The Window 7 taskbar

The Window 7 taskbar inside the virtual machine was not hardware accelerated and as such was unforgivably ugly. I looked for an option to make the taskbar look like Vista, but the option was not there. I guess that it was not put in because they really wanted people to properly test out the new interface. Well, if some of the starter edition doesn’t run with the transparency that comes with accelerated hardware, they will really need to look into the design of the taskbar, as it really is ugly. After much thought I cleared some partition space and decided to give it a chance to run against the actual hardware. I discovered, that the taskbar with hardware acceleration it is a really good. It is pretty and very functional. They really thought about the way the taskbar should work and rewrote it, when you hold your mouse over an open window you get a preview, no biggy there, both Vista and Linux with Compiz do the same, but this is where the little flourishes that Microsoft are so good at come into play. They are not just for looks, the previews are integrated into the application so that they have close buttons in the corner and when you hold the mouse over the previews, without actually selecting the window, it comes to the fore and the other windows become transparent. These are some of the functions that I find myself using very often.

All files/folders are now grouped and the quickstart bar idea has been developed upon so that it now forms the basis of the taskbar. In my opinion, it really works. For me I find this an actual productivity boon. I can really say that. Although I love Ubuntu, I love the stability, the way I can control it, the sense that its mine. The Gnome taskbar interface has stagnated for years. KDE 4 are trying to make some progress, but, their platform is still very much in development, and the Ubuntu version of KDE 4 is just plain broken at the time of writing this.
(Back to Windows 7) The copying and unzipping of files now takes place in a normal human lifespan, this was a great improvement and a demonstration that it was not broken, like Vista.

If you hold a window by its title bar and shake it, it causes everything else to be minimized. This is a load of rubbish, I have no idea of what marketing guy decided that, that was a must have. Also if you move a window by its title bar to the top of the screen, it maximizes the window. Very irritating, however, if you move a window to the side of the screen it resizes the window to take up half the screen real estate. Maybe, this has a future, this needs to be played with more. I don’t know why Microsoft are still resisting the ability to have virtual desktops. This is one of the biggest things that I miss coming from a Linux background, that and some of the app’s that are only available for Linux (Yes, it works both ways!). But on the other side MS Office is a delight to use under Windows 7.