News - PDC '08: Microsoft demonstrates Windows 7's sex appeal

[HEXUS]

Microsoft has provided a first look at its next operating system, Windows 7, and it's sexier than any Windows before it.

Read more.

[dangel]

Good article.

Pictures good, but video better to show the interaction. There's some here: http://www.neowin.net/news/live/08/1...e-windows-7-ui which help you make sense of it.

[Tidus]

I like all the new features shown so far, Vista enhanced the appearance of Windows and W7 is further enhancing the appearance of Vista, with the kernel optimisations hopefully Windows 7 will be a better OS allround.

For a more in depth look check out dangels link above.

Here's a copy and paste of my comment about the UI changes from a different topic made yesterday: -


I like the new enhancements / changes to the taskbar it looks like merging the taskbar and quicklaunch to give microsoft's take on a dock. The Jump lists and window preview look good aswell, good thing they did away with the sidebar as it was rubbish, the see through windows feature makes the gadgets a little more practical to use but I'd probably still not bother with them.

A few good new features but what I'm waiting to find out about W7 is whether it is subscription based or not and how much improvement has been made to system performance.

[miniyazz]

Not currently a fan of having a thicker taskbar, but I'll reserve judgement until I see it in use. I presume if they've not majorly redeveloped the architecture of the OS, apps designed for Vista should have minimal compatibility problems?

As for the gadgets; I like to be able to see my gadgets whenever I look at them, and not have to mouseover a button to see them. Especially if I'm checking them to find out which processes are eating my quad core if I got a slowdown - I don't want the OS to have to do anything processor intensive, as there would both be a lag, if my cores were maxed out, and might incorrectly show explorer as one of the CPU-hogging processes.
Equally, I might be playing a game on my projector and want to see how much memory/CPU it's using on a secondary monitor. Can't do that if I have to mouseover the button to see the gadgets.

Multimonitor support sounds good - currently I'm using Ultramon, and can't complain with how well it works and integrates into Vista - but it's not free, and I'm sure lots of people are missing out. The ability to click a button to switch which monitor the program is appearing in alone is invaluable, especially if you don't always use all the monitors at once - for example, a projector which take time to warm up/has higher running cost.

One problem with Vista I hope'll be fixed is the lack of shortcuts readily available. Two examples: Network connections and Display properties. In XP you could get to Network connections by clicking on Start Menu>Network connections - simple. In Vista you have to go along about four links - start menu>network>network and sharing centre>network connections, opening up three different windows en route. It's a pain when you use your laptop to connect to two different networks, using different IP addresses, and have to configure the network settings manually.
Again, with the Display properties - in XP you could right click the desktop and go to properties, and everything you need pops up in a dialog box. In Vista you have to go to Control Panel and Personalisation and Display Settings, and that only lets you change resolution - the dialog box in XP let you change Desktop and Screensaver settings etc as well. Again, a pain when you have multiple monitors and are activating/deactivating/changing resolution on these, which I do fairly frequently.
Fortunately I found that by copying the old shortcut links from XP and pasting them into quicklaunch on Vista actually works, so if anyone else was wondering how to open those easily, that's the solution.

Thus ends the world's longest post.
Sorry :-p

[dangel]

Not currently a fan of having a thicker taskbar, but I'll reserve judgement until I see it in use. I presume if they've not majorly redeveloped the architecture of the OS, apps designed for Vista should have minimal compatibility problems?

The core of the OS is the same, so yes no driver problems (probably) etc.

As for the gadgets; I like to be able to see my gadgets whenever I look at them, and not have to mouseover a button to see them. Especially if I'm checking them to find out which processes are eating my quad core if I got a slowdown - I don't want the OS to have to do anything processor intensive, as there would both be a lag, if my cores were maxed out, and might incorrectly show explorer as one of the CPU-hogging processes.
Equally, I might be playing a game on my projector and want to see how much memory/CPU it's using on a secondary monitor. Can't do that if I have to mouseover the button to see the gadgets.

Not sure what you mean here? Gadget sit ont the desktop so can be on your secondary monitor - the mouseover stuff is to do with applications, not gadgets.

One problem with Vista I hope'll be fixed is the lack of shortcuts readily available. Two examples: Network connections and Display properties. In XP you could get to Network connections by clicking on Start Menu>Network connections - simple. In Vista you have to go along about four links - start menu>network>network and sharing centre>network connections, opening up three different windows en route. It's a pain when you use your laptop to connect to two different networks, using different IP addresses, and have to configure the network settings manually.
Again, with the Display properties - in XP you could right click the desktop and go to properties, and everything you need pops up in a dialog box. In Vista you have to go to Control Panel and Personalisation and Display Settings, and that only lets you change resolution - the dialog box in XP let you change Desktop and Screensaver settings etc as well. Again, a pain when you have multiple monitors and are activating/deactivating/changing resolution on these, which I do fairly frequently.
Fortunately I found that by copying the old shortcut links from XP and pasting them into quicklaunch on Vista actually works, so if anyone else was wondering how to open those easily, that's the solution.

Quicklaunch is dead - and as for wifi connections there's a new much easier way to switch (see http://www.neowin.net/news/live/08/1...e-windows-7-ui)

[baius]

Good article.

Pictures good, but video better to show the interaction. There's some here: http://www.neowin.net/news/live/08/1...e-windows-7-ui which help you make sense of it.

Thank you for the link. It had some good supplementary information, and the videos were useful.

I like the fact that "touch" is becoming more "mainstream".

It looks very "Appley" from what I can see. That's not necessarily a bad thing though.


One thing, though: I hope that I can still have my desktop, how I like it. I.e.

(1920x1200 -> 960x600)

I showed somebody I worked for how I have my sidebar, and he has it like that, now, too.

I prefer it because you can see more open programs at once, it's out of the way on widescreen monitors and it's "different" (which gets people talking).

[Biscuit]

i like the look of this!

[Camrada]

It's a pain when you use your laptop to connect to two different networks, using different IP addresses, and have to configure the network settings manually.

Perhaps setting it up correctly would help? That is the purpose of the "Alternate Configuration" tab under the IP Properties dialog box, to solve this exact situation, if the card doesn't connect to the primary network, it will connect to the "alternately" configured one... hope that helps

I actually find that right-clicking on the Vista desktop and selecting Personalize give a much better user experience than the XP equivalent. It gives access to so much more than what XP used to from the same amount of "mouse clicks"... and if this is all improved in W7, then it is going to be a mighty beast...

I'm excited about the and really looking forward to sinking my teeth into it...

WTG Microsoft !!!

[Grimps]

2010 ehh? Oh well, Steve Jobs will have moved the goal posts again by then with next year's release of Snow Leopard. Leaving us Mac users all nice and smug once again

My worry for Windows 7 is that they don't fix the resource hungry nature of the Vista kernel. The major turn off for business with Vista was the high system requirements which means a higher TCO. It became very hard to convince the purse strings holders at work that Vista bought anything significant to the party that warranted the higher cost of ownership. Now if only it had included WinFS as originally promised........

Hopefully Win 7 will bring something new to the table, and that they'll learn that having so many different versions just didn't work (hands up all those people with Ultimate edition that feel at least slightly cheated). There should also be some huge upgrade discounts for all the vista users out there, who basically have taken part in a paid-for beta test.

I've always been one of those geeks that has had to have the latest OS, I even upgraded from Windows 3.1 to 3.11 for no other reason than the networking was slightly easier. However for the 1st time I can remember I haven't gone over to the latest MS offering. I dual-boot with XP (for the games ) and there's nothing in Vista that tempts me to make the switch, fingers crossed that Win 7 is more than just vista with an OSXish look.

[magneticman]

They ran win7 on a laptop with 1ghz w/ a gig of memory, from that i suspect they've finally optimised the os for most machines, rather than restricting it to better systems for prime performace like Vista.

As for the ms vs apple debate (yawn?) you really have to say these new features seem to be quite original, as opposed to vista which was claimed to have stolen a lot of ideas. I hope as the project evolves more innovative features will be added, not just announce a **** load of new stuff at the beginning then nothing.

[this_is_gav]

Hopefully Win 7 will bring something new to the table, and that they'll learn that having so many different versions just didn't work (hands up all those people with Ultimate edition that feel at least slightly cheated). There should also be some huge upgrade discounts for all the vista users out there, who basically have taken part in a paid-for beta test.

Ultimate: I don't feel cheated. I'd seen the Microsoft extras for previous operating systems, which weren't free I should add, and they were dire. Buying for the Ultimate Extras was always going to be a poor choice. I'd hope 95% here bought it because they wanted something like a combination of WMC and Remote Desktop, or WMC and domain access, not the free addons which were always going to be poor.

Beta testing: I use Vista every day. I chose it over XP as I think it's better than XP. It's an OS that's at least comparable to XP, offers big improvements in some areas and works fine since SP1. I'm not sure in what way I'm beta testing.

It is all looking very, very good. If MS are using a sort of tick-tock method of development, Intel and ATI style, then I'm all for it. Even if it's tick-tock-tock.

[Funkstar]

So tick would be architectural changes, and tock would be interface and optimisations?

Sounds good to me.

I'm with Gav on this one (oh god this is trurning into the 159,248th XP vs. Vista thread). As I've said in other threads, I didn't even know there were supposed to be free Ultimate Extras until people started complaining they were a bit thin on the ground and rubbish. I always assumed people were buying it to get all the corp features as well as MCE.

[this_is_gav]

So tick would be architectural changes, and tock would be interface and optimisations?

Yup. Whether it works out like that or not, time will tell. On the face of it, that sort of strategy is pretty tasty for me.

Though it may all be irrelevant within the decade if they take this whole [it's corporate buzzword time!] cloud computing thing to the extreme, as many fear.

[dangel]

2010 ehh? Oh well, Steve Jobs will have moved the goal posts again by then with next year's release of Snow Leopard. Leaving us Mac users all nice and smug once again

So snow leopard will be radical will it?

My worry for Windows 7 is that they don't fix the resource hungry nature of the Vista kernel. The major turn off for business with Vista was the high system requirements which means a higher TCO. It became very hard to convince the purse strings holders at work that Vista bought anything significant to the party that warranted the higher cost of ownership. Now if only it had included WinFS as originally promised........

Google 'minwin' - there's nothing bloated about the kernel in Windows. The *rest* of Windows will recieve a big shakedown - expect something much tighter than Vista (7 will run on a netbook).
WinFS is long dead, and, as far as i'm aware, nobody else has managed to achieve it's lofty goals either. Move with the times..

Hopefully Win 7 will bring something new to the table, and that they'll learn that having so many different versions just didn't work (hands up all those people with Ultimate edition that feel at least slightly cheated). There should also be some huge upgrade discounts for all the vista users out there, who basically have taken part in a paid-for beta test.

It's a bloody good beta then - it's far more stable than XP and a darn sight faster than it for me

I pity the smug

[joshy989]

I had a go at the Windows 7 beta, does look slightly better than vista alot better than xp and is alot fater than vista especially the sidebar.

[magneticman]

you mean pre-beta, i've seen it floating on torrent sites; but tbh there's no point of even looking at it til the beta comes out in Dec/early 09..