Windows 7 - Great "new" features

Vista was very hyped up while it was being development. It promised many things, but never delivered. This was mainly due to the fact that Vista was too user friendly for its own good, causing more head ache than the promised simplicity.

In the mean time, while everyone has been complaining about Vista, Microsoft has been working on the latest incarnation of Windows, called Windows 7 and making sure that they’ve minimized as much of Vista’s original “problems” as possible.

So which of Windows 7 features will save Microsoft from the depths of Vista’s failures? Why don't you decide and leave a comment?

User –Account Control

Those familiar with Vista will surely be able to tell you how annoying it is every time this feature pops up. The security feature, called the User Account Control (UAC) had good intentions, but ultimately became Vista biggest head ache.

Every time a user changed a setting, the screen would black out and return with a message box confirming the setting change. Once accepted, this would then be followed again with a  screen black out and only then could the user continue. A settings change that could/should have taken you a few seconds now takes half a minute.

Windows 7's fix for this is to give the user more control over the UAC. The user will now be able to specify which events the UAC should activate for. According to Microsoft this should solve the problem.

Taskbar

The biggest change here from Vista is the exclusion of the Quick Launch bar. Windows 7 will now display programs as large Icons, which can be arranged in order as the user likes. A little like another Silicon Valley giant perhaps?

Hover the mouse pointer over the Icon and it will display a thumb nail screen of the current running program.

Homegroup

This is a new home networking feature. It easily finds Windows 7 computers on your home network and the shares media between them. The nice part of the feature is that it only allows home PC’s to connect and won't show once you are on a public network.

To set this up the users should only change their Network Location to home and that’s it. It does allow a lot of customization though, allowing security to be implemented so that a person using your PC’s won’t just be able to work with files on the home network.

Libraries

Instead of having all your documents and multimedia under the famous Documents folder, Libraries will now allow for content to be categorized and managed each in their own Library. These will include the usual music, video, photos, downloads etc. (Another similarity to it's (for the time being) unnamed rival)

Touch Screen capability

With all the rage about touch screen smart phones of late, Microsoft has thought that it would be a great idea to implement into Windows 7, believing that it could take off in the near future.

The feature is great and was cleverly thought out. Swapping between your mouse and the touch screen is as simple as using either. Work with your mouse, then touch the screen, a water drop appears and the mouse pointer disappears.

Touching parts of the screen automatically enlarges the object. For instance, touch the start button and the start menu enlarges slightly to make navigation a lot easier. (Icons getting bigger when hovered over? Apple sure know how to build an operating system and Microsoft's latest (if a little simillar) offering could be one to look out for...)

Cheaper mobile calls are here

There are over a billion land line numbers that you can dial worldwide (350 million in China alone). The number surprised me at first considering the population of the world is 6.7 billion people. The arrival of Voice over IP (VOIP) and with it Skype gave us the ability to talk via the internet allowing huge savings on local and long distance call charges.

When it comes to mobile usage the numbers are a lot bigger as are the call costs. Almost half the population of planet earth use mobile phones. (That's rough 3,5 billion people) Making it the most widely spread technology and the most common electronic device in the world.

Now a service called Fring will allow you to do the same thing that Skype does on your mobile phone. Download the software onto your mobile and then buy data bundles which allow you to call people via the data connection on your phone. As one would expect the quality is not as good as your normal telephone link, but the cost makes up for it.

To give you an idea of the savings from a South African cost perspective, the best deal you can get for data bundles is reportdedly about 20c a Meg in SA, which means you pay about 1c a minute instead of R2-R3 per minute. 

Google voice search..... what next?

Google is really pulling out all the stops when it comes to maintaining the lead in the online and marketing  world. Google has released an application that allows you to do a voice search on the new Apple iPhone. What this means is that you would be able to stand in the centre of, say Times Square or Camden Town, and ask your mobile "Asian restaurant". The phone would be able to direct you to the closest restaurant.

It works with GPS with regards to your location. Brilliant!! The search expands to a whole new list of advertising. What Google can do is charge businesses to expand their range of clientèle. This is the stepping stone to a whole new world in marketing. For more you can read the NY times on this new application.

With this new application and others around the world one is starting to think that the futuristic sci-fi movies are becoming a reality. What are we going to see next?, flying cars? We already see cars that can drive themselves are in the process of being mass produced, The 2008 Opel Vectra, Honda Accord ADAS and that's just to name a few.

Browser Stats

I don't know about everyone else out there, but I am becoming increasing frustrated with having to test web sites in IE6

Surely it is time to call it a day and banish it to browser heaven? The latest browser usage stats from w3schools show it is on a steady decline and now Chrome has been up for a couple of months we can see how it is performing.

Geek out time...

2008	IE7	IE6	Chrome	Fx	Moz	S	O
October	26.9%	20.2%	3.0%	44.0%	0.4%	2.8%	2.2%
September	26.3%	22.3%	3.1%	42.6%	0.5%	2.7%	2.0%
2008	IE7	IE6	IE5	Fx	Moz	S	O
August	26.0%	24.5%	0.1%	43.7%	0.5%	2.6%	2.1%
July	26.4%	25.3%	0.3%	42.6%	0.5%	2.5%	1.9%
June	27.0%	26.5%	0.5%	41.0%	0.5%	2.6%	1.7%
May	26.5%	27.3%	0.7%	39.8%	0.7%	2.4%	1.5%
April	24.9%	28.9%	1.0%	39.1%	0.9%	2.2%	1.4%
March	23.3%	29.5%	1.1%	37.0%	1.1%	2.1%	1.4%
February	22.7%	30.7%	1.3%	36.5%	1.2%	2.0%	1.4%
January	21.2%	32.0%	1.5%	36.4%	1.3%	1.9%	1.4%

Microsoft offers Free Sotware

A couple of weeks ago Aaron, our Head of Technology, wrote a post about saving costs by using Open Source and mentioned that software could be as much as a third of the price of new PC’s and laptops.

Considering all of this, one can quickly understand the large amount of money spent on software and that it could be a difficult situation for small startup companies. Do they go the open source route or do they spend a large amount of their budget on software alone.

Problem solved or at least for small Web start ups. Microsoft announced yesterday that they will start helping small start ups to get off the ground by offering them free licensing as part of a worldwide program called BizSpark.

The program aims to help get small Web start up’s off the ground by offering them free licensing and support for several Microsoft products. The offer to the company will be available for free for three years after which the company then has to start paying for it. Software on offer range from Microsoft Office through to more advanced applications like Visual Studio and SQL Server.

Though this might seem like an amasing gesture by Microsoft, industry watcher says it’s a bold move to help curb the growing number of Open Source users worldwide. Microsoft’s thinking is that any company that has been using Microsoft applications for three years will find it difficult to move to Open Source placing them first in line when the company needs to buy or upgrade their software.

From the outside, this is actually I pretty clever move by Microsoft. It can be seen as short term investments that will pay dividend after three years and at the same time help Microsoft to grow/sustain the user’s worldwide.

Save the Planet with Windows Instant On

Let’s assume you’re a good person who cares about the environment and ultimately planet earth. Because of this you switch off your PC or Laptop, complete shutdown, whenever you are not making use of it. That’s all good for the environment, but within this situation lays a problem. Whenever you need to retrieve something very quickly (quickly being the key term here) from you machine you have to wait quite some time for it to boot up, then you have to log in and then wait for all your services to start before you can resume reasonable interaction.

Problem?  Not for long, as Microsoft has recently been publishing surveys which asks users what they their thoughts are about an “instant on” Operating System. Industry watchers have now said that Microsoft is in actual fact working on an Instant On feature for the next iteration of Windows. This basically means that you will be able to instantly start the OS and work on it.

There is a small downside to this however. The Instant On mode will only support limited functionality,  but even so, this will probably be one of the most useful additions that Microsoft has ever made to the Windows range and at the same time help with Global warming!

Managing e-mail

Not long ago our company mail server grinded to a halt as it reached its maximum storage capacity. After some investigating I was told that I was guilty of having the largest mailbox in the company and that I should do a good clean out.

In my defense there are two reasons for this. The first is that I get copied in on all work requests some of which include very large attachments. But the real reason is that I don’t like deleting e-mails. It has something to do with not deleting the evidence - I’m also a bit of a hoarder.

Did you know?

232.5 billion e-mails are sent daily and 72% of them are spam.
On average corporate users send and receive 133 e-mails a day.

The quantity of e-mail and managing it effectively is clearly an issue that is only going to get bigger and become harder to deal with.

Having recently upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2007, I've found that the search facility  in Outlook 2007 is slow and inadequate. I did some research and found some software that indexes all my e-mail (rather like search engines index webpages) and brings back lightening fast results.

The software is free and is called xobni (inbox written backwards).The best bit about xobni is that the search facility is very quick and intuitive but it also produces some insightful stats. Who mails you most? Who takes the longest to respond? For the record I've got 6 e-mails from the big boss and it took me on average 10 minutes to respond. Also who has kept me waiting longest the longest.(no comment)

It is an anticipated that by next year 41% of our time spent in the office will be spent dealing with e-mails. I think it's probably true already for most of us.

Microsoft adopts open source...

jQuery is a popular open source JavaScript library that has become one of the most popular libraries on the Web in a very short time. The reason for this is that jQuery allows developers to easily find and manipulate HTML elements with a minimum amount of code.

jQuery however, is not only popular under Web developers, Microsoft seems to think it’s a handy tool as well. This was made evident on Sunday when Microsoft announced that they would be shipping jQuery along with Visual Studio from now on.

According to Microsoft, jQuery would make out part of the higher level controls in the ASP.net Ajax Control Toolkit. The jQuery JavaScript library will be distributed as is, with files that will continue to adhere to the jQuery MIT license.

Microsoft is also not the only company to adopt jQuery, as Nokia is also in the process to implement jQeury as part of their application development platform.

Attend PDC to receive your pre-beta Windows 7

If you are lucky enough to find yourself in Los Angeles around the 27th – 30th October, make sure you pop in at the Professional Developers Conference 2008 (PDC 2008). Attending developers will be getting an early version of Windows 7 to take home, according to a blog post by Microsoft.

“With Windows 7 at PDC2008 you will see advances across the full range of Windows--including the kernel, networking, hardware and devices, and user-interface,” Microsoft said.

Microsoft pointed out that Windows 7 won’t include email, photo-editing and movie making applications as reported earlier. These will however be available as downloadable Windows Live applications.

Windows also suggested that a late 2009 release date would be likely for Windows 7.

Windows 7 - some more news

As we have mentioned before, the release of Windows 7 is getting closer and closer. Some reports today revealed some more features that have been incorporated (or omitted) from successor to the the much critiqued Windows Vista.

It has been decided that there will be no programs built into the new operating system that will handle e-mail, movie making or even photo editing as has been customary through all of the Windows operating systems. The software will still be available to Windows Live users and one can't help but think that this is a big push from Microsoft to compete with Google Docs.

According to Windows Vista general manager Brian Hall, Microsoft decided to remove these tools for a host of reasons including a strategy to release its operating systems faster that the Silicon Valley giant is currently accustomed to. It also helps eliminate offering support to what is in essence two programs doing the same thing.