And speaking of new info from Ars...

[jducoeur]

... they also have an article giving a first look at the new Windows 7 UI. It looks like Windows 7 is almost the opposite of Vista. Whereas Vista had dramatic architectural changes, but only tweaked the look-and-feel, Windows 7 doesn't do much under the hood, but has lots of changes to the user interface, especially how the taskbar works.

Overall, it looks like the changes are for the better, but we'll see what people say when they get a chance to go hands-on with it. I don't think it's going to make Windows lovers of the Linux or Mac crowds, but for the folks who generally stick with Microsoft, it's interesting stuff...

Comments

Windows 7 looks great.

[the-resa.livejournal.com]

I'm still working with XP, myself. But I do like some of these new ideas 7 has for it's user interface. Makes me want to run out and get it ...

[laurion]

A lot of entities are still on XP because the architectural changes, especially user level architecture, have broken a lot, or made adopters recalcitrant. I was pleased to see that those things are being somewhat addressed or mitigated in 7. The UI update, while arguably necessary, may continue to keep users afraid of switching, and I see some real pitfalls for technical support. In particular, the new collectors for media are potential traps. I can see users thinking that it is okay to delete media from one folder, because it now appears automatically in the 'music' or 'movies' folders. It does break the established metaphor that files only appear in one place. Soft file links (shortcuts) were very carefully designated as such, and Windows has never had hard file links that I am aware of. On the other hand, good for them for finally pushing their long standing plans to turn the file system into a database system. BeOS had that years ago and it was one of the most remarkable parts of that OS.

[meiczyslaw.livejournal.com]

Oh, and speaking of "fear of upgrade" -- this stylesheet looks like crap performs sub-optimally on IE6. (Basically, the indents don't work right, which makes following a thread difficult.)

Granted, it might not be a big deal -- I didn't notice until I looked at it on Firefox at home -- but figured you might like to know.

(And I wouldn't care if my I.T. department wasn't afraid of IE7, but they are.)

[jducoeur]

Well, this style is horribly obsolete at this point, and needs replacing. The only reason I'm still using it is that it has one or two customizations I greatly care for, and I don't have time to pull in the new version of the base style and re-apply the customizations. (Specifically, I actually care about the "back 20 entries" link at the bottom, which isn't native to the underlying style.)

Really, though, this is one of those things I've always found a little odd about LJ, the notion of reading peoples' pages in their own styles. Personally, I strongly prefer reading in my own style -- I find it easy to read, which is why I set it up, and so I generally read in style=mine...

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

I think I'm going to like 7 a lot. Ever since reading Coopers The Essentials of User Interface Design," I've worked almost solely with maximized windows except when I'm comparing two or dragging and dropping, and it eliminates a lot of distraction. Couple that with the fact that I use "recent files" menus a lot, and I've taken the trouble to customize my notification area to hide annoying icons, and it seems like a lot of this was designed just for me.

I always knew my way of working was best. Took them long enough to catch up. ;-)