Windows 7 thoughts

I’ve been playing around with the first beta for Windows 7 for a few weeks now, and I’ve got some thoughts on it.

A little background: I’m primarily a Mac user, and I haven’t used Vista much at all. I’ve been running W7 in a VMWare image (because that’s where Windows belongs and lately Windows has been stupid about running on my hardware). That’s that.

Running in a VM with 2GB of memory I have to say it runs brilliantly fast. IE8 is nice enough, though I find the menus incredibly difficult to navigate. Paint has been revamped with the new Ribbon interface (world asks “why?”), which although questionable, it still works pretty well. Paint has become a lot more feature rich lately — finally Microsoft seems to have realized it’s actually a pretty widely-used tool!

Haven’t tried any games on it.

Taskbar: Here’s where things get interesting. I’ll start with the Notification area, which has been revamped greatly. Instead of being clustered with a billion icons, it arranges itself perfectly and lets you configure what shows up and what doesn’t. And it works. It works well. It works like it always should have.

As for the rest of the bar, for starters you can finally re-arrange items in the taskbar (why this took so long is beyond me) but it works great. You items are now arranged by app, represented by a single app icon. This is also where your quick-launch items go. So allegedly it’s a lot like the Dock on Mac OS X. I’d say that’s a fair assumption. It works a bit differently, but they offer mostly the same functionality. The new taskbar will also show you window previews for each app, as you mouse over its icon. A nice touch.

So while I would say it’s borrowed things from the Dock, it’s not in a bad way. It’s all been implemented in a good Windows fashion and it doesn’t feel out of place. Very natural. I think it’s a great step forward in terms of usability. One thing they have to fix is the way running/nonrunning apps are shown. They all appear in the taskbar, with only a tiny, subtle indicator denoting a running app (a little outline, very faint). If they fix this, it will be mostly perfect.

So it’s generally a solid beta. No UAC bullcrap everywhere. It feels pretty refined. Good on them.