Windows 7
Seven. The number since ancient times and through many cultures and religions has meant perfection. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that Microsoft has finally gotten things right with Windows 7.
I downloaded the beta version on Wednesday night, but due to work I just haven’t had time to mess with it until today. That said, it has been worth the wait, because my experience with it today has been nothing less than spectacular, and I am so pleased and impressed with the results that I have decided to adopt it as my primary operating system on a full time basis.
The blogging world has been ripe with compliments and support for Windows 7, praising Microsoft for listening to customers and providing some much needed improvement and innovation, and well—I’m not gonna do any differently here. Maybe it’s because Vista was so horrible, so worthless, and so annoying for so many people (myself included) that truly anything would be an improvement. Maybe, though, it really is because Microsoft has taken some initiative and listened to the feedback on Vista and done their damnedest to get things right this time around.
I’m very, very picky about my operating systems. My first computer ran Windows 3.1 which was great for its time, but Windows 95 was my first beta experience, and it went remarkably well too. Windows 98 was alright, but not great and certainly buggy as hell, but they got things stabilized with 98 Second Edition. Still, Windows 98 just didn’t suit me very well, so I quickly jumped ship to the NT platform with the Beta 1 release of Windows 2000 sometime around December of 1998. Windows 2000 for me was perfect at the time. I loved it. Ran it on my desktop and my server until 2005 when I finally upgraded to XP SP2 on my desktop and Server 2003 SP1 on my server.
It should come as no surprise then that I absolutely hated Windows Millennium Edition (aka Moron Edition), and I really wasn’t too keen on Windows XP initially either. In fact, I swore off Windows XP until SP2 was released while I was at Muskingum College. It was only because of a need to push out SP2 to the campus that I finally broke down and tested the hell out of it and adopted it for full time use. Since then, I’ve tried every public release of Windows Vista and despite continual improvement, I’ve hated it since day one. Things just didn’t work very well, and they definitely weren’t usable to anyone other than a technological toddler. I still refuse to even consider using Vista on a regular basis and anything I can do to steer people away from it, well, all the better.
Windows 7, however, is another story. I’m sold on it. I’m truly convinced that this is the way Windows was meant to be. Click on to see why…
Once you login and see the desktop, the first thing you’ll probably notice (besides the fish) is the new start menu bar. Let’s take a look at it:
1) Preview windows as you hover over icons. Yeah, that’s right. Live-updating snapshots of your open windows for that program.
2) Inactive, Pinned programs are shown with no highlighting, no outlining. They work just like the old Quick Launch toolbar… but…
3) When you click them, they load the program and gain the outline as shown with Firefox. Multiple windows gain multiple "notches" to the right of the icon (up to 4, as shown with Firefox and Messenger).
4) The active window is Paint. Notice it gets a nice highlight and the outline.
5) As you hover over icons, a nice piece of eye-candy is that the highlight is based on the icon’s most dominant color… For example, the Messenger icon hovers blue-green while Firefox hovers orange.
6) You can drag-and-drop any one of those icons to reorder them on the start menu, so at long last you can keep your windows in the order you like them! This also applies to system tray icons by the clock.
7) Grouping can be left enabled, or turned off, or just limited to when the start menu is "full", plus you can enable "small icons" mode if you are obsessive compulsive about screen real-estate.
8) You can make the start menu any color shade you want, but I obviously like black.
9) Right click on an icon, and it will give you a list of options that you can do with that program (shown in the center image). They made the same feature appear on the Start Menu using the > arrow next to the icon (see right image).
10) It only took me 2 minutes to realize how much I loved pinning apps to the task bar this way… everything I run all the time is right there, and it STAYS right there. The more I open, the more it stays there and the more useful the preview windows are.
They have also done something innovative in how you handle multiple windows (and needing to get to the desktop or see other windows):
If you notice the transparent outlines in the images above, that is window gesturing, and it has a few major purposes.
1) Moving a window to the far left or right will allow you to “tile” two windows so that they are perfect for side-by-side viewing and comparison.
2) Moving a windows to the top edge of the screen will maximize it.
3) Moving windows away from those three edges restores it back to its original size.
4) Moving your mouse (or an object) to the lower right corner of the screen will allow you to quickly focus in on the Desktop. Perfect for moving files or creating shortcuts to content that you can retrieve later.
I’ll be documenting more about Windows 7 this week, time permitting, but suffice it to say—Windows 7 genuinely is great version of Windows. It is beautiful. It is usable. It is functional. It is user and tech friendly.