Microsoft makes Windows less annoying

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

There’s been no shortage of humility from Microsoft at PDC this week. The likeable Steven Sinofksy, who was parachuted from the successful Office 2007 team to oversee the Windows 7 launch, has perfected his self-deprecating schtick. 

“UAC was so famous I thought it might surpass Clippy,” he remarked to journalists earlier in the week. 

He issued another half-apology for UAC during his Windows 7 keynote today, dryly remarking “we got a lot of feedback on Vista RTM. From users, from the press, from bloggers… Oh, and from one or two adverts.” 

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Windows 7: the user interface

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

The most obvious change to Windows 7 is the revamped Windows desktop. The Taskbar has been completely redesigned, with the text descriptions of open windows replaced with large icons of the open applications. It’s an idea that has clearly gleaned more than a little inspiration from the Mac OS X Dock, but it goes further than the Apple concept.

Right click on an application’s icon – or swipe a finger upwards from it if you’re using the new touchscreen controls – and a “jumplist” opens. The jumplist provides a list of recent documents accessed in Word, for example, or recent sites visited in Internet Explorer, allowing you to open them with a single click. The jumplists can also be populated with commands, such as selecting a playlist from Windows Media Player. Microsoft has published a new API that will allow software makers to tailor the jumplists to their applications, and this has the potential to become a great timesaver.

The new Taskbar also comes into play when you plug a digital camera, MP3 player, or other peripheral into the PC. Instead of the old Autoplay prompt, a digital camera icon will show in the Taskbar. From here you can select options to import photos into editing software, for example, or kickstart a slideshow of your pictures.

As well as the thumbnail previews of tabs that were first introduced in Windows Vista, the new Taskbar provides full-screen previews when you hover over the thumbnail preview with the mouse. This feature could be pretty handy for a quick glance at an email, whilst you enter data into a web form for example, although it doesn’t really save much time compared to simply switching Windows if you’re proficient with keyboard shortcuts. More useful is the option to simply drag programs from the Start menu straight on to the Taskbar.

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Windows 7: multitouch controls

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

One of the few things we knew about Windows 7 prior to PDC was the existence of multitouch – using multiple fingers to swish around the Windows menus and applications instead of the mouse and keyboard.

Sadly, our test laptop isn’t touchscreen, so we’re forced to rely on the demos and a brief play with a HP Touchsmart PC to form our early opinion on the multitouch features.

Touch works well on the Windows desktop. As soon as you tap the screen with your finger, the now redundant mouse cursor disappears, and images of water droplets appear underneath your finger, providing an intuitive visual guide to the accuracy of your finger jabbing.

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Windows 7: networking

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Networking has been beefed up in a number of subtle ways in Windows 7. The first is a new feature called HomeGroup. This essentially turns all the Windows 7 PCs on the home network into a combined pool of data and files, much like a Windows Home Server or a NAS appliance.

Using a new feature called Libraries in Windows Explorer, you select and open files on the HomeGroup network as if they were stored locally on your PC. It’s also possible to search for files (using tags and filenames, or more advanced searches, such as the month a photo was taken) across the entire HomeGroup.

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Windows 7: device management

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Windows 7 debuts a new feature called Device Stage that has the potential to be unbelievably handy… or a complete disaster.

Plug in a supported media player, digital camera, mobile phone or printer, and you’re presented with the Device Stage screen, which allows you to manage tasks specifically tailored to that very model.

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Windows 7: tools for IT departments

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Windows 7 boasts several new features that could make PCs easier to manage and secure for IT departments. They include:

BitLocker To Go

Government departments pay attention: Microsoft is expanding the BitLocker drive encryption found in business and Ultimate versions of Vista to include USB flash drives. “The problem with these little buggers is people lose them,” said the unusually frank Boettcher.

IT departments can set a group policy that forces USB drives to be encrypted before the employee’s allowed to copy files off the corporate network on to the stick, saving IT departments from employing more drastic measures, such as disabling USB ports.

Alternatively, employees can easily encrypt their own drives with the Bitlocker Drive Encryption option in Windows 7’s System and Security settings. Remembering the password might be a stiffer challenge, however.

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Daylight savings, the iPhone way

Monday, October 27th, 2008

The PC Pro office on a Monday afternoon in press week isn’t Number One on my list of favourite locations to be, so it’s no surprise I found my gaze wandering towards the window. A depressingly black sight stared back at me, evidence that winter is almost here to wither away what little pigment remains in my skin.

But the fact that it was only five o’clock took a few minutes to strike me as odd – because on Friday it wasn’t even nearly dark when we stumbled out of the office at six.

Turns out the clocks changed over the weekend. Now, I’m sure you all knew that, otherwise you’d have turned up to work an hour early.

Wouldn’t you? (more…)

So, why do you hate Windows Vista?

Monday, October 27th, 2008

Windows Vista looks destined to go down in history as the latter-day version of Windows ME – an operating system that added some visual fluff to its predecessor’s solid workings, while somehow mucking up its usability.

But I’m not convinced by this. I’ve been using Vista in anger since the day of its release, and have long since given up Windows XP because I found I got most things done much more quickly with Vista in place.

So it came as a bit of a culture shock when, this weekend, I had brief cause to fire up a netbook. And although there are lots of things that Microsoft royally messed up in Vista, this drummed home to me just how basic XP is in comparison. (more…)

Microsoft brings the clouds to sunny LA

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

LA may be bathed in warm sunshine, but here at the city’s Sheraton Hotel things are very cloudy indeed. It’s only the preview day of Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, but I’ve already lost count of the amount of times I’ve heard the phrase “cloud computing”.

Tomorrow’s keynote speech by chief software architect Ray Ozzie (pictured) is being trailed with the tagline “cloud computing takes centre stage”, and we’ve been promised in-depth briefings on the Midori/Cloud/Strata (pick your own Microsoft codename) operating system tomorrow.

Yet, even before Ozzie’s curtain-raiser, Microsoft’s staff are already talking up the company’s cloud-computing vision. Group product manager David Appel has already tried to put clear daylight between Microsoft and Google, insisting that consumers and companies want to take their pick of applications to run in the cloud, and those they want to use on their own PCs. The implication was clear: Google may well have a vast repertoire of online services, but it hasn’t got the desktop software to match – no matter what clever tricks it can pull with offline access in Google Gears.

Has Microsoft got a bevy of online services up its sleeve? We’re about to find out. 

First look: ATI Radeon HD 4830

Friday, October 24th, 2008

It seems that, at the moment, ATI is releasing fantastic graphics cards on a month-by-month basis. Now, it’s the turn of a part that’s been designed to sit between the Radeon HD 4670 and HD 4850 in ATI’s comprehensive line-up: the HD 4830.

The specifications reveal that, while the 4830 isn’t as powerful on paper as the 4850, it’s still a powerful GPU in its own right. A core clock speed of 575MHz is only 50MHz lower than the 4850, and 512MB of 900MHz GDDR3 memory certainly hints at the new card’s potential.

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