Stan Beer
Saturday, 28 February 2009 14:32
Opinion and Analysis
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Microsoft has announced at least three dozen largely cosmetic changes to the beta version of Windows 7 as the software giant gets ready to distribute the first release candidate of its new operating system. Feedback in the blogosphere about the flagged changes has been mainly positive, although there have also been a few brickbats.
The changes announced on a
MSDN blog
by Chaitanya Sareen, a member of the core user interface development
team, are largely to do with the look and feel of Windows 7 and user
interaction.
The areas covered include desktop experience, touch screen support,
networking, control panel, Windows Media Player, device driver support,
sound systems, Windows Explorer and performance.
The desktop experience section improvements are mainly concerned
improving the user interface, including such things as keyboard
shortcuts to open applications on the task bar, the getting thumbnail
views when flipping between open applications, making it easier to open
files with different applications, more space on the task bar and more.
The touch screen support promises to enable users to get a thumbnail
peek at open applications by simply dragging your finger across
applications, while on screen keyboards will have multi-touch
capability to allow two keys to be pressed at the same time like
mechanical keyboards.
Improved support for devices and sound systems is also flagged, while
Windows Media Player is singled out for special attention, with
promises of more reliable Internet radio, better support for .MOV files
captured by digital cameras and a cleaner now playing view.
Not least, however, the blog did not fail to mention that it had
tweaked the performance of Windows 7 since the beta release and proudly
displayed some graphs to prove that the improved version in its
development labs is running faster.
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