And yet some more information about Windows 7 has found its way to users. Ars Technica is present at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference, and they dove into the new Device Stage feature, as well as the new Libraries feature in the Windows Explorer file manager.
On Windows, plugging a device or peripheral into the computer could result in different types of actions, and sometimes, it was not clear how to get to the functionality a device provided. Devices that provided multiple functions, like a combined scanner/printer/fax, would show up as multiple different devices, making everything look a tad bit messy. Enter Device Stage.
Device Stage is a place where each device gets its own entry, and all its functionality can be accessed from one place. Manufacturers can brand their device’s page. HP can, for instance, add a banner with a photo of the printer, and add links to cartridge suppliers. You can also edit what applications a device will use – you can set a Canon scanner to use the manufacturer’s tool, or the built-in Windows tool. These customisations are stored in an XML file, so they should be easy to make. Microsoft is planning on offering a public repository filled with these XML definition files, so that they can be downloaded much like a driver is downloaded from Windows Update.
The new Libraries feature in Windows Explorer are similar to saved searches, with the difference being that you can write to them (you can specify the write location). A library is created by adding ‘sources’ to the library, after which you can sort in whatever way you want, very similar to early demonstrations of WinFS from 2003. Since I store all my media on a (shared across the network) external USB hard drive, this feature allows me to combine the content on my external hard drive with that on my normal, internal drive. In addition, when my laptops are also equipped with Windows 7, I can create libraries on them that span across the network.
Media Player and Media Center use the same libraries as the ones in Explorer, creating a more consistent experience. Ars does note a problem when it comes to Libraries in combination with email and contacts – while Vista Mail and Vista Contacts use individual files for emails and contacts, Live Mail uses a database, and doesn’t work with Libraries.
Device stage is sort of expected since this is a “polish the UI” release, but I had written off libraries as yet another search folder implementation, which I have found useless on every OS I have used it on. I’ll reserve final judgement until I can actually play around with them, but this shows alot of promise
Great presentation skills.
Anyway it’s been a long time since I’ve seen something really promising coming from MS. I like the way MS is finally looking back on some things which weren’t that great and trying to make things up in the next release of Windows.
and more and more Windows is trying to be like BeOS with the glitz of MacOS X’s UI.
This ain’t a bad thing, though.
The better Windows becomes, the better the competition must become, so go Windows 7! ( hehe )
–The loon
I agree, MacOS X already showed that the assumption “eye pleasing graphics + ease of use != system security, versatility, and stability” was flawed and you COULD do better.
Windows 7 building on top of the great (IMHO) under-the-hood changes Vista pioneered for the desktop Windows OS system, optimizing performance, focusing on usability and UI consistency, will not only be good news for Windows users, but for Linux users too as IMHO will motivate the OSS to leapfrog their competition (and this will be good news for everyone).
In theory, yes. However, to this day, a tagging system like the one that exists in Vista has yet to be integrated in eg. Gnome.
Nautilus also needs some work if Gnome wants to compete with Windows 7 – this library thing looks really nice.
“I agree, MacOS X already showed that the assumption “eye pleasing graphics + ease of use != system security, versatility, and stability” was flawed and you COULD do better.”
OS X can be eye pleasing, yes. Ease of use? I know I will get slammed for this, but that is a personal opinion and subjective. It is a confusing and frustrating UI, unless you have used nothing but OS X.
You mean, it’s confusing and frustrating if you’ve only ever used Windows — If you’ve a wider experience than Windows alone, that includes Unix, Linux, Amiga OS, RISC OS, BeOS and so on, then OS X is not out of place.
Windows is like Photoshop. It’s bad UI to begin with, but you just slog through it until you know it well, and then you’re unable to understand anything alternative.
“You mean, it’s confusing and frustrating if you’ve only ever used Windows — If you’ve a wider experience than Windows alone, that includes Unix, Linux, Amiga OS, RISC OS, BeOS and so on, then OS X is not out of place.”
Well, again, that is your opinion and I respect that. I use Linux, Unix, Windows, and even OS X, and have used OS 9 prior to. BeOS never booted an any hardware I had so could never try it out. I still think the OS X UI is a usability nightmare, not that Windows and the like are all that much better depending who is using them.
The Gnome developers are only going to reimplement features that people actually use in Vista and Windows 7. Tags ended off being a bit of a fad, and I don’t know anyone who uses them on desktop files. Device Stage could be another one of those features. Multi-touch is likely to be the exception to the rule; I’m sure Gnome will get some multi-touch capabilities before everyone realises that they hate leaving fingerprints on their monitors 🙂
How is that different from smart folders (with the exception that you have to add folders to libraries manually, which sounds cumbersome)? Another badly copied feature?