The Minority Report

Looks like Sinofsky and the boys have been busy and busy listening to the critics that say that the Windows 7 Engineering team isn’t providing enough feedback to the beta testers (and world) about what’s being fixed due to comments and bug reports.

Personally, I would like to see the list that Long Zheng put together on the Aero Taskforce. If you don’t know, Long put together a site that you could submit and rate tiny UI bugs, problems and gotchas in Windows Vista. I think the site is awesome and wonder frequently if the Windows 7 Engineering team used that site at all and if they fixed any of the little bugaboos from that list.

Now I think they likely did but I wish there was confirmation.

There are a ton of items that were fixed/improved but I pulled this one cause it’s little but cool. “One can still quickly flip between and cycle through running windows using the ALT+TAB keys, but when more window information is needed Aero Peek will appear. This is triggered by a time delay as you pause while keyboarding through running windows”.

Today’s post is from Chaitanya, who has previously posted on some of the core user interface work. –Steven

This blog post talks about a few of the improvements that will be in our Release Candidate (RC) based upon customer feedback. There are many under the hood changes (bug fixes, compatibility fixes, performance improvements, and improvements) across the entire dev team that we just don’t have room to discuss here, but we thought you’d enjoy a taste of some changes made by three of our feature teams: Core User Experience, Find & Organize and Devices & Media. The comments in this article come from a variety of verbatim sources, with identifying information withheld.

Desktop Experience

1. Windows Flip (ALT + TAB) with Aero Peek

We’ve received overwhelmingly positive feedback about Aero Peek and how it helps customers switch windows with increased confidence. Daniel wrote to tell us “I’m wondering why Peek was never implemented for the ALT + TAB window. The thumbnails look/behave the same way as the taskbar thumbnails when you hover the mouse over them. It seems logical that they would exhibit the peek behavior, too”. We decided to make this change since we heard many requests for it. One can still quickly flip between and cycle through running windows using the ALT+TAB keys, but when more window information is needed Aero Peek will appear. This is triggered by a time delay as you pause while keyboarding through running windows.

Fig 1.

Aero Peek triggered from Windows Flip (ALT+TAB)

Engineering Windows 7 : Some Changes Since Beta for the RC

p.s. That Steven Sinofsky cat seems to be the real deal. I vote him in charge of all software development in Redmond.