The Ups and Downs of Windows 7
April 16, 2009 Software Review
Windows 7: The Ups
It’s one of the more maligned features of Windows 7: The new Taskbar. There is no longer the uncomfortable mental leap from where you clicked when you wanted to start a program to where you clicked when wanting to access a running instance. With Windows 7, these are one in the same. The difference between running and non-running applications has become irrelevant.
With Windows 7 you longer have to hunt through your Taskbar entries to find a running instance of a program. Each pinned Taskbar item remains exactly where you left it, making it easy to find frequently used applications. And because both running and non-running items use the same, fixed icon, which is always pinned in the same, fixed location, you’ll know exactly where to go each time.
Windows 7: The Downs
The new Taskbar is truly a leap forward in UI design. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the revised Explorer UI as a whole. For example, like the Status Bar, are simply holdovers from the XP UI; the new Details pane, first introduced with Vista, makes this mechanism almost entirely redundant. The revised task panes on the left side of the Control Panel, either display them all the time (as is the case within the various Control Panel subfolders), or not at all (such as in the top-level Control Panel folder). This behaviour is confusing and inconsistent.
