November 1st, 2008Windows 7 Pre Beta Released to Developers
Microsoft has been busy showing journalists some interesting bits of Windows 7, which you can expect to see on a new PC near you sometime in 2010 or 11, probably… Anyway, the OS still very much in its early stages of development is now being made available to developers to tinker with. Most of the new features have been heavily trailed so there’s no big surprises but the Touch screen stuff does look very impressive. It’s all very Minority Report, with lots of finger wiggling and hand movements, making things whizz around the screen, and pictures twist, tumble, enlarge and reduce, the only thing it doesn’t do is clean off the sticky finger marks afterwards…
Some other things we can be fairly sure about is that it will be very good at handling multimedia content, and a clever idea called Play To lets you send music and video from your W7 PC directly to suitably equipped and networked audio system and TV, rather than having to mess around copying or transferring files. There’s a lot of talk about ‘Mesh’ and ‘Cloud’ computing, which basically means trusting all of your data to remote servers and using on-line applications, rather than installing software on your computer. It means you can access your work anywhere but I I’ll need a lot of convincing before I trust my important data to the ether…. Two features that I would liked to have seen don’t appear to have made the cut, and they are Instant On and support for mobile broadband, but it’s still early days, so who knows.
Tags: Computer, Microsoft, Multimedia, support, Windows, Windows 7
