What the coming year prepares for us: Windows 7

On Monday, within the framework of the Professional Developers Conference 2008, Microsoft showed those who wanted a preliminary version of the following OS: Windows 7. We have already heard about it, and the news comes almost every hour from different parts of the Internet, so I decided to prepare for the Habrakhabr readers a kind of selection of the most interesting what awaits us.



Obvious is the fact that Microsoft has done a great job at the pre-beta stage, managing to integrate into the OS and multitouch, and many graphical “beautiful” and “usefulness”, like a function similar to Mac expo . In addition, the new operating system works on netbooks with a processor of 1 GHz and gigabytes of RAM. But it’s still too early to talk about this: let's see where the development of the “small-scale” will lead this time.

• One big news is the new taskbar , which traded text for icons and includes so-called. “Jump lists”, through which you can access the settings and options of the application. For example: by right-clicking on the Media Player icon, you can select playlists. Engadget also described the ability to make all windows transparent (pointing the mouse at the taskbar) as “super cool”.
• All widgets and gadgets are now shown directly on the desktop - the idea of ​​the sidebar was killed. This, without doubt, makes sense for owners of netbooks and laptops, whose screen width is limited. In addition, making the desktop transparent - only widgets are visible , which, of course, is quite convenient.
• Resizing windows now takes place in parallel with their movement around the desktop, in semi-automatic mode. Dragging a window at the top edge of the screen — the window will turn around, dragging down — take the original size, to the right or left edge — reduce the window to 50% of the original size.
• The tray now displays only what you said "show", everything else is hidden.
• User Account Control settings are now welded much better than before - easy to set access levels for different applications.
• The demo multitouch interface (video below) was shown on the HP TouchSmart PC and impressed many, despite the abundance of traditional exclamations like: “Who needs this? / It will quickly become obsolete.” When using a multi-touch controller, the Start menu becomes a quarter larger (in order not to have to poke your little finger with great precision), all applications support automatic scrolling. There is, moreover, a giant touch-pad, which has the function of “prediction” (as I understand it - by principle it looks like T9). All these features can be excellent, but you can only verify this in practice, which means you have to wait for the release.
• There are also rumors that Microsoft wants to force Windows 7 to be netbook-friendly, and little evidence of this was given on the PDC: Steve Sinofsky (Steve Sinofsky) was holding a laptop of an unknown manufacturer with a 1 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM (he By the way, it was very similar to Eee, but Ars Technika is leaning towards the VIA Nano variant, since it is one of the few netbooks with such a processor). It was noted that after loading the OS, half of the RAM is free.
• But if you look in the opposite direction of performance, then Windows 7 promises to support all hardware, up to 256 CPUs.
• Managing multiple monitors is now much easier, and setting up the settings for the projector is generally one hot button. Remote desktop also underwent massive changes.
• Windows Media Center has also been reworked - now it is very much like the Zune interface. Added a new Mini Guide when watching a video and a very beautiful Music Wall album artwork screensaver, appearing while listening to audio.
• All developers received disks with pre-beta Windows 7, and the finished beta is expected early next year.
• Not a single word about the approximate release date, except memorized "3 years after Vista."

I apologize for the quality of the video, did the Spaniard with shaking hands.





For the last two videos thanks rogix



via Engadget via Ars Technika