Some Cameos at the Windows 7 launch: HP stole the show with their multitouch tablet PC running Windows 7. Here are some videos I took with the Microsoft guys fooling around with Maps and the photo gallery.
Tag: Windows 7
Spent the better part of Thursday at the Windows 7 boot camp at the Manila Ocean Park. Although I’ve been using Windows 7 since its beta (thanks to Johnny Benitez of Microsoft) and have bootcamp-ed it on my MacBook, it was still great to hear the “promise of a great OS” from Microsoft. So Windows 7 is finally here and will retail for P7,777.00 for the Home Basic Edition on November 7 for the consumer launch at the SM North EDSA.
One of the winning features of Windows 7 is the built in photo stitching application with the Live Gallery (sign up for a Live account already if you still don’t have one). The application recognizes and stitches together shots that may seem to be a part of a panorama. All we needed to do was highlight all the photos you want in on the panorama and allow the app to do the work for you. Photos that were added but don’t go with the stitch are automatically recognized and discarded. Very nice.
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Windows 7 demo over Starbucks
Yeah. Even if I knew, from the back of my mind that Windows 7 will NOT install under CrossOver (CrossOver installs apps, not OS’s!), it was still worth a try.
I guess I must do this the hard way.
This afternoon, a rediscovered friend by the name of Johnny Benitez gave me a short run through of Windows 7’s beta release. Johnny works for Microsoft (argh! I envy his super cool title there!) and he gave me a short demo using his kick ass tablet PC. No screen shots here, but oh well here goes:
First. In the same way that Mac OS X can quick view into documents by pressing the spacebar, Windows 7 has its own little innovation by being able to “peep” within minimized windows on the taskbar. For instance, if you have 5 open tabs on Internet Explorer 8 (!!!) and they are all minimized, you can peek into the contents of each by mousing over each individual tab on the sidebar. Way cool. As a Mac user, I’m glad they didn’t rip off what OS X does for previewing documents. The peek function is definitely useful.
Second. Windows can lock on to certain parts of the desktop. Drag a window onto the left and it resizes to occupy 50% of the left of the screen. Same goes for right. This allows you to work on 2 windows with an easy resize. Dragging the window to the top of the screen maximizes a window. Dragging and “shaking” the window to and fro minimizes all other windows except the one being dragged.
Third. Windows 7 is noticeably faster than Vista. I guess you can say that Windows Vista = Windows 7 Beta. We were all fooled! HEHEHE. TEEHEEHEE. HOHOHOHO!
There are many other features inherent to Windows 7. Apart from the ones I just wrote about, Internet Explorer 8 is bundled with the web developer tool built in, and there are new power saving features (dim screen instead of sleep) that comes in the system settings.
So are you in the beta program yet? In the meantime, here’s a cool link to 150 of the best FREEWARE applications for Windows XP, Vista and Microsoft Office.
P.S. Thanks Johnny for the demo! I’m going to install this baby onto a sexy computer and see what happens.
Obama inspired Hope to America, and a litttle bit of that Hope is rubbing off Microsoft’s new Windows 7. It’s no secret that PDC copies are already out for developers. Rafael Rivera and Ed Bott discussed about the new “super taskbar” that highlights Windows 7’s new GUI.
From what I’ve been hearing, the new Superbar draws a lot of inspiration from the Mac OS X dashboard launcher with a little bit of the Google Chrome shortcut icon feature. The new Taskbar isn’t just a launcher but serves the purpose of adding and remembering sub windows within applications. In other words, what used to take five clicks to get to now only takes two.
I’m excited for Windows 7. Id like to believe it’s a second wind for Microsoft.
[image credit taken from Ed’s ZDNet blog]