Links: Windows 7, visualizing complexity, Cruz

October 30, 2008 ⋅ 2 Comments »

Ars Technica: First look at Windows 7’s User Interface

Looks like Windows 7 is going to have a bunch of interesting new task management features. (Of course, Microsoft has been pulling the ol’ bait-and-switch on things like since Memphis…we’ll see what actually ships.) The taskbar is getting a complete overhaul: thumbnails and “Jump Lists” look cool. Window management is changing as well; I especially like the ability to dock a window on one half of the screen.

Even if you’re not a Windows user, major new features like this will no doubt influence other platforms.

Engineering Windows 7: The Taskbar

Seeing the Ars article on Windows 7 reminded me about this post that I saw a while back. It sets the context for some of the new task management features. The most interesting part is seeing the statistics on what features of the taskbar are actually used, how many windows people typically have open, etc. This is a bit like the kind of data I’m hoping to collect with my tabbed browsing study.

Why Windows is less secure than Linux

This is brilliant. A graphical visualization of system calls in IIS/Windows vs. Apache/Linux. Full size images: IIS, Apache. (via Greg Wilson & Visual Complexity)

Cruz - A Social Browser for Mac OS X Leopard

Cruz is a new WebKit-based browser written by Todd Ditchendorf, the creator of Fluid. Some cool features: multi-pane browsing, a plugin API, Greasemonkey support, built-in TinyURL support. It’s only at 0.1 now, but I’ll be keeping my eye on this.


2 Comments:

  1. Anand - November 2, 2008:

    Yo, Cool links. Stats on Windows taskbar are interesting.

    Do you know what Cruz is using for their thumbing of URLs in their "enhanced google search"? We wanna do similar in BumpTop. I've seen WebThumb API (down atm) and Amazon's thumbs but you gotta pay a micro amt for each thumb so I'd assume its not that.

    Also, what did you think was so major about the Win 7 UI? I was underwhelmed, pretty incremental I thought. Auto-Window mgmt is a cool start though.

  2. Patrick - November 2, 2008:

    No idea what they're using for their thumbnails. Maybe they are just prefetching and snapshotting off-screen?

    The two-step window switching is a pretty big change. No more text on the taskbar -- you click on your app icon, then choose from one of the thumbnails.

    Jump lists look cool (right click on the icon, and get a list of frequent and recent docs opened by that app). Although, I'm curious how well that would work in practice.

    Adjusting the window size snapping seems like a useful feature; not that major I guess though.