2009 has launched with WAY too much excitement in the ol’ personal life (all pretty much good now, thanks for asking) so I’ve been kinda reveling the last week in being a Beta Nerd again. Microsoft recently released a public beta of their next Operating System, Windows 7 (codename: Making You Forget About Vista As Fast As Possible). There has been one or two earlier versions leaked in the wild, but they didn’t feature much in the way of new stuff nor were they really out long before Microsoft took the VERY wise step of trumping the leakers by making it relatively easy to get a hold of an official beta. It’s almost like they’re… eager to get this into people’s hands.
And they should be. For it is good.
Like… I replaced Vista with it in about a day good.
Microsoft seems to have finally realized that first impressions matter. Sure, most consumers don’t rush to grab betas of anything nor do they buy new OSes on the first day they litter the shelves at Best Buy. But the vast army of nerds, myself included, who DO do those things tends to be the ones writing the press and spreading the word in advance of a new Operating System’s release. And there’s quite a few of us; Microsoft originally planned to make “only” 2.5 million slots available to download the beta. That plan went out the window as even their massive file-serving infrastructure went almost all the way down under the weight of the demand, demand that was only increased by the good impressions the earliest adopters were putting out on the ‘net.
What’s so special about it? Let’s dig in:
Here’s my desktop as I write this post. As you can see, there’s some very non-Windows-y stuff going on, particularly with the Taskbar. In past versions of Windows, docking the Start/Taskbar to the sides of the desktop was an exercise in anomaly; it just didn’t look right. Old Windows task buttons wanted to have the full name of the app or window listed on it, which would lead to a Start bar that crept way wide into your usable desktop space. This was particularly galling since Apple’s OS X had shown the world a pretty fine way to manage a desktop task center that worked where the _user_ wanted it, not where the OS was demanding you kept it.
For web-readability’s sake, here’s the Taskbar in horizontal orientation:
You really need to see this in motion to understand just how much Microsoft has improved this; for one, you can FINALLY, without installing kludgy third-party applications, reorder any icon in the Taskbar or System Tray by simply clicking and dragging. Even better, the user is now the final arbiter of what shows up in the System Tray. The “can you help Aunt Melba fix her machine?” part of me always sort of appreciated the Sys Tray in Vista, XP and earlier versions of Windows; at least, when attempting to diagnose why a given machine was performing way under spec, I could sit down, look at the 67 persistent icons in the SysTray and set to removing them.
However, the incredibly anal and order-seeking part of me would always be infuriated at the two-three icons in MY SysTray from apps that a) I needed to have installed yet b) did not give any option to shut the goddamned icon off. FINALLY, a version of Windows offers us:
TA-DA! The Notification Area Icons Control Panel! (Yo, MS… it’s SysTray. Has been for over a decade. Stop renaming shit). Anything that WANTS to show up in the tray gets a spot in this Control Panel, where you can tell it to always be on and always show notification pop-ups, _just_ show notification pop-ups, or fuck off entirely, always. You can also drag and re-order the little bastards to your heart’s content here, too, just like the Taskbar icons now.
Another interesting aspect of Windows 7 is just how… light and fast it is. Not seems; is. Load up Vista and Win 7 on the same machine and you will able to tell the difference, particularly on a netbook. I don’t know what all they did behind the scenes to speed things up, but they did purge a lot of cruft. For example, out of the box and unlike every versions of Windows since I think 95 Rev. A, there’s no mail client bundled in. Which is weird because the free version of Windows Live Internet Mail & News Outlook 6 Express (to jam all of the names of the same one shitty mail app they’ve been puking up since 1997) that you can get with the recommended download of Windows Live Essentials is the first decent and usable free mail client Microsoft has ever made.
Windows Live Essentials is basically a bundle of apps that a lot of consumers will want… but that a lot of others will NOT want. Part of the problem with all past versions of Windows is that they’d come over-loaded with a ton of shit that Joe Six-Pack is never going to use or, worse, SHOULDN’T be using as there was almost always a better, safer alternative to whatever MS loaded by default. In this day and age, where even your drunk of an uncle does 80% of his personal computing in the “cloud”, why lard up an OS with apps that will never be called up? They just slow shit down. If you DO want the apps, they give you a link at the end of the OS install to get them on your own.
Again, I can’t express the irony that this raises in me, as the latest version of the Live Essentials suite that they’ve produced in anticipation of the Windows 7 launch is the first really good set of music, mail, photo and messengering managers they’ve built. And it won’t ship with the OS. I’m sure all the anti-trust crap MS has been put through in the past decade has something to do with this, which is a shame.
There are other cool features, even if they’re smaller in scope… the amount of efficient and awesome keyboard shortcuts one can use to move around the OS is excellent. There are some mouse gestures (or touch gestures, for you tablet users out there) that allow you to quickly maximize a window by grabbing its titlebar and tossing it towards the top of the screen, to pin it and half-width it by flicking it to the right or left… tons of economical little tricks like this are spaghetti’d through the OS now.
Even the almost-universally-loathed UAC (User Account Control) that made installing an app in Vista such a chore has been toned down without reducing the necessary security it was designed to introduce to the OS most targeted by the malware and spyware makers out there.
There’s tons more to discover and enjoy so far and, it must be reiterated: this is just the first beta. Windows 7 can only get better unless Microsoft makes an unlikely gross misstep between now and the anticipated launch later this year. But I can seriously state that this is the first operating system ever from Microsoft that actually has me excited about using the final version instead of filling me with dread about how much of my stuff is going to break when I install it (yes, every single peripheral and app I have save Daemon Tools worked without issue upon upgrading from Vista to Windows 7).
Instead of dropping $2,500 on a Macbook Pro to be my new laptop, I may just save two grand and go with a netbook running Windows 7. It’s that good.
Try it out here, if you’re feeling the urge.
