RSSWindows 7: The New Taskbar
Nov 03
Tech Articles Microsoft, news, Tech, Windows 7 View Comments
With Vista behind us, enthusiasts can now start looking into future developments of their favorite operating system. Microsoft’s ‘Professional Developers Conference’ (PDC) of late has shed a satisfactory degree of light on the impending seventh iteration* of the Windows-platform, and revealed numerous incremental improvements over an already very mature OS. As many speculated, the improvements made to Windows have proven to be mainly evolutionary and fit-and-finish-based. This fact predominantly shines through in the ‘User Experience’ of the latest development milestone (M3). Let’s focus on the current state of the Windows Taskbar for now.
* According to Microsoft; there has been a lot of controversy on the web about this.
Hello OS X Dock
Windows 7 will only partially retain its current task-management paradigm, as Microsoft’s currently prototyping a ‘new’ way of navigating your way through windows. This revolutionary –old- method, as it turns out, is very reminiscent of Mac OS X’ dock, which mixes app launchers and running applications in a [somewhat] arbitrary fashion.
Aero Peek
The revised taskbar consists of a series of launchers, save textual labels, on a slightly bigger pane. Application launchers double as task-switchers as soon as they’re clicked, revealing an attractive [Aero] Glass frame if more than one instance of a program was initiated. Hovering over them will trigger a new feature called ‘Aero Peek’, which allows for live window previews as you highlight the preview, an attempt at streamlining the process of window-switching even further.
The following video allows for a more visual understanding of this feature (fast-forward to 3:45).
As expected, Microsoft is only just starting to utilize Vista’s underlying technologies to their full potential. Evidentially, Aero Glass is getting a more prominent function, aside from just embellishing window frames.
Jump Lists
You may already be familiar with ‘Jump Lists’ if you’re a Vista user. Think of the type of menu that pops up when you click the power icon in the notification area. This type of menu-element is also used for the wireless networking dialog.
Windows 7 will incorporate Jump Lists in a more pervasive manner, allowing individual applications to generate their own when a user clicks on their switcher on the taskbar. These lists can contain informational elements, or they can — as demoed with the new version of Windows Media Player [12] – allow for on-the-fly application controls (see image on the left).
Revised Start-menu
The Start-menu is also still present in Windows 7
and has been updated to display a dynamic list of frequently/recently visited Explorer locations. Other than that addition, it remains to be a familiar UI-element that’s probably occupied every bit of innovation it had left.
Closing Thoughts
While these small updates may seem of trivial importance, they are valuable usability improvements which were inspired by Windows’ competitor OS X. Yes, some may accuse Microsoft of plagiarism, but I don’t agree. What’s wrong with learning from the competition if it benefits the overall quality of your product? Apple has undoubtedly done this as well in the past: the Finder in OS X was originally inspired by Microsoft’s integrated search in Windows Vista (formerly Longhorn).
Windows 7 is looking pretty good so far.
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