It seems as though Microsoft is putting a lot of work into Windows 7. Much more than we (the public) ever thought. And it also seems that they have been working on a lot of the details which is a VERY good thing. Among the new UI functionality and look, I find this to be one of the coolest additions: Color Hot Tracking. It extracts color information from the icon and moves the glow around based on your mouse position. As a UI guy, this gets my blood pumping. As a consumer, it is nice to see they are changing the taskbar finally.
However, I must say that I love my current taskbar. I wish I could have the new graphical features with the current style: text and small icon. Why? Because I am dependent on knowing where each Window is on the taskbar and getting feedback by quickly reading the text. If I have multiple Messenger windows open, it is nice to be able to quickly scan them rather than having to use a grouping mechanism which requires 2 (or more) clicks.
Anyways, Windows 7 has been really exciting for me. Aside from Visual Studio 2010, W7 is starting to be the most exciting software release ever for me. I just hope Microsoft follows through on this one…
IE8 Beta 2 is out! Here I am running it on Vista Ultimate X64:
Tonight I was tasked with the job of reinstalling Vista on my sister’s new Dell laptop. Why? Because for some odd reason, Dell doesn’t know how to install an operating system correctly and she was having constant problems. Anyways, after installing the OS (which took ~30 minutes, w00t), I ran Windows update. This, for the first time for me, decided to continually reboot the machine after it was “done” with the install.
Hmm. Well, I went into the extra options mode (F8 during Bios) and ran the Directory Services Restore / Repair Mode. This got me to a “Configuring updates” screen which was farther than before. After finishing the machine rebooted and kept restarting. So I did it again, and this time the updates were able to finish!
[b]Update (07/07/08):[/b] It started doing it again. After some tracking on the web I found out it has to do with an outdated driver that came with the Dell Vista install disc. Installing Vista SP1 did the trick, but to get there I had to put the drive into IDE mode (via the BIOS) so Windows could boot.
Ben Curry has made an excellent post about installing SharePoint 2007 on WS2008 by slipstreaming SP1 updates. I am now running SharePoint and AD on my internal server!
Long Zheng of istartedsomething has started an initiative for bringing attention to Microsoft the biggest problems facing the Windows UI. Head on over to the Windows UX Task Force page to submit ideas, problems and inconsistencies with the current Windows UI.
How come (in Vista) deleting files seems to be broken? The OS likes to decide that an application is still referencing a file that I am trying to delete, thus elevating to admin control. I hit continue, say yes, I am sure I want to do this and still nothing happens. Vista decides that it still can’t delete the file. This is great if I am using the file somewhere, but generally I am not when this happens. I can open the folder, select the files and delete them without elevation. I can then step back up a directory to the one that did elevate and delete without a problem.
So why didn’t it delete in the first place?
Windows | John Sedlak | 
October 29, 2008 5:08 am | 
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