I was out at Gartner ITExpo this past week, where I got to see a hands-on preview of the new Windows, due out some time this decade. It was OK. Major points:
They’re using thumbnail images for everything: hover over an item in the taskbar, and instead of a tooltip you get a thumbnail image of the window it represents. Use alt-tab to switch windows and get a thumbnail image of each window you’re switching between, instead of just icons of the apps. Open a file folder and the document icons are thumbnails of the documents (note: Nautilus has had this since 2000; it’s not that helpful, although it’s nice for image browsing).
They are using 3d somewhat effectively: hit Win-Tab instead of Alt-Tab, and all the windows line up and turn on their sides at a 45 degree angle so you can scroll easily among them with the scroll wheel. That’s a nice touch, although something of a gimmick and no more effective than Alt-Tab.
Search is everywhere: this is the really hyped one. Obviously there’s a search bar in every file browser window. But also there’s a search bar in the control center, so if you can’t remember where the parental controls are, you can search for “parent” or “child” or “security” and it will show you the relevant items. All the apps and so forth have metadata assigned to their launchers, apparently. In the file browser (Windows Explorer, I guess), the data columns include things like “Document Author” and there are extensive grouping and sorting options, as well as searching by metadata. I wondered where all this metadata came from. You can apparently assign keywords to files, but do you have to do that to each file for all this new search to be useful? If so, lame. If not, what do they use to magically generate data? I know Office assigns Author keywords to its files… but is that it? Is that the extent of the metadata magic?
Oh, and they have virtual folders (saved searches) in the file browser. That’s nice, although I doubt it’ll get used that much.
One neat thing in Explorer that Nautilus could use is, when you select a file, you get a little extra info about it in the sidebar. A larger thumbnail, some metadata, the “detail” view. That’s a nice feature. Nothing revolutionary though.
IE has been updated: Oooh, tabbed browsing, nice to see they’ve got that finally. One good addition is a tab that shows thumbnails (here they are again!) of all the tabs you have open, so you can switch easily between them. Not a killer feature, but a nice touch. In addition, where Ctrl+ or Ctrl- in Firefox just changes the font size, it handles full-page zooming in IE– including enlarging images, so they whole page remains proportional. That’s clever. Firefox has an image-zoom plugin, but it’s not integrated like that. IE has also added heuristics-based anti-phishing tools to warn you about suspicious sites. That could be helpful, but I’d hate to be the legitimate bank that got tagged by that.
Secretly Ironic 