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Windows 7 Beta - Review

Daniel Fone | January 13, 2009 on 12:31 pm | In Articles | No Comments

After playing around with Microsoft’s new Windows 7 Beta this morning (download), I thought I’d review a few of the most blaring new features. Although I haven’t had the chance to go through my usual work flows, first impressions are important nonetheless.

Here’s three important changes and the difference they’ll make to you and me.

Taskbar

The Windows 7 Taskbar is, in short, the questionable lovechild of the Quick Launch bar, the traditional Taskbar and the Mac OS X Dock. It will take quite some adjusting.

From the engineering team:

Manage your windows with confidence

You can switch to the right window quickly without mistakes and effortlessly position windows the way you want them.

This goal spoke to the very heart of the taskbar—the ability to switch between windows. This challenged us with seeking a more predictable method of surfacing windows on the taskbar, meaningful use of text and a reliable method of helping people consistently switch with confidence. We’ve had text on the taskbar for years and Vista introduced thumbnails, but customer feedback informed us that there was room for improvement. Interestingly, we found inspiration in old features such as Windows XP’s window grouping and Alt-Tab’s visual layout of individual windows.

During our investigation, we also spent time looking into why a person would switch windows in the first place. Two interesting scenarios emerged—one in which she needs to get some information from a window (e.g. getting a phone number) and to interact with a window’s options (e.g. controlling background music). We wondered whether we could address these task switching cases in a novel way—by actually removing the need to switch completely.

Although I share their enthusiasm for the goals mentioned, my main gripe is that all of this is just mouse-candy. If you’re a heavy keyboard user this doesn’t do a lot either way. I’d like to see some more work on the alt-tab interface.

Conclusion: Appreciation of the new task bar will vary wildly based on personal habits and taste.

Libraries

The concept of libraries is something that I believe will become increasingly important with the explosion of home networking. In my current setup I am dual booting with vista and all of my files reside on my vista partition. In this environment, setting up access to all those files was as simple as navigating to my home directory on the vista partition and clicking “Add To Library”. As our files become more and more dispersed the Library is going to be darn handy for ease of access.

However, I anticipate most users will react negatively to the change. I was surprised to find that clicking on the “Daniel” folder on the Start Menu took me my libraries folder rather than my actual home directory. Not having easy access to my main folder could be a pain. Additionally, I suspect that people running a simple single-computer set up will find the libraries concept “gets in the way” a bit.

Conclusion: Great idea. Implementation needs refining.

Notification Area

Of all the changes I noticed this was my favourite. From the Engineering Windows 7 blog post on the Action Center:

Our effort to quiet the system and make sure you are in control took the following approach:

• Working across Windows 7 to reduce unnecessary notifications
• Put you in control of the notifications you see
• Creating Action Center with the following goals
  • Reduce the number of notification balloons sent to you and make the ones that are sent more meaningful
  • Provide a contextual way to address the issues with a single click
  • Reduce the user-interface clutter in the system to streamline solving system issues

I think the team have really hit the mark with this. The area was uncluttered, undistracting and already encouraging me to get back to work. With almost everything hidden away there’s no more glancing down there, checking for new mail or new IMs or something, anything, to distract you from what you’re doing. Merlin Mann would be proud.

Although I had nothing to really put the Action Center through its paces, it seemed helpful and simple. The idea of centralising all of the OS notifications is a sure win to start with, and the implementation was polished. Usually I’d expect to hunt around if I wanted to disable antivirus warnings, but the interface encouraged me to have it my way - one click and the warning was gone forever.

Applications that require quick access from the notification area can still be shown, and the configuration is obvious and simple. I expect few real complaints about this change.

Conclusion: Good change, productivity+