| |
Windows 7
Windows 7
launched on October 22. This new version of Windows has a
minimalist feel and attempts to fix annoyances old and new. In
contrast, Windows Vista offered a flashy new interface, but its
poor performance, compatibility gotchas, and lack of compelling
features made some folks regret upgrading and others refuse to
leave Windows XP.
Windows 7 is hardly flawless. Some features feel unfinished;
others won't realize their potential without heavy lifting by
third parties. And some long-standing annoyances remain intact.
But overall, the final shipping version appears to be the worthy
successor to Windows XP that Vista never was.
The Windows experience occurs mainly in its Taskbar, especially
in the Start menu and System Tray. Vista gave the Start menu a
welcome redesign; in Windows 7, the Taskbar and the System Tray
get a thorough makeover.
The new Taskbar replaces the old small icons and text labels for
running apps with larger, unlabeled icons. If you can keep the
icons straight, the new design painlessly reduces Taskbar
clutter. If you don't like it, you can shrink the icons and/or
bring the labels back.
In the past, you could get one-click access to programs by
dragging their icons to the Quick Launch toolbar. Windows 7
eliminates Quick Launch and folds its capabilities into the
Taskbar. Drag an app's icon from the Start menu or desktop to
the Taskbar, and Windows will pin it there, so you can launch
the program without rummaging around in the Start menu. You can
also organize icons in the Taskbar by moving them to new
positions.
To indicate that a particular application on the Taskbar is
running, Windows draws a subtle box around its icon--so subtle,
in fact, that figuring out whether the app is running can take a
moment, especially if its icon sits between two icons for
running apps.
In Windows Vista, hovering the mouse pointer over an
application's Taskbar icon produces a thumbnail window view
known as a Live Preview. But when you have multiple windows
open, you see only one preview at a time. Windows 7's version of
this feature is slicker and more efficient: Hover the pointer on
an icon, and thumbnails of the app's windows glide into position
above the Taskbar, so you can quickly find the one you're
looking for.
Also new in Windows 7's Taskbar is a feature called Jump Lists.
These menus resemble the context-sensitive ones you get when you
right-click within various Windows applications, except that you
don't have to be inside an app to use them. Internet Explorer
8's Jump List, for example, lets you open the browser and load a
fresh tab, initiate an InPrivate stealth browsing session, or go
directly to any of eight frequently visited Web pages.
Non-Microsoft apps can offer Jump Lists, too, if their
developers follow the guidelines for creating them.
Other Windows 7 interface adjustments are minor, yet so sensible
that you may wonder why Windows didn't include them all along.
Shove a window into the left or right edge of the screen and
it'll expand to fill half of your desktop. Nudge another into
the opposite edge of the screen, and it'll expand to occupy the
other half. That makes comparing two windows' contents easy. If
you nudge a window into the top of the screen, it will maximize
to occupy all of the display's real estate.
The extreme right edge of the Taskbar now sports a sort of nub;
hover over it, and open windows become transparent, revealing
the desktop below. (Microsoft calls this feature Aero Peek.)
Click the nub, and the windows scoot out of the way, giving you
access to documents or apps that reside on the desktop and
duplicating the Show Desktop feature that Quick Launch used to
offer.
Getting at your desktop may soon become even more important than
it was in the past. That's because Windows 7 does away with the
Sidebar, the portion of screen space that Windows Vista reserved
for Gadgets such as a photo viewer and a weather applet. Instead
of occupying the Sidebar, Gadgets now sit directly on the
desktop, where they don't compete with other apps for precious
screen real estate.
Windows 7's Taskbar and window management tweaks are nice. But
its changes to the System Tray, (aka the Notification Area) have
a huge positive effect.
In the past, no feature of Windows packed more frustration per
square inch than the System Tray. It quickly grew dense with
applets that users did not want in the first place, and many of
the uninvited guests employed word balloons and other intrusive
methods to alert users to uninteresting facts at inopportune
moments. At their worst, System Tray applets behaved like
belligerent squatters, and Windows did little to put users back
in charge.
In Windows 7, applets can't pester you unbidden because software
installers can't dump them into the System Tray. Instead,
applets land in a holding pen that appears only when you click
it, a much-improved version of the overflow area used in
previous incarnations of the Tray. Applets in the pen can't
float word balloons at you unless you permit them to do so. It's
a cinch to drag them into the System Tray or out of it again, so
you enjoy complete control over which applets reside there.
Windows 7 largely dispenses with the onslaught of word-balloon
warnings from the OS about troubleshooting issues, potential
security problems, and the like. A new area called Action
Center, (a revamped version of Vista's Security Center) queues
up such alerts so you can deal with them at your convenience.
Action Center does issue notifications of its own from the
System Tray, but you can shut these off if you don't want them
pestering you.
All of this helps make Windows 7 the least distracting, least
intrusive Microsoft OS in a very long time. It's a giant step
forward from the days when Windows thought nothing of
interrupting your work to inform you that it had detected unused
icons on your desktop.
Tech Tip
Google
is not just a Search Engine
Try this:
Go to
Google and in the search box type 5*9+(sqrt 10)^3=
You will
get the answer (5 * 9) + (sqrt(10)^3) = 76.6227766
Not only
can you use Google as a calculator, there are dozens of
other tools available using Google. Go here to see them
all:
http://www.google.com/help/features.html
Tech Term
DNS
(Domain Name System)
DNS stands for
"Domain Name System." The primary purpose of DNS is to keep Web
surfers sane. Without DNS, we would have to remember the IP
address of every site we wanted to visit, instead of just the
domain name. Can you imagine having to remember "17.254.3.183"
instead of just "apple.com"? While I have some Computer Science
friends who might prefer this, most people have an easier time
remembering simple names.
The reason the
Domain Name System is used is because Web sites are acutally
located by their IP addresses. For example, when you type in
"http://www.adobe.com," the computer doesn't immediately know
that it should look for Adobe's Web site. Instead, it sends a
request to the nearest DNS server, which finds the correct IP
address for "adobe.com." Your computer then attempts to connect
to the server with that IP number. DNS is just another one of
the many features of the Internet that we take for granted.
HAVE A
GREAT DAY! |
|
