Scott Hanselman

I'm digging Windows 7 more and more. So much so, that I'm watching out for apps that use new features like Jump Lists, Libraries, Power Management, Taskbar Progress Bars, Icon overlays, Multitouch, Ribbon, High DPI, Sensors, Locations, etc. I thought I'd start a post listing the applications that are using new features in Windows 7. Basically what apps "Light up" on Windows 7.

Yes, I realize that this list will soon (weeks? months?) include every Windows app, but it's nice to have it now while we're all playing with our shiny new toys.

Here's the ones that I've noticed. Add the ones you've found in the comments and I'll update the list!

Gmail Notifier Plus

This little app sits in your Windows 7 "Superbar" and checks your Gmail. You get tasks as well as a list of your unread email and a preview of each mail. There's even a nice little number overlay showing the number of unread mail.

WinSnap

This is a screen capture utility and when it's pinned to the Taskbar it gives you a JumpList for taking screenshots.

Google Chrome 4 and Internet Explorer 8 and FireFox 3.6 (Daily Alpha Build)

As of this writing, both IE8 and Google Chrome have Windows 7 features. Chrome includes JumpLists and Tasks and IE8 supports not only those, but also Aero Previews of individual tabs (rather than just windows.) Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 also includes just the Tab Preview feature. Now that Windows 7 is out, I'd expect everyone to start ramping up the UX (User Experience) to get lit-up on 7.

The preview of individual tabs keeps me coming back to IE8. It's a REALLY nice feature and it's hard to get along without it.

One subtle but irritating thing I did notice, was that the Aero Previews for Firefox 3.61a1 (build 2) are really unclear and poorly dithered. Here's an IE8 preview showing cnn.com next to FireFox showing the same page.

I'm sure they'll fix it, but it's irritating to my eye. I immediately noticed it. I'll add Chrome whenever they add this feature.

IE8

Firefox 3.6a1 build 2

Zune 4 and (kinda) iTunes 9

Zune 4 includes Quickplay and Smart DJ tasks, and iTunes just includes two hard-coded tasks. Zune also ups the Win7 ante with its smaller and docked and minimized view, which is the hotness.

iTunes also supports some Taskbar controls, but misses the point but not putting Album pictures in the Taskbar Preview.

Windows Live Messenger

I have a love-hate relationship with the current Windows Live Messenger. Initially I was really mad that (on 7) it wouldn't minimize to the tray (that thing next to the clock, not really called the tray, but I will call it that, so meh on you). Instead, it sticks around the Taskbar forever. While I understand that Windows 7 has a new UX aesthetic, I would appreciate an option. At this point, the option is to right-click on the icon, click Compatibility and basically lie to it, telling Messenger that it is running on Vista. Of course, then you lose the Windows 7 features, like the very full-featured Jump Lists:

Paint.NET 3.5 Alpha

"The latest alpha build of Paint.NET v3.5 will now use DirectWrite instead of GDI for the Text tool if you are running Windows 7. Get it while it’s hot."

This means that Paint.NET 3.5 not only looks better on Windows 7 (and certainly different than it used to look) but it's also crazy fast. Be sure to try the multi-threaded Font Dropdown as well.

Expression Encoder 3

I encode most of my videos using Expression Encoder and it lights up the Taskbar button with a progress bar letting me know how far along it is without me having to restore the main window.

ImgBurn

Even though DVD/CD ISO Image Burning is built into Windows 7, I still like the UI and additional information that ImgBurn provides. It also uses the Taskbar button as a Progress Bar which is a subtle, but nice touch.

WinZip 14

WinZip 14 ups the ante with not only support for JumpLists, but also Touch Screen support (!), Libraries and Explorer Preview. The Explorer Preview support may be enough for me to move away from 7-zip, although if you keep your zip files associated with Explorer they'll be openable as folders on the left pane, so it's a toss-up. It also includes interestingly, features to "Zip My Documents" as well as a half-dozen other one-click options to Zip up various "My" folders. A nice touch. Note, don't just click through their installer, as it installs Google Toolbar unless you say otherwise.

AusLogics Disk Defrag

Disk Defrag 3 from Auslogics has a very clean interface...it looks like I wish Win7's defrag looks, although I understand that most people don't want all the details and pictures. It also includes Progress Bar integration and a little overlay to tell you it's running as Admin. It's FREE for Home Users.

PowerArchiver

I tend to lean towards 7-zip for its minimalist UI, but PowerArchiver has JumpLists and Icon Overlays. Oddly, they call the Win7-looking interface the "Power Users Interface," presumably as to avoid freaking out your grandpa who's zipping stuff up with the Classic Interface. The whole package is close but not 100%. For example, they use an icon overlay during an extract rather than a progress bar. That's just wrong, and it should be fixed ASAP.

Trillian Astra 4.1

Trillian is an IM and Chat client that integrates with Google, Windows Live Messenger, Facebook and more. I find it a little TOO out there from an interface perspective for my tastes, but many people swear by it. I like my apps to be a little Vanilla, or French Vanilla. Trillian is Rocky Road Chocolate and flaunts it. The new 4.1 version has Jump Lists, File Transfer Progress Bars, and even a Taskbar Preview of Video Calls in progress, which is a nice touch (I'm talking to you, Skype).

Basically anything with a Recent Items List

Make sure to right click on most of your apps in the Taskbar. The ones that include a "Recent Items List" will usually get a free JumpList not only in the Taskbar, but also the Start Menu.

Ok, what apps did I miss?

Related Links

• Top 10 Tips Working Developers Should Know about Windows 7
• The Weekly Source Code 45 - Kicking Butt on Windows 7 *and* Windows XP
• Windows 7 Easy Upgrade Path Truth Table/Chart
• Windows 7 Online Training
• Windows 7 UX Guide
• Less Virtual, More Machine - Windows 7 and the magic of Boot to VHD

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

What do you get when you put Spolsky, Atwood, Blyth, and Hanselman in the same room? A crazy Content-Free podcast recorded backstage at the San Francisco DevDays conference.

The video is up at Channel 9, and the audio will be up on Hanselminutes and in the RSS Podcast Feed in the morning. The audio for the actual podcast will include tracks from three locations and will likely be a LOT better, however, be warned, this episode runs a bit longer than usual and the sound quality isn't up to our usual standards.

Warning: extreme ramblosity ahead!

• Joel explains his Duct Tape Programmer post. Apparently DevDays is a duct tape conference, and this section of the recording is a duct tape podcast.
• Some discussion of the ubiquity of mobile code. Also, if you are nostalgic for the era “when development was hard”, the consensus is that you should be doing mobile development today on iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, or Symbian.
• Rory elaborates on his experience with (and effusive opinions on) iPhone development to date. Is coding in Objective-C best accompanied by a flux capacitor, New Coke, and Max Headroom? Also, his excitement for MonoTouch.
• Joel and Scott put on their amateur language designer hats and have a spirited discussion of type inference and Fog Creek’s in-house DSL, Wasabi.
• Scott covers some of the highlights of new and shiny features coming in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE, the C# 4.0 language, and the ASP.NET MVC 2.0 web framework.

Enjoy! You've been warned.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

Who loves you? Not only is Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 now available for everyone to download (not just subscribers) but I've got 11 short video interviews with the ASP.NET 4 team up on Channel 9.

I was up in Redmond just last week and made sure to stop by the offices of as many ASP.NET developers and program managers as I could. I chatted with a few faces you may recognize and a few you may not. All of them are working hard to make ASP.NET 4 cool.

I'm still working on my video techniques, and I used two different HD cameras to film these videos. Your feedback (negative AND positive) is always appreciated.

This series of videos is called Hanselminutes on 9 and you can get to all of these (and many more) using the Channel 9 Tag "hanselminuteson9." You can also subscribe via RSS to just those videos. There are also iPod, Zune, PSP and large WMV versions of every video to download as well as basic MP3's if you just want audio.

Enjoy!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

Lots of big stuff happening this week. Today Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is available to MSDN Subscribers and it'll be available for everyone on Wednesday.

I'm running Beta 2 on all my machines now and really digging it. It's much faster than Beta 1 and I'm doing all my work in it now. It's come a long way and I'm really impressed at the polish.

.NET 4

This is a big deal. This isn't ".NET 3.6" - there are a lot of improvements of .NET 4, and it's not just "pile on a bunch of features so you get overwhelmed." I've been working with and talking to many of the teams involved and even though it's a cheesy thing to say, this is a really customer-focused release.

Shouldn't every release be that way? Sure, and in this case there's a really clear focus on, as I like to say, "making the Legos the right size." This is as much about tightening screws as it is about adding new features.

There's more goodness that I can put in one post, but some personal favorite highlights are:

• Quicker to Install - A smaller Client Profile with a much smaller initial download (down to 0.8 megs from 2.8) for bootstrapping .NET client apps faster than ever)
• Side by Side - .NET 4 is a side-by-side release that doesn't auto-promote, meaning you won't break existing apps and you can have .NET 2.0, 3.5 and 4 apps on the same machine, happily.
  • Side-by-side CLR support for managed add-ins inside of apps like Explorer or Outlook. Again, new and existing apps in the same process, chillin'.
  • For more details on Application Compatibilty, check out the AppCompat Walkthrough for .NET 4 on MSDN.
• Dynamic Language Support - The DLR (Dynamic language runtime) ships built-in with .NET 4 so you can mix-and-match your solutions and pick the best language (or languages) amongst C# and VB.NET as well as F#, IronPython and IronRuby. This includes better support for COM (yes, COM! People do use COM and it's even easier with the new dynamic keyword in C# these days.)
• More Web Standards Support - Better support for WS-* and REST making interop easier. (I love ADO.NET Data Services, but you know that already, Dear Reader. I'm a bit of a RESTafarian, these days.)
• Plugins Galore - Visual Studio 2010 uses MEF and WPF to enable a whole new world of clean managed extensions as well as an Online Gallery (there's an extension for that!)
• Multi-Framework Multi-targeting - You can't really overestimate how useful this is, but a picture is worth a thousand words. You can code all your apps in all your organization's frameworks with the same IDE:
  

Keep an eye on the blogs this week as the various teams talk about their favorite features.

On the ASP.NET 4 side:

• I'll be posting video interviews with the actual ASP.NET 4 developers all week on Hanselminutes on 9 up on MSDN's Channel9 so watch for those.
• Joe and I will also start populating the Learn section of ASP.NET with new ASP.NET 4 videos between now and Christmas as well.
• And of course, @ScottGu is continuing his series of ASP.NET 4 Tutorials, so watch his constantly updated rollup post. He's currently on #8!

Oh, yes, one other thing…

Fresh Look

You may notice a few things in the new Splash Screen above. There's a new Visual Studio logo that goes nicely as well as a new logo for MSDN. You probably heard that we launched a new MSDN this weekend and today we add the new logo and background. This new MSDN is the beginning of a more agile, community focused MSDN and you should expect to see and hear of cool stuff coming from the team, often, in the months to come. Of note will be the new MSDN Lightweight view, soon to be the default view for the library. 

In the coming weeks I'll dig into more details on the these new things and how they work together:

• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4
• Windows 7
• Microsoft Developer Network

Enjoy! Also, be sure to check out Soma's blog post and go get Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 as soon as you can!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

I'm up in Redmond this week and I stopped by to abuse the folks at CodePlex.com. I got to see their hardware, build servers, server room and more. You can even see how they abuse the test team. Lots of fun with Sara, Jonathan and the Whole Codeplex.com Team.

Also, while you're watching, I'd encourage you to check out my other Channel 9 video interviews, including:

• Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood preparing for StackOverflow Keynote
• ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 1 with Phil Haack and Virtual Scott
• Phil Haack on the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release
• Brad Wilson has Lunch
• Rob Conery and the MVC Storefront
• Johnny Lee on Computer Vision (Project Natal prescience)
• Eilon Lipton and the ASP.NET MVC Rumors
• Chris Sells on Managing People and Your Time
• The Death of the Professional Conference Speaker
• The Nerds of Tomorrow
• Inside Secret Microsoft Meeting Rooms - What Laptop do Alpha Geeks Use?
• The .NET Micro Framework with Colin Miller
• Storyteller with Jeremy Miller
• Why Aren't There More WinForms Talks with Rocky Lhotka
• What is Productivity?
• Tour of Fog Creek Software with Joel Spolsky

Enjoy!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By