The “Break it Down” Blog

Introduction

When the public beta of Windows 7 was announced, we did like everyone else and ran over to the Windows 7 site to download it (ISO Download Links: 32-bit, 64-bit).

After getting it installed and spending some time with it, our overall take away so far are the following things:

• Windows 7 is a “finished” Vista. It’s not very different from Vista, it’s just a completion of all the ideas that Vista tried to ship.
• File-operation performance is still the same as Vista SP1. So if you are like me and remember the days when “Delete” actually mean a file link was removed and not the new meaning of “Delete” which means “Update the shadow copy, update the NTFS file system metadata about the file state and keep track of the file then move it to the Recycle Bin” — you will still be disappointed.
• Some of the new concepts, like Libraries, presented in Windows 7 are interesting.
• IE 8 is still dog-slow to startup, it feels like I’m loading Office.
• IE 8 looks better, still does some stupid stuff and the UI flows for initial user setup is ridiculously confusing — try and setup a different search provider and “Accelerators” — right after you are done with the 3-page setup wizard, 5 tabs open on you.
• IE 8 has this new “Suggested Sites” feature — trying to pull a StumbleUpon?
  

The Desktop

For the most part the initial-desktop feels familiar, but you’ll see a few things that are new. On the bottom left you have the Start Menu, next to it you have the new Taskbar that is specific to Windows 7 — no backward-compatible Windows XP bar here with Quick Launch icons. Lastly, on the far right you have the new System Tray area of the taskbar followed on the extreme right with the intelligent “Show Desktop” button/pad that is a quick way to get at your desktop then restore your windows back to where they were when you are done.

Windows 7 is also gesture-enabled as seen in this Windows 7 video. One the gestures that looks the most helpful to me in a day-to-day working environment is the “shake window title bar to hide all windows except the one being dragged” and then the “shake window title bar again to show all windows” — it’s pretty slick.

The Taskbar

At first glance I expected the Windows 7 taskbar to just look different, but not actually act any different — I was wrong, I behaves quite a bit differently. Some of the new features are:

• Pinning is how you will expand the accessibility of your favorite folders, sites, music, movies, etc. You pin those items to the taskbar, they get associated with the context menu of one of the existing icons and are now accessible by right-clicking on the parent application to get it’s context menu for common actions or recently used resources:
  



• Similar to Mac OS X, the taskbar icon for the application indicates a Running or Not Running state. On Mac, they use an arrow or now a blue glowing ball below the icon, on Windows 7 (which I found confusing) the icon receives a slight button outline, as seen above and a layered effect to indicate when many app windows of the same kind are available. I suppose this is meant to indicate that the item can be “clicked” to restore the single app window or get a list of windows for that app that you can restore. We would prefer to see a better indicator like a glowing indicator and a better tiled effect by maybe scaling down the app icon and layering it a bit more clearly.
• You can still choose to not combine windows and get a much wider taskbar which may seem like a more classic look for folks used to Windows XP
  



• The preferences have been overhauled, no more compatibility bringing back the Windows XP taskbar, Windows 7 has a new taskbar and that is the way it is.
• The new System Tray is all about grouping. Grouping notifications and Grouping tray icons.
  

Overall the taskbar in Windows 7 beta seems like a fine change — just not an immediately obvious awesome one. The way grouped application windows are presenting can still be plenty confusing to novices and long time Windows XP users, and the auto-grouping of system tray icons, while space-saving, will confuse the sin out of people used to working with their applications in their system tray.

The Show/Hide Desktop button is also an odd choice for premier desktop placement like it is. It started in Windows XP when that icon made it to the Quick Launch buttons and since then has had premier billing space — besides some tech people, I was never aware of normal people making huge use of this button. When I’ve shown it to normal users, their reaction has always been to think that all their apps just got “closed”.

The Start Menu

For the most part the Start Menu is unchanged. One of the first things I noticed is that the Getting Started section of the menu has premier billing right at the top so anyone new to Windows 7 can always find atleast some information on how to get started.

We also noticed that the retarded “Shut Down, LOLZ, just kidding Hibernate akshtually” in Vista has been replaced by a simple, persistent-selection fly-out menu that simply lets you choose what the button does (Shut Down, Restart, Hibernate, Sleep, etc.) and then click the words to actually do it. We would have liked to see the associated common icon (and visual queue) next to the words in the fly out menu as well as the big button, but we’ll take what we can get.

The nice-ass fast search is still there and the right-hand side of the Start Menu is entirely untouched. We would really like to see this menu editable at some point thought — for example, to add your own Libraries under the existing ones (My Documents, etc.)

The new “Library” Concept

When Microsoft introduced the idea of “My” resources, back in Windows 95 or 98 (I forget which) it was a huge hit. Everyone understood what “My Documents” meant.

In Vista the concept was expanded with My Documents, My Videos, My Music, My Pictures and more personal resources like Downloads and Searches. For some reason, some of these resources weren’t worthy of the “My” naming scheme.

This whole time that the “My” resources were making the rounds in Windows, the problem permissions and moving away from a single, central, administrative user were starting to plague Microsoft. So there was the idea of say “My Documents” and then “Public Documents” or “Shared Documents” — pretty damn confusing.

With Windows 7, it looks like Microsoft is trying to settle this by defining a new thought (and implementation) paradigm for users to follow in the form of the “Library” design. The Library acts as a way to categorize a type of resource.

Out of the box Windows 7 ships with “Libraries” defined for Documents, Pictures, Music and Videos and in each of those libraries there are two folders associated with those types; a “My Documents” folder and a “Public Documents” folder — where ‘Documents’ is any of the types above.

On the outset this seems sort of similar to Vista. What is new in Windows 7 is the ability to define a new Library (type) and freely associate folders with it or even augment the existing Libraries (e.g. “Documents”) and associate additional folders with it (e.g. “C:\Work\Docs” and “C:\Personal\Docs”). The benefit here is that you can now leverage a targetted search across Libraries, even thought they might have 10 folders associated with them, without needing ot resort to a full-disk-search.

Once a new Library is created, you are asked to start associating folders with it so Windows can identify the contents of those folders as belonging to this Library. You can select from existing folders or create new ones.

The library concept overall is a pretty interesting one for technical people — I find it pretty neat. For average users, I find it entirely too complicated and have no idea what they will think of it — assuming they ever discover it.

After thinking about Libraries for a while, I am starting to think this is another feature that Computer Scientists designed to solve a problem they perceived users to have, where as Apple may have taken a different approach along the lines of first assessing “DO people actually have this problem?” and if they do then “How can we help them solve it in an intuitive way?”.

My gut tells me that the reason Microsoft developers put this in is because it gave them a way to do targetted search and index building which they perceived to be very important — I doubt they actually polled 100k Windows users from each reach of the world and a significant number of them said “I need to be able to add my own types of file collections to Windows”.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8)

We’ll be honest – we mostly hate IE 8. One of the primary complaints we have about IE8 is how sluggish it is to startup, how sluggish it is to operate and some of the stupid, unintuitive UI design approaches that the IE team takes with the browser. One of the first user-experiences you have with IE8, which you cannot skip if you hope to use it, is the retarded setup flow.

Besides this flow being much too long, any auxillary setup choices you make (search provider, accelerators or compataibility modes) all result in tabs, not pages in the Wizard, but browser tabs, to popup after you are done with the setup. So if you are not familiar with tabs, as soon as you are done with the IE8 setup wizard, BAM, you get 5 tabs all loaded in the browser behind you, assuming you know what to do with them.

Freaking retarded.

Did I mention that the search provider selection is done on a webpage? Because god knows that could have never been done in-app; nope.

While the piggish startup and stupid UI from IE7 is still there strong in IE8, we saw some new additions like task accelerators, “Suggested Sites” feature that seems to be something like StumbleUpon, some information about compatibility modes and more enhanced fishing protection.

Overall IE8 is a natural upgrade to IE7, but with IE7 being a piece of shit, it’s hard to say that IE8 is a “Great upgrade” — it’s still shit.

NOTE: I am currently not enamored with any browser right now. I don’t hate IE8 because it’s not Firefox, I hate IE8 because it rediculously confusing to use as a browser, sluggish and a memory hog. The simplicity of Google’s Chrome or Apple’s Safari are better from the user-simplicity perspective, but far from perfect themselves.

Memory and Performance

Overall Windows 7 does feel faster than Vista an on-average used a good bit of memory less than we saw on Vista. Nothing earth-shattering here, but instead of the OS getting slower and fatter with another Windows release, it does feel like Microsoft did some tightening on Windows 7 over what was Vista.

We grabbed a screenshot with the complete dump of memory usage for all the default system processes right after boot if you are interested.

The New Paint Application

This got it’s own section because Calculator, Notepad and Paint have been in Windows since Windows-time-began and have rarely seen updates with each release of Windows.

Paint saw a rewrite for Windows 7, including the now-celebrated Office 12 “ribbon” design along with an extensive set of editing tools that makes Paint a much better beginner graphical tool instead of immediately needing replacement if you wanted to do anything better than shooting screenshots in BMP format.

The overall ribbon design and cleaned up UI (even enhancements to the Menus as seen above) refined the Paint application into a really fluid and well designed experience.

WordPad

As reader Brian pointed out, WordPad did infact get a need facelift as well with the badass new Office “ribbon” design, check it out:

WordPad also has support for reading and writing the following formats, keeping it as a more handy tool with Office 12 getting deployed to more desktops:

• Rich Test
• OOXML
• ODT
• Plain Text
• ODF
• Plain Text – MS-DOS Format
• Unicode Text Document

Misc

While Paint got the first-rate treatment, we saw Calculator get a face lift and unfortunately Notepad continues to stay stuck in time.

Conclusion

Overall Windows 7 is looking… well… like what Vista was suppose to be. We can’t say this is “good” or “bad” or even if it’s a “must upgrade” or not, it depends entirely on how much you liked Vista.

If you like Vista just fine and don’t recognize any of the flaws that make people rant about how much it sucks, then you will love what’s coming in Windows 7. If you are not taken with Vista much at all, Windows 7 isn’t going to do anything substantially new for you that will melt your face off. If anything, with the introduction (again) of unsupported drivers and broken applications, we seriously doubt many people are going to go screaming towards Windows 7 and treat it very much like Vista all over again.

If you are a Mac OS X fan, stay put. There is nothing coming in Windows 7 that wasn’t mostly attempted in Vista already, so if Vista didn’t pull you over, OS X is still going to be the preferred choice for you most likely.

Update #1: Reader Brian asked about WordPad so we added a new section above for that.

Update #2: Reader dmdanleaf commented about the memory consumption of Windows 7 being much better than Vista and we confirmed that as well and added a section for that.

Windows 7 Screenshot Gallery