Microsoft gave media and developers a first look at Windows 7 last month at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, and first impressions are mostly positive. The company appears to have learned from some of the misfires in Windows Vista, and has taken steps to improve the user experience.
Take, for example, the much-reviled User Access Control (UAC). Users who were scared out of their socks the first time Vista's screen went black and then slowly asked if they really wanted to perform a potentially dangerous task such as installing software will be relieved to know that, although UAC is still alive and well, they now have more choices as to how it works. Now, instead of a hard-to-find option that only lets you turn it off, there's a Control Panel applet with a slider that allows you to pick the level of UAC, from full-bore nagging as in Vista to completely off, with intermediate levels providing limited protection.
Another feature that read better than it worked was the Sidebar, a dedicated area for gadgets (small applications like clock, calendar or weather reports) that only worked well on widescreen monitors with real estate to spare. The Sidebar is dead in Windows 7, and gadgets can be placed anywhere on the desktop.
While we're looking at the desktop, cast your eyes down to the Taskbar. First, have a peek at the bottom right, where lives the System Tray, that area showing the clock and a herd of icons placed by applications such as antivirus and Microsoft Update. Under Vista, either only the apps in use show, and you click an arrow to check the others, or else you can show everything. There's nothing in the middle. In Windows 7, two things have changed. First, there's a blank space to the right of the last icon – more on that later. Second, you can choose which icons are displayed, which ones you can show on demand, and which you never want to see. It can eliminate a ton of clutter. You can also control which applications are allowed to send messages via the System Tray, to control annoying pop-up windows.
Next, the Taskbar proper has had some renovation. The Quick Launch bar (those icons to the right of the Start button that let you run applications) is gone. But before you wail that you use it all the time, contemplate its replacement. Now you place icons for the programs you use most often on the Taskbar itself, in the order you want to see them. When you put the cursor over one of those icons, if the app is running it will show you thumbnails of the documents it has open; click on one of those documents, and you'll see a full-screen preview. You can even close a document from its thumbnail. Right-click on an icon, and you get what Microsoft is now calling a JumpList – the context menu on steroids. Now it shows you recently used files or recently visited websites as well as the expected actions. The JumpList also works on the Start Menu.
With more and more homes installing computer networks, Microsoft spent some time making their operation easier with the concept of the Homegroup, a collection of computers and devices attached to your home network; Windows 7 automatically finds and configures them for you. If you bring your domain-joined Windows 7 work PC home and connect it to the network, it will even automatically change your default printer to the one on the home network, and put it back to normal when you hit the office network the next day.
