36 new features for Windows 7

 

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Posted on 27 Feb 2009 at 08:40

"We've been quite busy for the past two months or so working through all the feedback we've received on Windows 7," explains Steven Sinofsky, lead engineer for Windows 7.

"It should be no surprise but the Release Candidate for Windows 7 will have quite a few changes, many under the hood, so to speak, but also many visible."

A majority of these features are user interface tweaks, however they should add up to a much smoother Windows 7 experience. Take the "aero-peek" feature which allows you to make all your open windows transparent to peer at the desktop widgets beneath.

This feature will now activate when you're alt-tabbing through active windows, leaving only your selected window visible. It's nothing revolutionary, but it should make picking that pesky Word document out of the fifteen open a bit easier.

Windows Media Player has also been tweaked, with perhaps the most useful change that it will now filter out content it can't play. Aggravatingly, the prior version would add every media file it could find to your library regardless of whether it knew what it was. No longer. The other significant change should improve the way WMP handles streaming content. According to Microsoft streaming content is now "more reliable and resilient".

WMP will also allow you to resume watching video content the machine wakes from sleep. Previously this content would need to be restarted.

Needy Windows

Elsewhere, the behaviour of "needy windows", those icons that flash at you from the taskbar when they need attention, have been changed.

Microsoft claims the notification flash was so subtle people were missing incoming instant messages, or new emails arriving in Outlook. To combat this the flashing animation has been changed, and will now flash seven times rather than the old three. Again it's nothing revolutionary but it should make the experience of Windows 7 much smoother.

We also like the fact the company has squeezed more icons onto the taskbar before you have to scroll, and that Jumplist menus have been scaled back so they only include ten items, which should stop them appearing cluttered.

Alongside this, you now have the ability to pin anything to a jumplist. So, in the beta you could only pin a HTML files to the Internet Explorer 8 jumplist, because that was the program set up to handle that file type. Now, however that HTML file can be pinned to notepad's jump menu, or anywhere you please. It's a simple tweak, but one which proves Microsoft has been listening to feedback.

An office bugbear has also been addressed. The high-performance power mode has been moved into the right click battery menu, meaning you don't have to enter the full-fledged power menu to access it, as you did in the beta.

Despite all this, Microsoft is still not offering any hint on the availability of the Release Candidate.

Author: Stuart Turton