The 7 Coolest New Features in Windows 7

The New Windows Taskbar

The Taskbar, the strip along the bottom of the Windows desktop that shows active applications, has been redesigned. Now, it feels and behaves a lot more like Mac OS X’s dock. You can reorder applications by dragging them. You can further customize the Taskbar by dropping in icons that launch your most-used apps. And, you can see live thumbnails of what’s inside the window of each open application right there in the Taskbar. If you have multiple tabs open in your browser, you’ll see each browser tab in its own thumbnail, and you can jump straight to the tab you want. If you’re listening to a song or watching a movie, hovering over the thumbnail will bring up cover art and controls to pause or resume playback.

Jump Lists

These context-sensitive menus are available for each program in your Taskbar and your Start Menu. Click on the programs’ name or icon to get a list of the most recent or frequently-requested tasks. For example, you can click on the Internet Explorer icon in the Taskbar and see your recent browsing history or choose from a list of your most-visited websites. Or, click on your MS Word in the Start Menu and see a Jump List of your most recently viewed documents.

Aero’s New Moves

Microsoft first debuted the glossy, animated Aero user interface environment in Windows Vista. At the time, many noted that several visual cues within Aero seemed borrowed from the Mac OS X desktop. Aero returns in Windows 7 revamped and pumped-up. One of the new enhancements, Aero Peek, seems to borrow from Mac OS X’s own animated window manager, Expose. Hover your mouse over the far right side of your Windows Taskbar and your active windows become transparent, exposing the desktop.

The new Snap feature lets you expand and maximize windows simply by dragging them to different edges of the desktop. Drag a window’s top edge to the top of the screen to maximize it, and drag it away to restore it to its original size. Line up any window’s edge to either side of the desktop and that window will snap to fill up that half of the screen. Do the same with another window on the other side and you’ve got two equal-sized windows on either side of the screen.

Unified Search

The old Start Menu gains a greater amount of utility in Windows 7. The clunky nested menus are gone, and they’ve taken with them all the guesswork involved in finding your favorite apps. A search box in the Start Menu offers lightning-quick suggested search results as you type. Search extends into contacts, e-mail subjects, names of documents, playlists, song titles and even the names of individual settings in your Windows Control Panel. It also learns from you, bringing the things you use the most to the top of the results.

Fewer Annoying Pop-ups

Remember the famously intrusive User Account Control system in Vista? The feature that constantly displays yes/no prompts asking you to approve system status updates, butting in all too often like a nagging nanny? How could you forget, right? As expected, Microsoft has scaled back the pop-ups for all users. Furthermore, advanced users with admin rights can set a slider based on their own preferences. That way, only the most important messages get through, and notifications for things like the built-in firewall can be disabled.

HomeGroups

Put multiple Windows 7 PCs on a single network and they’ll all find and connect to one another, forming a HomeGroup. Users can then browse all of the media stored across the multiple PCs as though they were all on the same hard drive. Sharing within any folder can be disabled for security reasons. You also get location-aware printing — click print and the system will pick the printer closest to you.

Device Stage

Windows 7’s device manager gives you a single window for interacting with your various gadgets. Plug in your cameras, MP3 players and printers, and you’ll be able to see all of them listed in the Device Stage window. Click on a device to get details on its status — battery charge, available storage space, the time and date of your last sync and so on. From within the same interface, you can sync it, manage your photos, music or ringtones you have stored on it, or any other device-specific task. We haven’t tested Device Stage, so we don’t know how well it will work with iPhones and iPods, but for cameras and Windows Mobile smartphones, it looks very cool.

- by: Michael Calore

Source: www.webmonkey.com

Microsoft Releases Windows 7 Beta as a Free Download

LAS VEGAS -- Microsoft's excitable CEO Steve Ballmer showed off Windows 7 -- the slick, fast, user-friendly successor to the much-maligned Windows Vista -- and said it will be available as a public beta on Friday (January 9).

Unveiled by an intense Ballmer during his keynote address on the eve of CES 2009, Windows 7 will offer better performance on underpowered machines such as netbooks, support for multitouch interfaces, and simplified home networking.

Ballmer said that this would be the "best version of Windows ever" and pointed out features that implicitly acknowledged the problems with Windows Vista.

"We are putting in all the right ingredients -- simplicity, reliability and speed -- and working hard to get it right and to get it ready," said Ballmer.

Ballmer's keynote is his first at the big, prestigious CES show since the departure of Microsoft founder Bill Gates a year ago. He showed no signs of stage fright, bounding onstage in a maroon pullover, rubbing his hands together and grinning eagerly.

Microsoft is also eager to get Windows 7 into people's hands given the negative reaction to Windows Vista, which was widely panned. Released in 2007, Vista annoyed many customers with its hunger for computing resources and its seemingly incessant security notifications. Those notifications were such a defining characteristic of Vista that they were even satirized in Apple commercials. Despite the criticisms, Microsoft sold 20 million copies of Vista in the first month, and there are now an estimated 300 million users of Vista worldwide.

According to Ballmer, Windows 7 will be available to developers immediately, and to the general public on Friday, January 9. It will be a free download from Microsoft's site.

Windows 7 has been widely anticipated since developers got the first glimpse of it at a Microsoft conference earlier this year. Microsoft promises that the new OS will have faster startup and shutdown times, fewer security alerts, and will provide better power management leading to improved battery life on laptops.

Microsoft showed off Windows 7's support for multitouch interfaces, simplified home networking, and easier management of peripheral devices such as cell phones and digital cameras.

In addition, the OS will have an updated Taskbar, new animated desktop effects, context-sensitive menus and a smarter desktop search tool. And it will be svelte enough to run on a netbook with as little as 1GB of RAM and a 1GHz processor, Microsoft has promised.

This is the only public beta of Windows 7, a company spokesperson confirmed. The company did not announce the exact date of Windows 7's commercial release.

Windows 7 is only one part of Microsoft's three-pronged strategy to provide software for what Ballmer called the "three screens" -- PCs, phones and TVs.

"I believe windows will remain at the center of people's technological solar system," Ballmer said, touting the company's efforts in the mobile, online, and home entertainment markets.

For instance, Ballmer announced that its online software suite, Windows Live Essentials, will be coming out of beta as of tomorrow.

The company announced several Windows Live partnerships, including one with Facebook, which will allow Facebook users to share content that they've uploaded into their Facebook accounts with their Windows Live accounts. Similar interconnectivity already exists between Windows Live and Flickr.

Also, Dell will be preloading Windows Live Essentials on its computers, replacing the Google Toolbar.

Ballmer promised a new version of Microsoft's OS for smartphones, Windows Mobile, to come in the first quarter of 2009. This OS will include support for Adobe Flash-based apps, including the video players used on many sites, such as YouTube.

After Ballmer, Microsoft's Robbie Bach took the stage to tout the company's Xbox 360 and Xbox Live products. According to Bach, 28 million Xbox consoles have been sold to date, and there are 17 million active users of the Xbox Live service.

The company will also be releasing two new Halo games in 2009, including Halo Wars, a strategy game that will ship on March 3, and Halo 3: Orbital Drop Shock Trooper.

Wrapping up the keynote, Ballmer and another Microsoft executive gave a demo of a futuristic multitouch application for students that made use of many technologies from the company's R&D labs, including automatic document summarizing and highlighting of key points, organizing notes along topical timelines, and collaborating with other students on a Microsoft Surface-type touch-sensitive table. They also showed what they said was a prototype flexible display, although the image shown on the bendable plastic did not seem particularly dynamic.

Source: www.wired.com

Codename: Vienna (Windows 7) - Successor to Windows Vista

Windows 7, (formerly codenamed Blackcomb and later Vienna) is the working name for the next major version of Microsoft Windows and the successor to Windows Vista. Microsoft has announced that it is "scoping Windows 7 development to a three-year timeframe", and that "the specific release date will ultimately be determined by meeting the quality bar."

Windows 7 will ship in both client and server versions with the client versions available in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. The server version of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, is 64-bit only.

Little is known about the Windows 7 feature set, though public presentations from company officials have disseminated information about some features. Leaked information from people to whom the Milestone builds (M1, M2 and M3) of Windows 7 were provided also provides some insight into the feature set.

Windows 7 is expected to be released by 2009 or near January 2010.