What’s Cool in Windows 7

PDC keynote this morning had a lot of pleasant surprises.  These 7 stood out to me.

 

1. Dual Monitor Remote desktop connection (You can see both screens on your screen!)

2. Jump Lists – from the task bar you can customize the list of what you can do.  (You have to see this to understand it)

3. Create a VHD natively within Windows 7.

4. Boot to and Mount a Windows 7 VHD

5. Decreased use of RAM, Disk IO, and Power (Steve Sinofsky was using a 1GB machine and OS fully loaded uses only 512M)

6. Multi Touch Support & Hardware Integration (lots of cool demos on this)

7. Improvements in core apps, MS Paint gets ribbon, new Calc and Wordpad support for ODF and Open XML.

 

It was a blast watching PDC this morning streaming live with an interesting twitter feed #pdc side by side.  All they were missing was a way to post from that screen, it was a pain to have to swap back and forth, or would be nice to blog right from that page.  — Next time 🙂

 

 

If you’re asking… but what does it look like?  This M3 build looks a lot like Vista with the black smokey glassy look. 

 

Check out the Windows 7 themes in this build.  Sure looks and smells like visa.  Not a bad thing.  I expect more changes to th UI come between beta 1 and beta 2.  The task bar, the ribbon in the windows core apps (mspaint and wordpad), and the music and photo management UI is going to be quite different with WPF as a platform (This is what will really make things different and smooth.

 

The big differences they showed were working with pictures, music, and all the cool multi touch interfaces…. with less memory and similar device support as Vista, (No new device drivers, like the big revamp for Vista.)