“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.” 

“We had the best of intentions of helping to secure the platform more,” he continued, before adding: “we probably went a bit too far.”

Yes, Stephen, you did. But Microsoft certainly appears to have learnt its lessons before Windows 7. The new OS includes a slider that allows you to set the level of UAC interference, right down to the equivalent of ‘don’t darken my door again, buster’, which I suspsect is the setting that most PC enthusiasts will immediately deploy.

The nagging can be silenced elsewhere, too. System Tray pop-ups can be disabled, and you now have the option to condemn those irritating “love me, love me” System Tray icons that certain software makers love, to an overflow area.

In fact, I’m yet to find something in Windows 7 that’s lit my infamously short fuse. Give it time, though. Give it time.

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.

One clever new option is the ability to drag a window to the side of another open window, triggering them to automatically snap into place side-by-side with one another. This comes into its own when trying to compare two documents, taking full advantage of the horizontal space offered on widescreen displays.

Windows 7 includes other gesture-like controls. Drag a window to the top of the screen and it automatically blows the window into full-screen mode – a shortcut that we suspect will take a little getting used to. Hover the mouse to the far-right of the new Taskbar, meanwhile, and all of your windows become transparent, providing a clean view of the desktop.

Control freaks, meanwhile, will be delighted that Taskbar items can now be juggled into whichever order you wish, allowing you to always keep your email in the far-left tab, for example, even if it was opened after another application.

Gadgets and glass

The gadgets introduced in Windows Vista are retained in Windows 7, but they are no longer imprisoned on the far right of the screen, and can be dragged and dropped anywhere you fancy on the desktop. “We see the market moving heavily to laptops – that’s a lot of screen real estate to lose,” said Linda Averett, group program manager for core user experience of Windows, explaining the decision to let gadgets roam free.

Microsoft has also made the look and feel of the desktop much more customisable. Averett claimed that 30% of Windows Vista users went as far as changing the colour of the Aero glass, and so the company has decided to give interior designers their head, by allowing them to save different colour schemes for different seasons, for example. PC manufacturers will also be able to toy with the glass, so expect cobalt blue windows from Dell and shiny black edges from Sony in the future.

System Tray

“We have received volumes of feedback on the System Tray,” Averett claimed, and none of it good, we suspect. Consequently, Microsoft has decided to minimise the number of times the System Tray screams for attention with annoying pop-ups and flashing icons.

When an application adds itself to the System Tray, it automatically goes into a new overflow area, allowing you to decide if you want it to display permanently or not. There’s also a new Action Center that queues up all those infuriating Windows Update and other maintenance messages, meaning you’re not interrupted every two minutes with another meaningless reminder, and can review them in your own time.

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