Cool video of awesome new Windows 7 taskbar

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 04 November 2008 07:00

Opinion and Analysis

Want to see what the new Windows 7 taskbar and Aero peek features look like, along with the Windows 7 boot screen and some touch screen goodness?

Anyone who has the Windows 7 pre-beta 6801 build on their computers should already know that the “superbar” from the as yet unreleased 6933 build is available now, but if you didn’t, you must check it out.

If you don’t like the new taskbar and want the old one back, you just follow those same instructions and click “lock” again, which will make sense when you do it.

But if you haven’t got Windows 7 and want to see up close what the new taskbar and “Aero peek” features are all about, Neowin has some videos you’ll want to see.

The new taskbar lets you mix both icons to start programs and open program windows you can select just as with the old fashioned Windows task bar, making it a combination of the Mac OS X dock and the taskbar of old.

Although the open windows are grouped by the program they belong to, these can be separated if desired – you can change this in the taskbar’s properties, although the new grouping is a much better way of doing things.

For example, if you have several tabs open in Internet Explorer, putting the mouse of the IE icon shows all the open tabs in a window above the task bar. In the 6933 build of Windows 7, hovering your mouse over a preview makes it appear on screen in full, so you can clearly see what is in that preview window.

In the 6801 superbar tweak, you need to click on each preview window with your right mouse button to make it appear, but this will change come 6933.

As you move from IE to, say, Microsoft word, the preview bar morphs and shows you how many Word documents you have open. It’s smooth, and cool.

So what isn’t the superbar doing at this stage, and what’s in the rest of those videos? Please read on to page 2.