Woody  wrote:
> zoara  wrote:
> 
> > I know a few of you have had a reasonable play with Windows 7, and
> > I'm
> > curious... What stuff has Microsoft done with it that Apple could
> > really
> > learn from for the next version of OSX?
> > 
> > At first I thought I liked the feature where hovering over an app in
> > the
> > taskbar gave you previews of all the app's open windows, but now I'm
> > not
> > so sure; rolling my mouse over the dock would give me a headache,
> > and I
> > have loads of windows open in some apps, which would make the
> > previews
> > very small.
> 
> The previews can be small, but they are live previews and they do
> work.

Can you tell the difference between the previews when an app has (say)
20 or 30 windows open? Exposé allows them to be large enough to tell the
difference as it uses the whole screen, but Windows 7 (presumably) only
let's you have one row.

> It doesn't really give you a headache

So what happens if you quickly roll your mouse across four or five icons
on the task bar? Does it attempt to show previews for all the apps you
roll over (giving a flickering effect) or does it only show previews for
the first and last icon (ie it will only show previews when the mouse is
held over an icon for a short time)?


> > The "throw a window on each side of the screen and have them take up
> > exactly half the space" feature seems useful, in that you can
> > quickly
> > set up two windows to be visible rather than spending (slightly)
> > more
> > time arranging them manually to avoid overlap. Is it useful in
> > practice?
> 
> I don't like the snap to full size option. i didn't know there was a
> half size option.

I don't like the fullscreen option either; you lose more than you gain.
But the halfscreen option might be useful.
 
> > Everything else I have heard of that seems interesting appears to be
> > a
> > second-rate copy of OSX features. That Exposé "show the desktop"
> > feature
> > (Aero Peek?) seems very badly thought-out; why do they leave the
> > outlines of all the windows onscreen?
> > 
> > I'd be interested in hearing the "highlights" from a Mac user's
> > perspective...
> 
> I have been using windows 7 for quite a while (I am one of the
> official
> beta testers, rather than the random downloads) and it is definately
> one
> of microsofts best to date. Some of the things they have done are
> great.

That's the impression I've been getting (and what prompted my question).
It's not OSX but could be a very decent alternative.

 
> Some of the things they have done that echo what has happened in a way
> on OSX are going to irritate windows users, like the search and the
> abstraction away from the file system.

Didn't they irritate Mac users when they were first introduced though?
 
> There are things that apple should copy which I like, such as the
> overwrite dialogs when you copy something from one place to another
> and
> get told it already exists there, giving you the option to overwrite,
> cancel or copy with a different filename.

Yeah, that's definitely a good one.

> I believe it was a vista
> feature anyway, but all the vista features work better in 7. Apart
> from
> search.

Search? What's the story there?

 
> Ultimately there is nothing that makes me want to use it more than
> OSX,
> but there are somethings that make using it better than the previous
> windows.

Other than the overwrite dialogs, you haven't mentioned any. Is that
because they are few and far between or some other reason?

I was hoping for this thread to provide a wealth of clever features that
I could spend time hoping that Apple would implement, but there doesn't
seem to be much...

    -zoara-

-- 
email: nettid1 at fastmail dot fm