Windows 7 user interface features
Sunday, January 11th, 2009I just downloaded and installed Windows 7 Ultimate Beta on a virtual machine on my Mac. As it was installing, the first thing I did was to check Wikipedia to see all the new features I should be trying out. I visited the Features new to Window 7 article. As I read through it, I noticed that just about every single entry for “User interface” already exists on the Macintosh. I do want to note that I think Windows 7 is looking like a huge improvement over Vista. I’ve heard great things in regards to its speed, performance, reliability, stability, security, etc. In regards to the UI, it does seem there are a lot of new features, particularly with touch. But the scope of this post is to note all the UI features mentioned in Wikipedia and compare them with Mac OS X.
The first feature noted was the Desktop Slideshow. This allows the user to have their desktop background change after a designated amount of time. Again, this feature has been on the Macintosh for sometime.
Windows 7 now has something called Libraries. They are essentially smart folders in Mac OS X. The Wikipedia article describes them as “virtual folders that aggregate content from various locations.”
Federated search is something I’m uncertain about. It allows the search in Windows 7 to search “external data sources, such as custom databases or web services.” Spotlight on the Macintosh does support plugins for searching, and Mac OS X Server does have a Spotlight service for clients to search network shares.
The Windows Taskbar is now a whole ten pixels taller and can support a larger default icon size. Just to note, the icons in Mac OS X, in the dock and elsewhere, are sized up to 512 pixels. They also made the taskbar transparent.
The Windows 7 Taskbar is now more “application-oriented” instead of “window-oriented” with what Microsoft is calling Pinned Applications, which is a benefit of Mac OS X that I’ve been explaining to people for sometime now. This pretty much allows the application to be kept in the taskbar and once I tell you about Jump Lists, you’ll see why this is important.
There’s also an Enhanced Preview Pane. This is nice. Although not a direct copy of anything on the Mac, it’s comparable to Exposé.
Jump List allows the user to righ-click on an icon in the taskbar and receive application specific options such as playing and pausing music for a media application. Again, this has been the case with icons in the dock.
There’s a new show desktop action that makes all the windows transparent so you can see what’s on your desktop. It’s a big improvement over the show desktop button that’s placed in the Quick Launch with Windows XP and Vista. Ultimately, we still have this similar feature with Exposé.
The Aero Shake is a cute one. If you were to want all Windows to be minimized so you could focus on just one of them, you can now grab a Window as if you were going to move it and just shake it back and forth with your mouse. This minimizes all other Windows. In Mac OS X, we have the ability to hide opened applications. There is an option to Hide Others, which does the same thing.
The last feature mentioned is with font management. In Vista, you pretty much just have a folder of all your fonts. With Windows 7, font families will be “stacked” to help organize all the fonts. As I read the Wikipedia article, they also mentioned something I didn’t know: “Windows Vista had received considerable criticism for including the same ‘Add Font’ dialog that had existed as far back as Windows 3.1; this dialog has been removed.” Regardless, Mac OS X has a wonderful application for managing fonts called Font Book.
Windows 7 seems to be a vast improvement over Vista, but it seems to just bring the Windows operating system up to par with what Macintosh already has out. I guess we’ll have an interesting debate and comparison between Windows 7 and Snow Leopard.