Another day, another keynote. Herded like cattle again, but today I managed to snag a seat towards the back. Little know fact about me: I dislike crowded rooms. Yay for an aisle seat with an escape route! :-P I suspect that today is going to be all about Windows 7, since that seems to be the focus of the talks all day.
Interesting innovations in terms of browsing running apps, documents, etc in the taskbar. Visually, not drastically different from Vista -- some changes, but nothing scary so far. Everything is about usability thus far, and I've not seen any sort of new things for clients to code for. Home networking has gotten a lot easier, which is great. I never had problems with it, but I'm also not the average home user. But it integrates much nicer with other machines on the network. For instance, I can use PC A to play a video that lives on PC B on my XBox. That's pretty neat, but I bet it pisses the RIAA and MPAA off. Good! There have been some additions to personalization which I'm sure others will like. I don't really modify the things they're allowing you to modify. One awesome thing is that the system notification area is now totally customizable. So no more incredibly annoying crap that shows up there which I have no control over. Instead, the items are hidden by default and only I can decide what ones to actually show. There's also a nice addition to the notification system where it queues up the messages instead of them intruding. One thing which delights me is that the Ribbon is expanding from Office and migrating into the OS. So things like Paint now get the Ribbon, which is fantastic.
I'm really glad to see that Microsoft in unapologetic about the pain they brought in Vista for forcing people to deal with non-elevated privileges. Yes, it was painful and they admit it. But it has improved the ecosystem overall, and that's a good thing. They're toning it down a bit, but it's not going to change. The good news is, if you're Vista capable, then you're Windows 7 capable.
New stuff for developers: Ribbon (YAY!), jump lists (taskbar advances, really), multi-touch, ink, speech and improved DirectX support. Sounds like the next generation of GDI (so a step past GDI+). The multi-touch stuff also looks realllllly cool, especially on the awesome hardware they're showing off. :-)
Microsoft is spending a ton of time improving things that they didn't do well in Vista. Lower memory footprint, faster, less power consumption, etc. Oh, a neat concept is the ability to create and work with virtual hard drives. That's frickin fantastic! You can also boot to the frickin things! Remote desktop got better and has multiple monitor support, which was a hit.
Beta early next year, RTM is based on when things are good.
The Windows Live services and Office parts of the keynote had some really fancy collaboration demos, but the talks were still a bit of a snore. Nothing that actually affects REALbasic users, really. Now I'm waiting for the next keynote to start (which is about 20 minutes late because the speakers went a bit long for the first keynote). I'm excited about getting my pre-beta copy of Windows 7 installed. I've got the Mac here, which should be a really interesting experience to put the two together. :-P
Don Box talked about Cloud computing stuff, which I find boring. Except for the fact that Don Box is one of the best presenters you can ever watch. Boring content, awesome presentation.
Lunch was a horrible crush where I felt very much like cattle in a chute. Thankfully, I scarfed my food down and ran to my first session of the day: a look at the Windows 7 Desktop. It's a lunchtime session, so it has no code. The start of the session has basically be a retrospective look at Windows from 1.0 onward. A neat statistic that I've heard before is about how many people actually alter the defaults for their user experience: < 1%. What that means is that, basically, no one changes the default settings for things like auto-hide the task bar, etc. The Aero "peek" functionality is quite awesome. As an avid user of Alt+Tab functionality, but this is something that will probably get me off it. Even cooler -- tabs are peekable too!
After the lunch session, I hung out for a peek at "Oslo", which is a new modeling language. Not much of interest to people using REALbasic, but interesting from a language design perspective (though certainly nothing revolutionary either). I must admit, I was distracted during the talk and didn't really get much out of it aside from the very basics.
I took the last session "off" so that I could do a vendor walk and ask various questions of Microsoft employees. I didn't get all of my questions answered, but I did get a fair number of them. As far as I've been told, there's no plans for application packages like OS X has -- it's just not a part of the ecosystem. Also, (and this was no huge shock), there was no one from the MacBU, but no one on the Office team had any inclination of whether automation support would be added for the Mac version of Office. They thought it was highly unlikely though. I had a few esoteric Windows questions about varying technologies, but I'm still trying to hunt someone down who knows about printing and terminal services. :-P
There was an evening party at Universal Studios for all of the attendees. I hate theme parks, and was extremely tired! So I went back to the hotel, had some chinese food and fell asleep watching Law and Order. It was a good night!
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