Photo courtesy of Alex Brown Photography.
Tag: Windows
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Taking Windows 7 for a Spin
I had my first look at the next version of Windows – Windows 7 – at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles back in October, a week after I joined the company. By the powers vested in me as a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft, I got my paws on an installer for a recent beta edition and a spare machine – a Dell Latitude D830 with a 2GHz Core Duo processor and 4GB RAM — on which to take the new operating system for a test run.
The installation of the Windows 7 beta went considerably better than my experience installing the Windows Vista beta back in 2006: this time, it worked.
Over the next little while, I’m going to spend some time – perhaps a day a week – doing actual daily work on the Windows 7 machine in order to really experience it. It’ll also give me a chance to try out some “developing for Windows 7” example code. I’ll post my observations here on Global Nerdy – at least as much as the non-disclosure rules allow.
Links
- The Engineering Windows 7 blog
- Global Nerdy: Area Man Attempts to Install Windows Vista; Results Disappointing
- Ars Technica: First Look at Windows 7’s User Interface
- InformationWeek: Why So Little Buzz Surrounding Windows 7?
…and hilarity ensues:
Links
- The Onion: OS X Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7
- Apple’s page on Mac OS X “Snow Leopard”
- Microsoft’s site on Windows 7
Technorati Tags: It’s Funny Because It’s True,operating systems,Apple,Microsoft,OS X,Windows,Snow Leopard,Windows 7,The Onion
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“Windows 7”, Eh?
Purported Windows 7 screenshot, taken from MegaLeecher.net.
More will be revealed at the upcoming PDC (Professional Developers Conference) and WinHEC (Windows Hardware Engineering Conference), but for now, we know the name of the next version of Windows: Windows 7. The only other hint that Mike Nash drops in his post on the Vista team blog is that the goal for this version is to:
“stay firmly rooted in our aspirations for Windows Vista, while evolving and refining the substantial investments in platform technology in Windows Vista into the next generation of Windows.”
which I interpret as: “It’ll be the Vista we should’ve made.” For their sake, I hope so.
As for the name, it may not be as aspirational or inspirational as “Vista”, but it’s probably a good idea for Microsoft to adopt an “under-promise and over-deliver” strategy.
c|net cites an Evans Data report: “A recent report from Evans Data shows fewer than one in 10 software developers writing applications for Windows Vista this year. Eight percent. This is perhaps made even worse by the corresponding data that shows 49 percent of developers writing applications for Windows XP.” Here’s VentureBeat’s take on this report.
Eric Sink on Windows XP and Listening to Customers: “My overall posture toward Microsoft is still friendly. I still use Windows every day…I’ve used Vista, and while I didn’t find it to be a compelling “must-have” upgrade, I rather liked it. But none of this means that I’m going to give my blanket agreement to every decision Microsoft makes. In this case, I object to Microsoft’s plan, not because Vista is so awful, but rather, because ignoring customers is so wrong.”
When I moved to my current position as Nerd Wrangler at b5media, I arrived to discover that the computer waiting for me was a Toshiba P200, a 17″ beast of a laptop that I’ve named “The Coffee Table”. This is the first time in about 5 years that I’ve worked with Windows as my primary operating system, and after a month in Vista, my feelings about operating systems are pretty much summarized by the picture below:
More on my experiences in a later post.
[Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.]