A first look at Windows 7's UI

Fixing the UI before fixing the foundation is a little like fixing the water stained walls of your house before fixing the leak in the roof that caused it.

When is MS going to do away with the registry?

I think it looks very promising. I like the idea of gesture based window resizing, but am worried it will be annoying in practice though.

Finally, we can re-order items in the task-bar!

The things they are changing about their UI are not caused by any foundational issues. It's just bad UI design being worked on and not related to bad fundamental architecture.



I'd love for them to do this, but it would cause a lot of complaints. Vista was a foundational release, and due to the foundational improvements it made a lot of legacy problems. Doing away with the registry is a good idea, but would cause too many legacy problems for Microsoft to consider right now.

That's the only part I really like about what I've seen so far.

I agree the registry is bad, but I don't think it necessarily needs to be done away with. I think the registry is fine for Operating System settings. The biggest mistake with the registry IMHO was opening it up to developers, and then encouraging them to store application configuration there, as opposed to in separate .ini files.

Microsoft no longer encourages developers to use the registry, and instead prefers application write to users space in the Application Data folder (/Users/Nick/AppData/Local) However, this doesn't solve the storage location problem global applications, that everyone can use.

As Robert says, killing it would introduce huge legacy issues. If they were to do this, perhaps they could implement a hidden layer that redirect registry hits to a global user space? This is similar to how programs that write to the /program files/ directory were handled.

Well, the new Windows UI looks almost as good as Mac OS X did when it came out several years ago

I know I know, I'm a Mac weenie. But I spent over a decade working on Windows systems, so now I have to give equal time to the Mac.

Apparently there is alot under the hood as well. It actually runs faster then Vista does. It has better memory management, such as not allocating GPU resources to a minimized application. It also provides better battery life.

However, what sounds the most intersting to me, is it detects if an application crashes multiple times, and will try to determine what is happening to cause the crash, and if it can run the app differently to prevent the application from crashing. Interesting Idea.

http://gizmodo.com/5070219/giz-explains-why-windows-7-will-smash-vista

Okay, so now that I've seen some more videos about windows 7, I actually think it looks really cool.

The windows taskbar looks like it will take some time to get used to (it's more 'mac' like) but looks like it works well. The 'Peek' feature I think I would use ALOT. The only thing that worries me is if I have 10 tabs open in firefox, I don't think I would want to see 10 previews when I hover over the firefox menu item.

Check out the walkthrough video:


Another interesting (but probably less useful) feature is the new 'Aero shake' to minimize all but the current window.

OK... got a problem here.. hopes you guys can help.

I've successfully installed Windows 7 on my Mac OSX 10.4.11 using an expired boot camp 1.4 beta (by partying like it was 2007 in the time/date settings).

The only problem is, when I go to Startup Disk on OSX, I don't have a windows partition to boot from. If I wind the date back again and tell it to attempt to install W7 again, with the Windows install disk inserted, it simply boots to the windows partition anyway, but that's really quite annoying.

Is there a way to make 10.4.11 see my W7 partition?

"Yeah, upgrade to 10.5 already you idiot!"

Yeah, I know, I know.... but other than that.... ???

I think Symantec is using the \docs and settings\all users\appdata\local path.

OK, stop panicking. I found a reasonable workaround.

Holding down "option" key at startup lets me choose either OS. Yay!

OK, new problem.

My Mac batteries are on the way out, so I only get about 2.5 hours in OSX, which seems to equate to about 20 mins in Windows 7!!

Huh?