Windows 7 first looks (Prebeta)
I’ve been playing with Windows 7 for the last few days, and I’m liking what I’m seeing which so far seems to be a lot of UI polishing. I know there is more going on under the hood than that, but I haven’t dug deep to try and figure out what. There are lots of little things that when switching back to Vista you notice stick out.
Performance has been surprisingly fantastic, it seems just as quick or quicker than Vista SP1 (my machine is beefy-ish, Intel Core2Quad Q6600@2.4ghz, 4gb DDR2 800mhz, 512mb 9600GT). After installing Win7, I had no need to download/install any new drivers – sound, LAN and video drivers were all picked up perfectly. The video drivers weren’t just “Generic Display Device” drivers either, I was able to install Far Cry 2 and play that perfectly smooth without updating/changing any settings!
Back to the UI, there have been a few changes to the Start Menu, all of which feel more like polishing/evolution than the major changes/revolution we saw with Vista. A great example of polishing the UI is that searching in the Start Menu now expands the width of the results to take up all the Start Menu.
Another nicety is each app in the Start Menu can have a list of recently opened documents, so you can launch the app directly at the file.
Progress windows now show their progress as the background on the Start Bar/Super bar, which again isn’t a must have feature but is pretty and nice to have.
The “preview tab” has made a return in many dialogs, it works well now.
There are various changes to Media Center as well, it now has a more Zune-like look to it (in both the main menu and the new “music wall” visualization for music).
However my favourite part of the new UI so far is the new “Super Bar” (enabled with the bluebadge patch). It’s hard to show off how smooth it is with pictures, so I’ve thrown up a screencast on Viddler (using Community Clips, which seems to limit video to 256 colours)
UI aside, there are a few noticable additions/changes. “Libraries” (Collections of like file types that can span multiple folders/machines) are an interesting way to sort/find types of files, but even more interesting is the ability to share them so easily on the new networking concept (for Windows), HomeGroups. The combination of HomeGroups, Libraries and auto-network-discovery will be fantastic for less computer literate people wanting to share files between computers; in theory Libraries from other computers in the same HomeGroup should appear automatically in Explorer.
I think the biggest surprise with Windows 7 so far has been that…Paint is now..useable?! It has been redesigned with the Ribbon UI (which makes its way into a few programs such as Wordpad), and fleshed out with many “new” features (aka, ones standard to any image editing application). Sure, it won’t be taking Photoshop down, but when you need to do basic editing (resizing, cropping, rotating, etc) it actually looks to be a contender!
[...] I mentioned when I first looked at the prebeta/b6801 of Windows 7, the Start Menu itself has also undergone a few changes, seemingly all for the [...]