I should have started my Windows 7 coverage with this article instead of divulging more exciting User Interface stuff. Before we get overwhelmed with even more Microsoft news, I think it’s important to get the essentials straight before we go drifting off daydreaming about geeky OS fluff.
Talk of the day:
I just got my hands on the Windows 7 build (6801) that was handed to PDC attendees a while back. It’s the M3 release I wrote about in my latest article on the Windows 7 UI. I’m currently installing it in a virtual machine and will be installing it on a laptop in a few days to a hands-on view and get a feel for what it’s like.
I’ll report back soon.
(click thumbnails for full-view)
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.
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.
It certainly seems so from the screenshots that have been popping up all over the internet lately. A lot of them are most likely souped up for conceptional purposes, but one thing certain returns steadily: the click-wheel-like interface. Usually the Windows Logo Orb is seated in the center of a wheel with numerous icons surrounding it. These images are by no means official, nor were they acknowledgded by Microsoft.
They’re certainly fancy looking, though I wonder about the practicalities of it. Translucencies in the user interface as a whole seem to be coming back, too, sometimes turning out nearly transparant, other times more opaque.
Earlier today I came across an article of Paul Thurrott’s regarding the apparently new kernel work Microsoft has been doing in preparation for Windows 7. He points out that MinWin is not a new technology, but merely a continuation of the compartmentalization MS had developed for Vista and Windows Server 2008. Since this story caught on on many news sites and blogs alike (mine included), I thought I’d set the record straight, whereas I too pushed the publish button without double-checking the facts.
Read all about the true MinWin over at Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows.
Windows Vista has merely been out for a year and there’s already talk of Windows 7.
Actually, I hadn’t expected this to happen to quickly, but it’s positive that Microsoft is letting people in on there scheme. Last week, Eric Traut discussed Windows 7 for the very first time, along with the core kernel of future Windows versions, which is called MinWin. The latter is - according to Traut - actually very streamlined, in contrast with Windows Vista. MinWin occupies 25MB of disk space and nearly 40MB of RAM. It doesn’t have a graphical interface though, at this point it’s only usable as a text prompt. Furthermore, there are no commercial plans with this kernel, as it’ll only be used to spawn applications based on Windows (and in the end Windows 7 itself).
The original video was pretty lengthy (about an hour) and pretty dull, too. Long Zheng from istartedsomething.com gracefully clipped out the interesting part, about Windows 7, MinWin and previous versions of Windows - all the way back to Windows 1.0.
A pretty slick ASCII bootscreen.