Sometimes it is the small things: Windows 7 attention to detail

I noticed this today by accident. When you are hovering over taskbar icons in Windows 7, they hover the general color of the icon they contain. You might notice first that my taskbar is a sidebar, this seems to be a really desirable configuration with Windows 7 now that taskbar buttons don’t contain application names anymore.

At first I thought it was possibly doing some color grouping like IE8 does with tabs. Then I noticed the colors matched! I am not sure what the algorithm is, but it looks like it takes the dominant color, and the glow is that color, slick.

That leads me to the topic of this article, attention to detail.

Windows 7 is Polished

Of course these little glows do little to add functional usability to the operating system, but the pop-up windows previews and aero-peek functionality they enable sure do.

Beyond the coolness of them, they are fast and unobtrusive as well. I find myself using them as a faster way to navigate tabs in Internet Explorer as well as to figure out where I am when using several spreadsheets at the same time in Excel.

What’s with all this Transparency?

I kind of thought the same thing too, that was until it came in really handy the other day. My friend Matt was messaging me with Google Chat via the GMail page, and I had no notification of new messages. At least I thought I didn’t. Then I saw the Page Title flashing through the transparent border of the application I was currently working in.

That adds another level of interest for me with transparencies, they allow me to keep a little more of a grasp of what is going on beneath them.

Of course a lot of this is just glitz and splash, but if you give Windows 7 a chance you will find there is a lot of really useful technology hiding all over the place, it may not be a single feature to knock your socks off, but the sum of the parts is one beautiful operating system.

If you aren’t running Windows 7 yet, I have two suggestions:

1. Download Windows 7 RC and upgrade today, it’s baked, it’s solid and it’s totally worth the upgrade.

2. Hit up Amazon or Best Buy and pre-order the upgrade. It’s cheap, $50 cheap for home premium, that’s over half off. Get it before July 11th or it’s going to cost you double.

I know I work for Microsoft, and that makes me seem biased, but try this on for size. I have a Macbook Pro, and I love it, but I recently bought a new PC laptop, installed Windows 7 before I ever booted the OS that came on it, and I use it probably 60% of the time at home.

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