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images/news/microsoft.jpgWe’re still in the long dark before 7’s dawn, but the earliest signs are encouraging: a new streamlined kernel, an inbuilt VM for running old software, a revised and simplified UI... there’s every chance that Microsoft intends Windows 7 to rise from the ashes of Vista and be what Mac OS X was for Apple.'
A new look
There’s no doubt that Windows 7.0 will sport a revised interface. It was Sinofky’s winning gamble to give Office 2007 an all-new UI which swapped the decades-old clutter of menus, toolbars, task panes and what-not for a single task-aware ‘ribbon’.
Office 2007’s UI overhaul itself was led by Julie Larson-Green, who (as reported earlier this year) Sikofsky has since tapped to head the “User Experience” program for Windows 7.
Will Windows 7 see as radical a facelift as Office 2007? That’s harder to tell, because the change in Office 2007 wasn’t made for change’s sake: Larsen-Green went back to first principles for the suite, and she’s likely to do exactly the same for Windows. Starting with a clean slate, she’ll be asking what people expect their computer to do, and then how an OS should fit in with that. But its safe to say that feral UI elements such as Vista’s ‘icon overload’ Control Panel are not long for this world.
Roll your own?
The nuked Channel 9 post which placed virtualisation on the Windows 7 blueprint also indicated that the look of the UI would be highly customisable, perhaps implying a de-coupling of the top-most user interface layer from the actual Explorer shell.
(It’s worth noting that Microsoft has already decoupled the ‘Explorer’ shell from the OS in Windows Server 2008, which permits admins to install the core alone - called a ‘Server Core’ install – and then interact with it entirely through the command line or via remote connection from a machine running the m management console.)
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A new look
There’s no doubt that Windows 7.0 will sport a revised interface. It was Sinofky’s winning gamble to give Office 2007 an all-new UI which swapped the decades-old clutter of menus, toolbars, task panes and what-not for a single task-aware ‘ribbon’.
Office 2007’s UI overhaul itself was led by Julie Larson-Green, who (as reported earlier this year) Sikofsky has since tapped to head the “User Experience” program for Windows 7.
Will Windows 7 see as radical a facelift as Office 2007? That’s harder to tell, because the change in Office 2007 wasn’t made for change’s sake: Larsen-Green went back to first principles for the suite, and she’s likely to do exactly the same for Windows. Starting with a clean slate, she’ll be asking what people expect their computer to do, and then how an OS should fit in with that. But its safe to say that feral UI elements such as Vista’s ‘icon overload’ Control Panel are not long for this world.
Roll your own?
The nuked Channel 9 post which placed virtualisation on the Windows 7 blueprint also indicated that the look of the UI would be highly customisable, perhaps implying a de-coupling of the top-most user interface layer from the actual Explorer shell.
(It’s worth noting that Microsoft has already decoupled the ‘Explorer’ shell from the OS in Windows Server 2008, which permits admins to install the core alone - called a ‘Server Core’ install – and then interact with it entirely through the command line or via remote connection from a machine running the m management console.)
Continues Here
