Windows 7 Beta – Very First Impressions

I am typing this from Windows Live Writer, a part of Windows 7. I gotta say, this is pretty nice so far. Though I can’t really comment on stability yet, I would like to point out some nice, new features.

The new system tray is very nice. Click that little arrow, and all your typically unused icons appear in a neat little box. It’s much less clutter. I set up Steam and Twhirl to always be visiible, since I use those all the time. And see that little rectangle in the bottom right corner? Mouse over that to make all windows transparent to see your desktap gadgets. Click it to minimize all.

Shades of Mac OS X, but the new taskbar is great. You can pin programs you always use to the bar itself, and open programs will come and go. I can’t really grab a screen grab to show it, but mousing over an icon gives the Vista style preview. But mousing over the preview gives a full screen preview. Also, mousing over the active IE 8 window gives previews of each open tab.

I like the empahsis on floating gadgets without the dock. They they’ll still sticky to the sides if you like having a sidebar, the aforementioned tranparent to desktop view makes custom layouts of gadgets extremely useful. Also, you can pick a whole bunch of wallpapers, and it will cycle through them. It just did it as I was typing that sentence, in fact. Crazy!

See?! Crazy!

Wordpad actually looks like a word processor now. Handy since my Office 2007 key stopped working after I did a reformat a few weeks ago.

I’ll continue playing with this thing and chime in with more thoughts. Also, I took all these screen grabs with a nifty new utility called the Snipping Tool. Fun and productive!