I am writing this on Windows 7, the successor to Vista that was previewed at Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference in Los Angeles earlier this week. Microsoft is keen to avoid a repetition of Vista’s shambolic launch. Mike Nash, corporate vice-president, spoke at the press briefing about learning from the Vista experience, and the man in charge of Windows engineering, Steven Sinofsky, emphasized the rigor and discipline of the Windows 7 development process.
It appears to be working. Even in the preview handed out to the press, Windows 7 feels more polished and less annoying than its predecessor. The changes are not dramatic, but that is a good thing. Microsoft has left the core architecture untouched, so that software and devices that worked on Vista should still work.
Microsoft is also making Windows “quieter”; in other words, reducing the number of prompts that interrupt your work. For example, too many applications now install themselves in the Windows system tray and pop up frequent notifications. Windows 7 lets you hide them or turn off their messages, returning control to the user. You can also fine-tune User Account Control, the security feature that in Vista flashes the screen and shows a dialog whenever you change a system setting.
Windows 7 does have some user interface changes, the most obvious being a revised taskbar, which shows an icon for every running application. The Windows 7 taskbar has larger icons, full-screen application previews when you hover the mouse, and “jump lists”: pop-up menus that control key features, such as starting or stopping a song in Windows Media Player, or visiting a favorite site in Internet Explorer. Application windows can be made transparent to see files on the desktop, and when you drag a window with the mouse, it snaps to screen borders: a small touch but one that feels natural.
Windows Explorer, the main tool for file management, has a new feature called libraries, which pulls together content from multiple locations and lets you treat them as one. For example, if you have some photos on an internal hard drive and others on an external drive, you can include both locations in one library and search it like a single folder. Applets like WordPad and Paint have been refreshed, and now sport fat ribbon toolbars like those introduced in Office 2007.
However, it will not be the new features that make or break Windows 7, but rather its quality, compatibility and performance. Windows 7 is less ambitious than Vista, its development is less rushed, and provided Microsoft can dissuade its partners from overlaying it with third-party add-ons of lesser quality, this release promises to be one users will actually enjoy.
In 1990, Amy Chen (陳怡美) was beginning third grade in Calhoun County, Texas, as the youngest of six and the only one in her family of Taiwanese immigrants to be born in the US. She recalls, “my father gave me a stack of typed manuscript pages and a pen and asked me to find typos, missing punctuation, and extra spaces.” The manuscript was for an English-learning book to be sold in Taiwan. “I was copy editing as a child,” she says. Now a 42-year-old freelance writer in Santa Barbara, California, Amy Chen has only recently realized that her father, Chen Po-jung (陳伯榕), who
Famed Chinese demographer Yi Fuxian (易富賢) recently wrote for The Diplomat on the effects of a cross-strait war on demography. He contended that one way to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is by putting the demographic issue front and center — last year total births in the PRC, he said, receded to levels not seen since 1762. Yi observes that Taiwan’s current fertility rate is already lower than Ukraine’s — a nation at war that is refusing to send its young into battle — and that its “demographic crisis suggests that Taiwan’s technological importance will rapidly decline, and
Jan. 6 to Jan. 12 Perhaps hoping to gain the blessing of the stone-age hunter-gatherers that dwelt along the east coast 30,000 years ago, visitors to the Baxian Caves (八仙洞) during the 1970s would grab a handful of soil to bring home. In January 1969, the nation was captivated by the excavation of pre-ceramic artifacts and other traces of human habitation in several caves atop a sea cliff in Taitung County. The majority of the unearthed objects were single-faced, unpolished flake tools fashioned from natural pebbles collected by the shore. While archaeologists had found plenty of neolithic (7,000 BC to 1,700
These are volatile times for the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), with the party’s founder, Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), in and out and back in jail repeatedly, Ko resigning as party chair and naming TPP caucus convener Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) to replace him and an upcoming party leadership vote. How representative of the party’s supporters has the party’s leadership been recently? The TPP caucus in the legislature is so closely aligned — and votes so similarly to — the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that they are in effect a pan-blue party now. Billing themselves as the “white force” between the pan-blue and pan-green
RSS