Over at Walt Mossberg’s D: All Things Digital conference, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have shown a small snippet of the upcoming Windows 7. The short version? Windows 7 looks like Vista with some new Multi touch clothes. The long…
Over at Walt Mossberg’s D: All Things Digital conference, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have shown a small snippet of the upcoming Windows 7. The short version? Windows 7 looks like Vista with some new Multi touch clothes. The long version? There really isn’t one.
If you watch the video, which contains nearly all of the “new” features demonstrated at D, you’ll be forgiven your feelings of déjà vu. In fact, it seems like the Windows team have switched their focus for inspiration from Mac OS X to the iPhone OS. Multitouch is the biggest addition, and will appear system-wide, usable anywhere. The screen used for the demo is made by Tyco Electronics, whose Elo TouchSystems are already found in kiosk hardware.
The pinch-to-zoom feature makes it in, as does a Cover Flow style touch-to-flip, seen here used to display information written on the back of a photograph. Google also seems to have been a muse. The mapping application comes on like a cross between Google Earth and the Maps application for the iPhone, with added touch-screen goodness. Even the little pushpins look familiar. The touch screen piano, too, is old hat if you’ve a Jailbroken iPhone.
In fact, the most interesting part of the touch UI is not the eye candy, it’s the Task Bar, which seems to have morphed into a pie menu. A pie menu is a circular pop-up menu which appears wherever your cursor (or finger) may be. It lays out the options into radial slices, making it, according to Fitts’ Law, much faster to navigate. Because the positions of the options don’t change, it is also possible to commit them to muscle memory. In the case of Windows 7, pie menus might also relieve some of the strain of holding your arms out straight in front of you all day long.
To be fair, Microsoft is trying not to give too much away. After the Vista debacle, which saw the operating system slough features like a Persian cat molts fur, Microsoft plans to keep things a tiny quieter. Chris Flores at the Windows Vista blog:
We know that when we talk about our plans for the next release of Windows, people take action. As a result, we have the ability to significantly impact our partners and our customers if we broadly share information that later changes.
Translation: If nobody knows what to anticipate, nobody will be disappointed. A few things we do know. Windows 7 will not, as has as been speculated, throw out the old OS kernel to begin anew, which is what Apple did when it started over with Mac OS X. Instead it will, according to Windows chief Steven Sinofsky, be “an evolution” of the Vista underpinnings. Supposedly drivers will work just as well as they do in Vista (hardly a great promise). Sinofsky also gives us a launch date, even though it is somewhat cryptic:
the next release of Windows, Windows 7, is about three years after the general availability of Windows Vista.
So, an interesting glimpse at the new Windows, but hardly a window onto its future. We haver ragged the company a little for borrowing others’ ideas, but to be honest, where else could it go? It’s much superior to demo some eye candy that could already easily run on Vista than it is to make promises of, state, a revolutionary file system which might eventaully be dropped. We’re looking at you, Win FS.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, CEO Steve Ballmer and Windows 7 Preview [All Things D]
Windows chief talks ‘7′ [CNET]
Via [wired.com]
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