Jeroens blog

I’ve been using windows 7 for 3 days now (on my primary machine), and these are my impressions:

The good:

• It’s eating less resources then Vista – although I can’t imagine you didn’t already know that.
• It looks and feels like Vista, but is just smoother to work with. A lot of attention has been paid to usability, so a lot of the small pains of Vista are gone (the list is really huge). This is probably the biggest reason to switch from Vista, and when still using it XP.
• The new task-bar design feels a little awkward at first, but works really logical, so you’re off with it in an instant.
• No lame sidebar to remove every time you install the OS.
• I didn’t have to install any driver or have problems with internet connection, which I did sometimes with Vista or XP.
• It’s compatible with Vista – all my apps still run on it. This is cause at it’s core Win 7 is really similar to Vista.

The bad:

• Quick-launch is disabled by default. Most people probably won’t miss it, since you can pin items in the task-bar. When you are used to having 12 or 14 items in your quick-launch, which is quite doable in Vista if you have a double height task-bar, you’ll be pretty annoyed though. Luckily, you can enable quick launch, but still it’s not as good as the Vista version. Only one line of quick-launch items is displayed on a task-bar with default height, and only one is added when you double the height. This is really lame, since doubling the height of the task-bar isn’t logical, since it’s already almost as heigh as the double Vista one, and isn’t needed, unless you regularly have a few dozen apps open in your task-bar. What makes it even lamer is that the task bar could display 2 lines of quick-launch items, but simply doesn’t. So apparently I’ll have to be satisfied with only 6 (directly click-able) items in my quick-launch.
• The snap-window feature, or whatever it’s called, that enables you to maximize a window by dragging it to the top of your screen, or putting it half screen by dragging it to one of the edges is nice, but sadly you can’t do this on an edge that has another monitor area next to it.
• Still no way to minimize/maximize (win key + d) all windows on one monitor.

I’m going to wait a little with installing it on my other machines. It’s very likely to make both my Win XP and Vista disks obsolete though. No reason to install Vista any more, and same for XP, which I only used cause Vista used up to much resources. I hope most people will upgrade from XP to Win 7, cause that OS is really getting old, and no matter what most people say – Vista is better, assuming your machine is powerful enough.

Today I had some fun checking out the Google Earth API. You can do a lot of cool things with it, and it’s relatively easy to integrate with Google Maps. Check out this fun demo integration.

I also did some effort to get the hang of KML, which I will need to create Google Earth maps with. The KML Interactive Sampler for Google Earth made this really easy. I’m now going to check out if it’s possible to ‘merge’ Google Maps and Google Earth functionality into one service in Maps. If this is possible, users will just have to add earth=enabled parameter or something like that to their Google Maps wiki code to also enable the Google Earth map type.

Anyway, that’s for tomorrow when I can use both eyes again. Today I messed around a little on the web and came across some interesting apps I didn’t know yet. I also gave up on fixing my Vista Ultimate x64 on my dual core pc. For some reason the drivers keep craching, although I installed the 64 bit versions. Now I have a dual boot with Win XP Corp x64 sp2 and Win Vista Ultimate sp1, which are both working fine. I don’t get why the x64 Vista won’t work, since my dual core is running a x64 XP, and I used the same installer for the Vista as I did on my quad core pc, which is running it without any problems. So lame there is no protableu3 version of FireFox 3,which would make it unnecessary to install all my plugins (Firebug, WebDev, Dictionaries, …) again after reinstalling my OS. Maybe I’ll just do an attempt to make a windows usb stick after win 7 is released

Almost forgot: I registered a profile @ netlog (yeah, I made an account on a social networking site (and not social.msdn ), don’t be schocked!) with the username 600613. WTF @ no one having that one yet xD