My co-workers are hilarious. It’s a Microsoft-centric startup, so they’re not shy with stuff that comes out of the factory. Apparently as soon as the Vista beta came out, all the developers save one were using it on their workstations. Well now we’re doing the same thing with windows 7. One of us is running the 32 bit version, I’m sporting x64, and the other is running it on his Macbook Pro. Talk about early adopters.

I decided to take the plunge after I read my third or fourth review that detailed some of the UI enhancements. I may be off base here but it seems that the majority of changes involve the UI in one respect or another. This is a welcome change in my opinion; MSFT rarely does things that break backwards compatibility, so if they’re going to improve Vista quickly, it makes sense to focus primarily on the UI. Improving performance shouldn’t hurt either…

What’s new? To me it looks like Windows 7 and OS X are converging, usability wise. Some of the most obvious enhancements include a new start bar that resembles the dock (icons instead of buttons), and some window management features that resemble Expose.  There are some nice keyboard shortcuts that arguably should have been available years ago, but it’s definitely nice to see improvements where they come. Start-Up now maximizes the current window, Start-Right/Left maximizes it to fit exactly the left or right half of the screen. Not (half) bad. When do you suppose Apple will add a similar feature to Expose?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 9:37 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.