Huddled Masses

So, I wrote up this great explanation about how much the Shell in Windows 7 has changed from Vista, and how this shows that this Windows 7 beta is a much bigger deal than most of the whiners in the press are giving it credit for being, and explain about how I used to be a shell developer, and how that means I should have credibility when it comes to discussing changes in the taskbar, systray, desktop, and their various preference panels ….

Then Windows 7 bluescreened

I think the drivers for Mesh, (maybe VirtualCloneDrive, or Eset’s NOD32) ... didn’t like going into hibernation. Anyway, I lost all that, so let me just list for you some of the changes just in the shell. I’m going to ignore the multi-touch capability, and “Homegroup“s, and the “Libraries” that are really impressive if you’ve never learned how to make a junction …

1. You have complete control over what icons show in the systray. By default, new apps don’t get to show you anything. Hurrah!
2. You can chose large icons for task bar. Actually, it defaults to large icons, so I guess I should say you can choose small icons, but since that’s all that was available in previous versions of Windows, it seems like the new stuff should be what I mentioned. Oh, you know what these larger icons mean?
1. The systray clock now shows the date by default (hurrah!). Ok, I know that’s not actually a big change, but it’s a tiny thing that makes me happier.
2. Each running process gets exactly ONE (squarish) tile on the task bar, with a little extra ridge on the side if it represents more than one window. Of course, that’s just the default:
3. You can switch the text labels back on to make things look like before
1. You can turn off the “grouping” so each window gets it’s own button
3. You can drag tasks on the taskbar to reorder them. I’ve been using Taskix as one of my first installs for years, so this isn’t as big a deal as it could be, but it’s pretty interesting, when you combine it with:
4. You can use WIN+ to launch another copy of a task (based on the order they’re in on the taskbar). Incidentally, if anyone from the team is listening, you should focus the already running task, if there is one, so that pressing Win+# is like clicking the button. Oh, and WIn+Shift+# could run a new one.
5. Mousing over a taskbar tile pops out a pane with thumbnails of each window (or tabs), and mousing over the thumbnails actually hides all the other windows so you can see just that window (or tab) ... and there’s even a close button, so you can close the ones you don’t want without switching to them
6. Dragging a window to a screen edge lets you tile it in place, or maximize it. Cool, and about time ... really we need a few other options on this too, and it should work on the “inside” edges of a multi-monitor setup (hopefully they’ll fix that).
7. The right-click menu for a task tile is customizable: it can show you a list of things to chose from to open in that app: like your recent folders (file manager), your recent history (browser), your “status” (instant messenger), etc.
8. There’s (almost always) a button on that right-click menu for launching another copy of the app. And you can right-click it to get the “run as admin”
9. The task bar tiles can show (become, really) a progress bar! I can’t explain how cool this is, or how many other things it could be used for, but if you’ve got Windows 7, try downloading something large in IE8 — you actually see the progress as a green background on the taskbar button. I have to investigate whether this means you can owner-draw stuff on the taskbar, or if they’ve just provided progress bars built-in. If it’s the former, you can expect to see lots of cool stuff in the near future (like counts of unread messages or emails, etc).
10. Two tiles for the same app appear to be merged together — That is, if you unstack windows, or choose to stack only when there are too many to fit, the borders between buttons are less visible, and the mouse-over highlight carries across them. This is most noticeable if you make your taskbar vertical.

1. There is coloring of apps, so when you mouse over the taskbar buttons, they get highlighted in a color that is based on their icon.

OK, there’s actually more changes than just those … the desktop wallpaper has a built-in “slideshow” feature, so you can have your wallpaper change every day (or every 10 seconds, or something in between). The UAC prompts have a link on them to the UAC preference panel where you can disable UAC as easy as sliding a slider. The taskbar can “learn” just like the start menu does, to keep the apps you use the most always available… or you can just pin those apps to the taskbar manually (again, just like the start menu).

So there’s lots of cool new features in the shell, even without getting into touch interfaces and other stuff, and generally, I think this represents a bigger change than the windows 95-98 and possibly even bigger than 2000 to XP, and on top of all that, the relative performance of the system seems to go in the right direction for a change.

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