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Windows 7 Walkthrough, Boot Video and Impressionsfrom Gizmodo: Top by Wilson Rothman
Like Elvis in '68, Microsoft is itching for a "comeback," and Windows 7 is the perfect excuse. In fact, this week in LA at the Professional Developers Conference,Windows 7 officially shoved Vista aside. Having suffered through theoften deserved criticisms of that ill-fated OS installment, Microsoft'speople are thrilled to tears to be able to talk about something(anything!) else. On Sunday, they took journalists through a lively7-hour orientation on Win 7, then handed off a Dell XPS M1330 loadedwith pre-beta Build 6801. Thankfully for the overworked,underappreciated developers at Redmond, it's surprisingly stable, andits look and feel already puts Vista to shame.
Here's awalkthrough of the system I'm looking at, some videos showing its basicperformance, and then shots of more interface and system details demoedat PDC that will show up in the first beta build.
It's reallyhard to piece together everything I experienced at the seminar, so I'mgoing to start with the real, actual improvements I see in the systemI've been fiddling with, and then expand into the more rhetorical stuff.
WHAT I'VE ACTUALLY SEEN
For starters, even the early build of Windows 7 feels like a fast,stable environment. There's a lot going on behind the scenes to makethe OS more usable, one monumental improvement being how video memoryis allocated for unseen windows. (Hint: It's not.) The resultis a highly responsive machine that gets decent battery life. Thoughspecs aren't out yet, Windows boss Steve Sinofsky confirmed that itcould run on systems with just 1GB of RAM.
As you might expect, I'm already seeing smarter user-interface decisions. Here are three great examples:
Choosing a Wi-Fi network now takes just one click, straight from the system tray. How much of a no-brainer was that? Instead of the clicking on the insulting "networks are available" pop-up, you actually get the available networks.Speaking of the system tray, it now gives you more complete controlover what you see—instead of just hide or show, you can get it todisplay particular notifications, as you see here:
The dreaded User Account Control lives up to its name with more control.Yes, this slider is how you will be able to reduce the number of peskypop-up warnings, eliminating all the ones that come from Windows, forinstance. There are four tiers of security in total, so basically twosettings between Vista's tell-me-everything and don't-tell-me-squatmodes.
The sidebar is dead—the gadgets roam free!Why should keeping one or two gadget/widgets alive mean sacrificing afifth of your clickable screen? Now when you add gadgets, they stack upon the right, but you are at liberty to put them wherever you want, andthey're always there, hiding under your windows. This is an idea I wishApple would incorporate too. Speaking of Apple and things hiding underwindows, there's an upcoming "peek" feature that I will show below inthe up-coming section.
There are some other new interfaceelements that might be quite useful. Microsoft is sort of the oppositeof Apple when it comes to organizing your media files: Apple helps youput them all in one place, while Microsoft says it's okay to leave themscattered around. Up until now, though, it was hard for Microsoft'ssoftware to keep track of everything. But there are two new tools, onelocal and one networked, that will help you track all kinds of mediafiles.
Libraries let you clump together same-type content no matter where it is on the system.If you have pictures in one set of folders, and other pictures inanother, and you damn well aren't going to merge the folder, you canstill track them together by adding them both to the Photo Library.Libraries even show the contents of local external storage drives youadd to them, though when you unmount the external drive, Library offersto ditch its folder.
HomeGroup is a re-do of classic workgroup networking, only with the home in mind.The feature will only work on Windows 7, so to test it I'd need asecond loaner unit. Still, having set up a basic HomeGroup, at leastthe initial interface and Microsoft's literature suggest that this willsimplify viewing content across multiple machines, and sharing printersand other products. Let's hope so, because it could also be one ofthose classic "Why won't this work for me????" networking wizards. (Oris it just me who gets those?)
Here are some other shots from the pre-beta unit I'm looking at, including:
• Ribbon interface now appearing on WordPad and Paint (and nothing else so far)
• Solutions Center that will soon be re-branded as Action Center
• New fast-launching "lightweight" Windows Media Player
• Subtler, but still cool, improvements to the main Windows Media Player
• Windows information page, so you can see the attributes of the system
VIDEO
I shot the following videos to get you some immediate sense of whatit's like to use the Windows 7 laptop, but though in some instances itis compared to a reasonably similar system that is also fairly clean,this isn't any kind of test. It is interesting to note, though, thatwhile the Win 7 boots way faster here (even with the other computer'sBIOS startup out of the way), it actually takes longer than the othersystem to shut down. But yes, these are totally unscientific, just anice thing to observe:
Totally Unscientific Video of Boot-Up Time
Totally Unscientific Video of Shut-Down Time
Super Scientific Video of New Window Resizing Feature
WHAT MICROSOFT IS PROMISING
The sad thing about the build that Microsoft handed out is that it'smissing a lot of the neat stuff that they showed off at the conference,and have been hinting at elsewhere. Though we did see a lot of thisstuff running on systems, we couldn't take photos or video—not even ofthe slides.
User Interface Improvements In the last videoabove, I say more UI to come, and I mean "in the beta." Here are thenew promised UI effects—all of which make Vista's Flip3D look like theOS equivalent of the infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner.
WhileI'm a fan of the mouse hot-corner "Peek" function in the above photo,that lets you see gadgets or icons that windows could be obscuring, thebiggest improvement to the Windows UI is probably in the Taskbar. It'sgone through quite a few evolutions already, but this latest one ispretty great. Click on an app, and contextual menus pop up, giving youoptions like opening recent documents. The Taskbar can pull informationthat's already part of the program, so new apps don't need specialprogramming to work here. Another aspect of the new Taskbar will be thepreview feature, which will show you floating glimpses of hiddenwindows. (I'm still hazy on this one, so we'll have to revisit it oncethe beta comes out.)
Other improvements come in thenatural-interface category: You can now write in math equations. (Ithink this is cool, even though it's been a very long time since I'veactually written out any math more complex than a bar tab.)
Windows7 will have great native touch and multitouch benefits too—none shownhere unfortunately: Menus subtly enlarge when tapped with a fingerinstead of a mouse cursor; the mouse cursor disappears when the fingertouches the screen; and iPhone/Surface-style pinching and stretchingare now part of the OS.
Cool Device Tricks
As agadget lover like most of you, one of my favorite parts of theconference was the device discussion. I am happy to report that, forstarters, Windows 7 is itself a more aggressive media playback system,natively handling both AAC and H.264 as well as DivX and Xvid withoutthird-party download.
It'salso a DLNA 1.5 system with some neat tricks up its sleeve. WindowsMedia Player has a "play to" feature (at left) that you can reach viathe Taskbar—one click and you can pull up a song, start playing, andeven jump to the next.
But here's the coolness: You can use thatsame feature to pull songs from other places on the network. And youcan send the song to play through a Sonos or other compatible player onthe network, rather than through your dinky laptop speakers. You caneven, theoretically, if everything's visible on the net, pull DRM-freeAAC files from a Mac, and tell it to play on the Sonos, re-encoding iton the fly if the Sonos doesn't support AAC. In this case, thecompatibility is only as good as the interface, and the interface isonly as good as the compatibility, so I am eager to see how this isexecuted.
A nice servicey program for interfacing with gadgets and peripherals is called Device Stage. Yesterday in comments,it got maligned a bit as the new PlaysForSure, but that's a branding itdoesn't deserve. Not yet, at least. The system allows camera, phone,MP3 player and printer makers to create mini interfaces for theirdevices. The products appear in the Taskbar when connected, with theirown pop-up menus of activities, like offloading pics or uploadingmusic. In addition to the pop-up Taskbar menu, each device will haveits own pop-up page with links to ordering supplies or downloading themanual in PDF format, plus a photorealistic icon that will appearwherever the device is referred to.
ForDevice Stage to work, the third-party brands will have to provide theirown content, but it will get served throughout the world by Microsoft.If there is no Device Stage present, you get the basic AutoPlay pop-upthat we've seen for ages. When I asked Microsoft how aggressive theywould be in getting companies on board with Device Stage, they saidthat the companies themselves were excited about the chance to do it.As someone who was bitterly let down by PlaysForSure, I can tell you,this ain't the same.
I realize I covered far more of theexternal bits and far less of the internal guts than some of you folkswish—nor I even touched on the new Windows Live and IE8 features, bothof which are somewhat visible already—but it's early yet, and while Iwill always focus on usability, there will be a lot more to look at inthe coming months as the builds get richer and the testing is morereflective of the final product. As far as exact dates go, Microsoft isreluctant to carve anything too deep into granite, but can you blamethem?
For now, we should just be happy that Windows 7 appears tobe on the right track. You can almost look at consumer-levelWindows—that is, 95, 98, Me, XP, Vista and Win 7—like the first six Star Trek movies: They pretty reliably alternate between crap and quality. All I can say is, screw the Final Frontier, and hellloooo, Undiscovered Country. That, and thanks to Microsoft for talking about Windows 7 early and often. It helps. Just don't screw it up! [Windows 7 News on Giz] |
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发表于 29-10-2008 04:14:43
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