up into golden skinned face of his brother. “Why Raist?” he pleaded. It was then Caramon stared more deeply into the shadowy face, covered by the robe’s hood. “Why?” Raistlin hissed, “Why, my brother, is not for you to question. But know this. I now have more power than you can possibly imagine.” With that Raistlin removed his hood and Caramon gasped for air. The big warrior looked into the eyes of his brother and saw not the hourglass-shaped pupils that had haunted him since Raistlin took the Test of Wizardry, but spinning Aerobies, glowing as they spun.
“I now have the power of spinning discs at my disposal!!” Raistlin boomed. It was a voice Caramon had never heard before and it echoed from the Halls of Redmond.
Ok, ok. So that scene never happened in the Twins Trilogy. And such a thing never happened in Dragonlance. But after I installed Build 5472 of Windows Vista I realised that something was missing. Something that had been symbolic for quite a while. The hourglass had gone. Replaced by a spinning disc that looks a bit like a crystal Aerobie. upgraded from Build 5384 (the Public Beta build) through to Build 5472 (the July CTP). There are actually quite a few changes, mainly and most notably in the UI. The disc is not quite a fetching as Apple’s beachball, but let’s hope we see less of the disc in Vista as we see of the beachball in Mac OS.
New icons for returning to the desktop and the windows switching mode (which looks much sharper in this build) are added to the quick launch menu. The options for the look and feel have been changed slightly. Now you can chose the level of opacity of the glass interface or have it runed off all together, which is not something particularly new, but now it seems much more difficult to turn off the Aero interface, unless you choose Windows Classic as a theme.
No doubt I’ll discover other gems within the UI once I’ve used it a bit more. One thing can be said, this build appears snappier although Explorer still restarts on me from time to time especially when opening windows that contain folders of video files…
Oh an incidentely, there’s a Dragonlance animated movie planned for next year telling the original story of Caramon and Raistlin along with the other Heroes of Lance, based on Dragons of Autumn Twlight. And Kiefer Sutherland is going to be the voice of Raistlin. I hope it’s good enough to get me coughing blood into my hankerchief!
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[...] So there you have it. Three new things along with the death of the hourglass. Seems that the death of the hourglass though has not meant the death of waiting for stuff to happen on Vista. Oh well. [...]