Windows 7 first impression

• I like the new task bar
• I like the fact that when I maximize a windows, the task bar and the windows are still transparent
• ISO burning built in yes !
• WMP hidden controls when watching a movie
• IE8 has some issue with msn.ca, but it seem faster than IE7
• "Devices and Printers"

For a beta I'm really impress. Just one bug so far, as with Vista in the beta, the screen saver never start.

There's some unexpected extras, if you resize a window border to the top of the screen or to the taskbar, it maximizes just vertically (kinda like OSX).  Winlogo+arrow keys docks/maximizes/minimizes/restores windows.  Win+space peeks at desktop and gadgets although I really wish you could interact with it, play with a calculator gadget or something.

The biggest downside to this Win7 beta is probably the IE8 build, for something that is supposed to be nearly at RC milestone it runs like crap.  I keep hitting a deadlock freeze, theres tons of render issues, performance is still very bad (cpu usage at idle, lots of memory use).   Hope IE isn't going to delay Win7 ship.  Why browsers require so many resources to render primitive things like text and graphics I'll never know.

CreamFilling512 said:

There's some unexpected extras, if you resize a window border to the top of the screen or to the taskbar, it maximizes just vertically (kinda like OSX).  Winlogo+arrow keys docks/maximizes/minimizes/restores windows.  Win+space peeks at desktop and gadgets although I really wish you could interact with it, play with a calculator gadget or something.

The biggest downside to this Win7 beta is probably the IE8 build, for something that is supposed to be nearly at RC milestone it runs like crap.  I keep hitting a deadlock freeze, theres tons of render issues, performance is still very bad (cpu usage at idle, lots of memory use).   Hope IE isn't going to delay Win7 ship.  Why browsers require so many resources to render primitive things like text and graphics I'll never know.

Take a look at the CSS2 specification which defines the layout of a web-page, it's more complicated than you'd think. Next to LaTeX CSS is properly the most advanced content layout system there is in wide deployment besides the Turing-complete PCL and PostScript.

CreamFilling512 said:

There's some unexpected extras, if you resize a window border to the top of the screen or to the taskbar, it maximizes just vertically (kinda like OSX).  Winlogo+arrow keys docks/maximizes/minimizes/restores windows.  Win+space peeks at desktop and gadgets although I really wish you could interact with it, play with a calculator gadget or something.

The biggest downside to this Win7 beta is probably the IE8 build, for something that is supposed to be nearly at RC milestone it runs like crap.  I keep hitting a deadlock freeze, theres tons of render issues, performance is still very bad (cpu usage at idle, lots of memory use).   Hope IE isn't going to delay Win7 ship.  Why browsers require so many resources to render primitive things like text and graphics I'll never know.

Like on this webpage alone there is tons of little images. Images do take a lot of memory.

Never really thought of css as being advanced, I think its a mess myself..

stevo_ said:

Never really thought of css as being advanced, I think its a mess myself..

It's still advanced tho! A bit curious about how similar XSL-FO and XPS are. XSL-FO has the advantage of being XML based and therefore extensible, compared to CSS. On the other hand CSS could be seen as a DSL. The ideal is to be able to use whichever you like the most - so the extensible format when you need it and the DSL when you don't need extensibility. I wonder if there's already an Mgrammar for CSS.

esoteric said:

stevo_ said:

*snip*

It's still advanced tho! A bit curious about how similar XSL-FO and XPS are. XSL-FO has the advantage of being XML based and therefore extensible, compared to CSS. On the other hand CSS could be seen as a DSL. The ideal is to be able to use whichever you like the most - so the extensible format when you need it and the DSL when you don't need extensibility. I wonder if there's already an Mgrammar for CSS.

CSS is extensible, it allows new properties (provided there is a vendor prefix like "-moz" or "-webkit") and new selectors. You can probably get away with adding your own @blocks too. The specification states that unrecognised syntax should be ignored which makes it future-proof (unless they add in some paradigm-shifting syntax features).

CSS is a DSL, but it isn't programming since it's declaritive. I don't see the point in making everything have an XML syntax. Keep things simple, and CSS's syntax is a lot more simpler than XMLs, tidier, less clutter, and easier to parse (so simple you can write a fairly robust FSM-based parser by hand in a couple of hours).

CSS and XSL-FO serve different purposes. You can apply an XSL-FO to any XHTML or XML document in the same way CSS can; it's just that CSS handles pretty much everything whereas XSL-FO is more of a 'roll-your-own' and seems geared towards fixed-format printing, whereas CSS supports many different media types with different methods of rendering (e.g. paged or continous).

W3bbo said:

CreamFilling512 said:

*snip*

Take a look at the CSS2 specification which defines the layout of a web-page, it's more complicated than you'd think. Next to LaTeX CSS is properly the most advanced content layout system there is in wide deployment besides the Turing-complete PCL and PostScript.

C'mon CSS2 is from 1998 and postscript is far more ancient.  I'm not saying its trivial to implement these things, but there are cell phone browsers using Opera or Webkit that have no issue running in a footprint that is orders of magnitude smaller than IE8.

Things I like

• Snipping Tool.  Yeah, we could already do that with Ctrl-PrintScreen and Paint, but it's nice to have it all in one tool.  
• 7 is a noticeably more responsive than Vista. 
• desktop peek

Annoying things:

• No text next to taskbar buttons by default.  I really don't know the icons for a lot of apps I use.
• moving a window to the top of the screen maximizes it.  It would be nice if I could hold down a key or something to override this as sometimes I just want to move the window to the top of the screen.

spivonious said:

Things I like

• Snipping Tool.  Yeah, we could already do that with Ctrl-PrintScreen and Paint, but it's nice to have it all in one tool.  
• 7 is a noticeably more responsive than Vista. 
• desktop peek

Annoying things:

• No text next to taskbar buttons by default.  I really don't know the icons for a lot of apps I use.
• moving a window to the top of the screen maximizes it.  It would be nice if I could hold down a key or something to override this as sometimes I just want to move the window to the top of the screen.

First impression: the new loading animation is quite snazzy (especially in comparison to Vista's "we forgot to put in the logo" blank screen with progress bar).

Wonder what prompted the change in heart to make them put the snazzy animation during the initial boot process.  The rationale for the blank screen in Vista was that they were trying to save time everywhere they could in the boot process (in fact, the edition of XP was removed from the boot screen in SP2 because detecting it took too much time).

I also find it interesting that it doesn't ask you which edition you want to install (or even for a product key during setup).  Vista and Server 2008 asked you which edition all the way back into the beta and RC releases:  does that mean Microsoft's listened to their customers and is going to ship a single edition of 7?

Installing to a VM right now...  then I shall see how well it works.

CannotResolveSymbol said:

spivonious said:

*snip*

First impression: the new loading animation is quite snazzy (especially in comparison to Vista's "we forgot to put in the logo" blank screen with progress bar).

Wonder what prompted the change in heart to make them put the snazzy animation during the initial boot process.  The rationale for the blank screen in Vista was that they were trying to save time everywhere they could in the boot process (in fact, the edition of XP was removed from the boot screen in SP2 because detecting it took too much time).

I also find it interesting that it doesn't ask you which edition you want to install (or even for a product key during setup).  Vista and Server 2008 asked you which edition all the way back into the beta and RC releases:  does that mean Microsoft's listened to their customers and is going to ship a single edition of 7?

Installing to a VM right now...  then I shall see how well it works.

Setting up personalized settings for Windows Desktop Update?

CreamFilling512 said:

There's some unexpected extras, if you resize a window border to the top of the screen or to the taskbar, it maximizes just vertically (kinda like OSX).  Winlogo+arrow keys docks/maximizes/minimizes/restores windows.  Win+space peeks at desktop and gadgets although I really wish you could interact with it, play with a calculator gadget or something.

The biggest downside to this Win7 beta is probably the IE8 build, for something that is supposed to be nearly at RC milestone it runs like crap.  I keep hitting a deadlock freeze, theres tons of render issues, performance is still very bad (cpu usage at idle, lots of memory use).   Hope IE isn't going to delay Win7 ship.  Why browsers require so many resources to render primitive things like text and graphics I'll never know.

Holy S%&* Win+Arrow keys is cool!

Since they have a mouse gesture to correspond to 3 of those arrows, maybe they should allow dragging a window title bar to the taskbar to minimize it to be consistent.

spivonious said:

Things I like

• Snipping Tool.  Yeah, we could already do that with Ctrl-PrintScreen and Paint, but it's nice to have it all in one tool.  
• 7 is a noticeably more responsive than Vista. 
• desktop peek

Annoying things:

• No text next to taskbar buttons by default.  I really don't know the icons for a lot of apps I use.
• moving a window to the top of the screen maximizes it.  It would be nice if I could hold down a key or something to override this as sometimes I just want to move the window to the top of the screen.

I like the drag to maximize, but I like being able to drag an already maximized window to restore it even better. Its great when I want to peek behind the window to not have to double click then go find the title bar to drag. I can do it all and put it back in one motion.

Ion Todirel said:

lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of UI things done wrong, looks so unfinished, and don't say it's a beta because considering the evolution of Vista those things haven't changed that much

Aaaand...  the USB drive with the VM drive on it just decided it really wanted to be disconnected.

CreamFilling512 said:

There's some unexpected extras, if you resize a window border to the top of the screen or to the taskbar, it maximizes just vertically (kinda like OSX).  Winlogo+arrow keys docks/maximizes/minimizes/restores windows.  Win+space peeks at desktop and gadgets although I really wish you could interact with it, play with a calculator gadget or something.

The biggest downside to this Win7 beta is probably the IE8 build, for something that is supposed to be nearly at RC milestone it runs like crap.  I keep hitting a deadlock freeze, theres tons of render issues, performance is still very bad (cpu usage at idle, lots of memory use).   Hope IE isn't going to delay Win7 ship.  Why browsers require so many resources to render primitive things like text and graphics I'll never know.

I'm finding Flash video to be very jerky. I though maybe it was IE's fault so I installed Firefox but it's nearly as bad there. Silverlight videos on c9 won't play at all, and the WMV download links make WMP error out.

Too, bad. I have this hooked up to my TV and was hoping to watch c9 and other videos on this guy.

spivonious said:

Things I like

• Snipping Tool.  Yeah, we could already do that with Ctrl-PrintScreen and Paint, but it's nice to have it all in one tool.  
• 7 is a noticeably more responsive than Vista. 
• desktop peek

Annoying things:

• No text next to taskbar buttons by default.  I really don't know the icons for a lot of apps I use.
• moving a window to the top of the screen maximizes it.  It would be nice if I could hold down a key or something to override this as sometimes I just want to move the window to the top of the screen.

The new taskbar kind of reminds me of the computers in the movie Idiocracy. You know the people can't read so the computers of the time have big icons and pictures with no text. I always suspected they all used KDE in that movie, but I guess Windows was still around ERRRRRRRRR DAMN KEYBOARD!

What I ment to say was that I love Windows 7 new taskbar and think it's a great invention/innovation, and I promise to defend it religiously until death. The above was just a weird typo. I mean the keys are like right next to each other. Sorry guys!
(Please believe me, saying anything bad about Windows 7 is basically a death sentence on the Internets right now )

CannotResolveSymbol said:

spivonious said:

*snip*

First impression: the new loading animation is quite snazzy (especially in comparison to Vista's "we forgot to put in the logo" blank screen with progress bar).

Wonder what prompted the change in heart to make them put the snazzy animation during the initial boot process.  The rationale for the blank screen in Vista was that they were trying to save time everywhere they could in the boot process (in fact, the edition of XP was removed from the boot screen in SP2 because detecting it took too much time).

I also find it interesting that it doesn't ask you which edition you want to install (or even for a product key during setup).  Vista and Server 2008 asked you which edition all the way back into the beta and RC releases:  does that mean Microsoft's listened to their customers and is going to ship a single edition of 7?

Installing to a VM right now...  then I shall see how well it works.

Okay...  so don't install the VM additions.