Here's some links to reviews/discussions:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/19/windows...-depth-preview/
http://www.winsupersite.com/mobile/wp7_handson.asp
Overall, WP7 actually looks quite good. The UI is pretty interesting - certainly unique and recognizable. The panorama effect is cool, and I like the idea of "hubs" that keep all related information together in one view. Thurrott had a good comparison to the iPhone - instead of separate apps/websites for Flickr, Facebook photos, MobilMe galleries, etc., WP7 just has a "Photos" hub. All your photos from all sources in one place. Slick.
Two downsides that I see with the UI. The big one - it's not clear at all what parts of the UI are tappable buttons/areas and what parts aren't. The UI is largely just flat colors and plain text. Sometimes things are outlined with a rectangle to indicate they're tappable, but not always. I know that's the look they're going for, but they need to do something to make this clearer.
The other downside is that I feel they went a bit overboard with the font size and spacing. There's a lot of empty space on the screen, and combined with the oversize fonts, you can't fit much information. Look at the 6th screenshot from the top of the Engadget review (showing a list of Facebook updates) - the giant "People" header takes up about 25% of all the available screen space, and then the large titles leave little room for actual content. You have a beautiful large display, and you can barely fit 4 short status messages on it at once.
Of course, both of those issues are entirely in software, so they can be changed/fixed down the line.
Otherwise, looks good. I don't know if it's anything that will have people switching away from iPhone/Android in droves, but competition is always good
]]>Seems one fo the things being shown off at the mix10 confernce is IE9
What is known about it so far:
- better standreds support. The first alpha shown had 32 out of 100 on acid3. IE8 has 12
- New javascript engine. IE9 before tested a little slower then firefox 3.6 using the sunspider test
- The entire render engine uses direct2d, which means it's all GPU accelerated
I came across this program recently. All it does is install a service into xp/vista/win7 that allows you to use themes without patching.
So anyone who was scared to mess around with system files no longer has to worry. Noe doe anyone when a service pack comes out
In case anyone wondered how win 7 handles custom visual styles:
]]>About a week ago this weird problem appeared. There was no channel up or down button, no guide button, nor any record button. Only way to switch channels or record was to switch to the guide and back
I manged to fix it. I unistalled media center, rebooted, reinstalled it, rebooted, reinstalled the driver package so my tuner works with media center, then went through a manual setup in media center.
Today, 3 days later, the buttons are gone again
]]>http://windows8center.com/]]>
-Double click the top or bottom border of a window to maximize teh window horizontally
-hold down shift while right clicking a folder will show a number of additional entires "copy path", "open command prompt here" and "open in new process"
-game explorer can accept any sort of shortcut dragged and dropped into it. I use that with chrome's web app ability to play online games (linked directly to naeve's pacman to play pacman in a window)
-Right click menu on the desktop has a "next background image" to allow you to move to th next image in your desktop slide show]]>
Bumptop just unveiled supports for the new multitouch APIs in windows 7. It works just like those cool surface demos showed a few years back.
Now I don't know how useful this is, but demos should be running in every store that sells a mulitouch capable computer. i think in teh very least that will make people go "coool!"
Be sure to watch the video]]>
It breaks the files down into groups (Last Month, Two Months Ago, etc.), but within each group, it sorts by name (with folders sorted before files).
Does anyone else think this is an extremely broken behavior? If I'm sorting by date, I want the information to be sorted such that it's in chronological order in the date column. That's what it does when "show in groups" is off, so why not do the same when it's on?]]>
I actually first got it in the xpize package, which is sort of like a Windows XP HD Remix. Pretty cool.
]]>The only flaw I've found is that if you have grouping enabled, you can't drag a group (since clicking on it opens the popup menu with all the windows).
As a bonus, if you use TweakUI to set the grouping threshold to 2 (so that any app with multiple windows collapses into one button), you'll essentially have the Windows 7 taskbar
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