Windows 7 - Already Better Than Vista?

MCN wrote:Tell me - what is there in Leopard that couldn't have been achieved with an update to Tiger?

Stig wrote:Pedantic but:

Windows NT and 2000 weren't in the same market as 95, 98 and ME.

Denster wrote:Look KP i dont mind the paedo jokes about my daughter

At PDC today, Microsoft gave the first public demonstration of Windows 7. Until now, the company has been uncharacteristically secretive about its new OS; over the past few months, Microsoft has let on that the taskbar will undergo a number of changes, and that many bundled applications would be unbundled and shipped with Windows Live instead. There have also been occasional screenshots of some of the new applets like Calculator and Paint. Now that the covers are finally off, the scale of the new OS becomes clear. The user interface has undergone the most radical overhaul and update since the introduction of Windows 95 thirteen years ago.

Understanding Windows Live Essentials in Windows 7
Ars Technica's live cast from PDC 2008
Windows 7 to finally go public in late October
Ars at PDC 2008. What do you want to see?
First, however, it's important to note what Windows 7 isn't. Windows 7 will not contain anything like the kind of far-reaching architectural modifications that Microsoft made with Windows Vista. Vista brought a new display layer and vastly improved security, but that came at a cost: a significant number of (badly-written) applications had difficulty running on Vista. Applications expecting to run with Administrator access were still widespread when Vista was released, and though many software vendors do a great job, there are still those that haven't updated or fixed their software. Similarly, at its launch many hardware vendors did not have drivers that worked with the new sound or video subsystems, leaving many users frustrated.

While windows 7 doesn't undo these architectural changes—they were essential for the long-term health of the platform—it equally hasn't made any more. Any hardware or software that works with Windows Vista should also work correctly with Windows 7, so unlike the transition from XP to Vista, the transition from Vista to 7 won't show any regressions; nothing that used to work will stop working.

So, rather than low-level, largely invisible system changes, the work on Windows 7 has focused much more on the user experience. The way people use computers is changing; for example, it's increasingly the case that new PCs are bought to augment existing home machines rather than replacement, so there are more home networks and shared devices. Business users are switching to laptops, with the result that people expect to seamlessly use their (Domain-joined) office PC on their home network.

As well as these broader industry trends, Microsoft also has extensive data on how people use its software. Through the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP), an optional, off-by-default feature of many Microsoft programs, the company has learned a great deal about the things that users do. For example, from CEIP data Microsoft knows that 70% of users have between 5 and 15 windows open at any one time, and that most of the time they only actively use one or two of those windows. With this kind of data, Microsoft has streamlined and refined the user experience.

The biggest visible result of all this is the taskbar. The taskbar in Windows 7 is worlds apart from the taskbar we've known and loved ever since the days of Chicago.

Text descriptions on the buttons are gone, in favor of big icons. The icons can—finally—be rearranged; no longer will restarting an application put all your taskbar icons in the wrong order. The navigation between windows is now two-level; mousing over an icon shows a set of window thumbnails, and clicking the thumbnail switches windows.

Right clicking the icons shows a new UI device that Microsoft calls "Jump Lists."

Jump lists provide quick access to application features. Applications that use the system API for their Most Recently Used list (the list of recently-used filenames that many apps have in their File menus) will automatically acquire a Jump List containing their most recently used files. There's also an API to allow applications to add custom entries; Media Player, for example, includes special options to control playback.

This automatic support for new features is a result of deliberate effort on Microsoft's part. The company wants existing applications to benefit from as many of the 7 features as they can without any developer effort. New applications can extend this automatic support through new APIs to further enrich the user experience. The taskbar thumbnails are another example of this approach. All applications get thumbnails, but applications with explicit support for 7 will be able to add thumbnails on a finer-grained basis. IE8, for instance, has a thumbnail per tab (rather than per window).

Window management has also undergone changes. In recognition of the fact that people tend only to use one or two windows concurrently, 7 makes organizing windows quicker and easier. Dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes it automatically; dragging it off the top of the screen restores it. Dragging a window to the left or right edge of the screen resizes the window so that it takes 50% of the screen. With this, a pair of windows can be quickly docked to each screen edge to facilitate interaction between them.

Another common task that 7 improves is "peeking" at windows; switching to a window briefly just to read something within the window but not actually interact with the window. To make this easier, scrubbing the mouse over the taskbar thumbnails will turn every window except the one being pointed at into a glass outline; moving the mouse away will reinstate all the glass windows. As well as being used for peeking at windows, you can also peek at the desktop:

Peeking at the desktop is particularly significant, because the desktop is now where gadgets live. Because people are increasingly using laptops, taking up a big chunk of space for the sidebar isn't really viable; Microsoft has responded by scrapping the sidebar and putting the gadgets onto the desktop itself. Gadgets are supposed to provide at-a-glance information; peeking at the desktop, therefore, becomes essential for using gadgets.

The taskbar's system tray has also been improved. A common complaint about the tray is that it fills with useless icons and annoying notifications. With 7, the tray is now owned entirely by the user. By default, new tray icons are hidden and invisible; the icons are only displayed if explicitly enabled. The icons themselves have also been streamlined to make common tasks (such as switching wireless networks) easier and faster.

The other significant part of the Windows UI is Explorer. Windows 7 introduces a new concept named Libraries. Libraries provide a view onto arbitrary parts of the filesystem with organization optimized for different kinds of files. In use, Libraries feel like a kind of WinFS-lite; they don't have the complex database system underneath, but they do retain the idea of a custom view of your files that's independent of where the files are.

Brerlappins little hat wrote:i love how macfags bleat on about how superior ther laptops are and how theyre a part of 'the mac community' and decry windows as being shite and a rip of off mac os's etc, without realising that microsoft owns like a 49% stake in apple and without MS, apple wouldve sank without trace long before the ipod made apple 'trendy'.

oh and



how many buttons do macs have nowadays? still only one is it?

Alpha eX wrote:I see the mac fanboys have arrived

Beans wrote:

Alpha eX wrote:I see the mac fanboys have arrived

Whats wrong with liking Macs?

Brerlappins little hat wrote:

Beans wrote:

Alpha eX wrote:I see the mac fanboys have arrived

Whats wrong with liking Macs?

apparrently it makes you have no sense of humour and forces you to respond to obvious jokey remarks about your chosen os by calling people morons.

Carlos wrote:Good job, Microsoft.

bear wrote:

Carlos wrote:Good job, Microsoft.

*faints*

At the other end of the scale, Windows 7 supports machines with up to 256 CPUs

Fatal Exception wrote:My prediction on page 1 turned out to be true

I'm liking Windows 7 so far. I'm hoping they don't stop you dumping files on the desktop, that desktop looks a little clean for me.

Oh and moving icons around on the tastbar can be done on XP Vista with a free 3rd party tool called "taskbar shuffle" It's strawberry floating amazing.

Freak Out Requiem IV wrote:Actually, Pete, I think you'll find it wasn't the macboys that started the (crap) war. I don't really care for format wars; Bunches and I only call people up on their responses when they're clearly misinformed or bigoted. I don't care if someone doesn't like OS X, that's their prerogative, it's just painful stupidity and/or obvious baiting that bothers me.

For what it's worth, the proposed features of Windows 7 in that post above make it look like the OS will finally be actually usable (hurhur), so I'm genuinely interested to see how it pans out.