Well this has been another great day! The focus was on Windows 7 today. I got to play with the HP TouchSmart PC for one thing. It wasn’t as cool as I’d hoped! Touch is a bit laggy and not all that accurate much of the time. Instead of typical touch screen technology (capacitive or resistive) it uses cameras. It can only detect two touch points, but it got confused pretty often.
We talked a lot about the ribbon user interface paradigm as seen in Office 2007, and sometimes called the Fluent UI. It looks like there will be more and more support for it and they really want to see more apps using it. It’s a nice way to lay things out. I’ve used it in sample apps before and it really makes them look polished. Of course part of that it that it’s new, but they are more intuitive than toolbars and more accessible than menus.
Search is always a big deal. I’ve been playing with the federated search providers and they’re pretty nice. I can see them as being a Big Deal(tm) when Windows 7 hits the streets, but at the same time I see them as ultimately disappointing. Yes it’s cool to search Flickr or eBay from Windows Explorer. It’s really cool actually. No ads, no extra time to wait for the page to load, no paging through results in a clunky way… On the other hand though, there is almost zero flexibility. You can’t pass arguments except statically defined in the OSDX file itself. In other words, if you want to search your own Flickr images sometimes, and public ones other times, you’d need two different OSDX files, and therefore two different searches. You can’t even merge searches in order to, for example, search Flickr and DeviantArt at the same time. I can see it being handy to search several stock image sites at once, or multiple eCommerce sites. If you want that, you’d need to implement a search gateway and create an OSDX to that gateway. It’s too bad though. It can have been implemented in order to handle those things. I know that some of it is using the OpenSearch restrictions (though they already have a few extensions there), but they could have created a custom format for advanced capabilities, then support OpenSearch for interoperability.
Finally, I really like the concept of Libraries. I use Windows Home Server, so I have my libraries include my own machine and related locations on the server. When I view the Library (not even talking about searching) I get all files from all locations. I can group by various attributes, sort, show folders or not, and more. I think that this is one killer feature from the user viewpoint that will really make Windows 7 relevant. Unfortunately, they are their own entity, so you need to support them explicitly in your application. For instance, if I want to create a slideshow it would be good to allow a user to specify a location, but from the Common File Dialog, a Library might be selected instead. Now I need to handle both cases differently. A standard path is just a directory, while Library has different attributes and requires that I separates iterate over the member folders. Now I need to keep track of selected location, which could be a folder or could be a Library. If it’s a Library I should get its member folders fresh every time in case the user changes anything. I intend to play with the samples a bit so hopefully it’s not as bad as all that.
They are also continuing to push for better file type support. I can definitely agree with this. Property support for search, preview for Explorer, and thumbnails for icons, should be universal for any modern software. They have a file format verifier that should make it easier to ensure a well-done handler.
Well, tomorrow we should hopefully be working on hardware (didn’t happen today), and more Windows 7. I’ll be back!
posted @ Wednesday, January 28, 2009 9:40 PM