Back when Microsoft's Julie Larson-Green demonstrated Windows 7's multitouch framework during the All Things Digital conference, many noted the different taskbar that she was using on the demo machine. When Walt Mossberg asked her about it, she smiled and replied "It's something we're working on for Windows 7 and I'm not supposed to talk about right now, today..." Personally, I was quite intrigued by this revamped taskbar, seeing how static and old the current one already is (Windows 95, people). Microsoft has remained mum on the issue ever since, but last Tuesday, the silence was broken when Microsoft's Chaitanya Sareen posted a detailed entry on the taskbar on the Engineering Windows 7 blog.
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Member since:2006-02-05
A) The blog is info on how the windows team works, not specifics. The team was very open with vista, and got alot of expectations raised when they talked about directions they were going, or features they are working on. They have learned from that mistake, and have gone more "opaque".
B) The blog post was very high level about how they are thinking about the taskbar, what usage data they have accumulated, and what user feature requests are most popular. On top of that bulleted list, there is this paragraph
You don't need to read between the lines, they explicitly say that it is just user requests that they are listing, not a feature list for windows 7.
Edited 2008-09-25 19:15 UTC
Member since:2006-01-23
There is a free utility for Windows XP (dunno about Vista) called Taskbar Shuffle that allows you to rearrange your taskbar items. It is very cool.
EDIT:
http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshuffle.htm
Says it works with vista too.
Edited 2008-09-25 20:24 UTC
Member since:2006-01-19
The problem with addons is, that most of the time they work badly.
Take for example virtual desktops.
Practically every Unix and Linux desktop nowadays has it, and it is very useful if you are part of the "has more than 9 applications open" crowd. People who don't need them can switch them off (reduce the number of virtual desktops to one).
There are several applications which try to mimic this behavior under Windows, but all of them ultimately get in trouble with the MS Office MDI philosophy. All open MS Office Documents of one kind can only be on one virtual desktop.
Which is completely killing the concept of virtual desktops. They are needed whenever I have one "USA", one "France" and one "UK" Project, for each Project I open one Spreadsheet, one Word Document and one Presentation, and 5 other Programs.
Gives me a total of 24 open Windows, 8 for each Desktop. I can make a fast and easy switch from one project to the next one in case a colleage busts in and urgently needs to know something, and don't have to search through 24 Windows, which are NOT groupable by project.
So for me THE killer feature of any new taskbar would be virtual desktops.
Making the system tray less noisy (and less spac-wasting) would also be a good idea.
Member since:
2006-05-12
Windows 7 will allow you to re-arrange taskbar entries, that much is clear. Spanning the taskbar across multiple monitors shouldn't be too hard either, and I can even envision a system where each monitor gets its own taskbar
That's complete speculation. If you read the Blog Post carefully, it doesn't tell you they plan to do... They only tell you what kind of feedback they received so far.
Will they act on that feedback? only time will tell.