istartedsomething

Here’s a bit of fun. Take a good look at this screenshot to find out why I’m excited about the new find and organize features in Windows 7. See if you can figure out what makes this special and why there’s tremendous opportunities here for developers and end-users. More detail in the next couple of days. (P.S. Flickr API is fun.)

Yes, the rumors are true, I have a fetish for icons. Earlier this week, Microsoft’s Steve Clayton teased us with a small thumbnail of the new Windows Live Wave 3 product icons and since then I’ve made it a quest of mine to showcase them in their original high-resolution glory. With the help of Windows Live community manager Marcus Schmidt, my quest is complete and my icon hunting skill points have doubled. Here they are for your visual indulgence.

My favorite would have to be the simplistic yet iconic (pun) Live Photo Gallery icon, and least favorite the Live Spaces icon which is overly complex.

If you have had any theories Microsoft was conspiring with the media conglomerates to protect their interests and not the user’s, throw them in the bin, pour jet fuel and remotely detonate them since Microsoft can’t be any bolder than building in DivX and Xvid native support in Windows 7. Yes, all your favorite Family Guy episodes will play in Windows Media Player. Yes I’m looking at you. You may have also heard there’s native H.264 and AAC support. But that’s not all. After all, decoding is only one part of the equation.

In a presentation titled “Video Improvements In Windows 7” at WinHEC 2008, Microsoft also revealed new encoding and similarly transcoding capabilities in Windows 7. The new “Media Foundation” decoders are as follows,

In Windows 7, encoding is extended to widely adopted MPEG-4 and 3GPP standards with H.264 video and AAC audio encoders built in, on top of the WMV, WMA and MP3 encoders built-in to Vista today – after all, hardly anyone uses Windows Media outside of the Microsoft ecosystem. Speaking of which the Zune even supports H.264 and AAC natively.

Bear in mind however these encoders are not a replacement for commercial alternatives. The limitations include simple profiles, maximum bitrate and resolutions.

With this new pool of decoders and encoders, Microsoft’s also doing some building in some interesting transcoding (decoding and re-encoding from one format to another) technology in Windows. From what I can at least gather from the presentation, transcoding is actually built right into the Windows 7 shell. That is, if you drag and drop a video from your desktop to your portable media player, the conversion will happen automatically. Personally, anything that removes unnecessary third-party bloatware to add content to portable devices gets my vote.

Microsoft also recognizes that software transcoding is less than ideal – a movie will usually take hours, so Windows 7 will also support a new breed of dedicated hardware transcoders which could ideally become a standard motherboard chipset feature. Here’s a particular one from Quartics.

If you’re particularly fond of the kinetic scrolling functionality that is implemented on the iPhone and Zune 3.0, then you have to get your hands dirty on Windows 7 since kinetic scrolling is now operating-system wide. The feature, officially implemented as “Panning”, was one of the many secrets unearthed by Rafael Rivera and can only be used if touch capability is detected.

The above demo was recorded on a Toshiba Portege M750 Tablet PC which is a tablet/touch convertible. A more in-depth review on that soon.

What this feature does (in build 6801) is allow you to use your fingers to “pan” or scroll any element with a scrollbar. The obvious examples include the start menu, Notepad and the help files. At the time of writing, browser windows including both IE and Firefox are not compatible which I assume is because the browsers implement their own scrolling behavior (ie. smoothscroll). And just like most other kinetic scrolling implementations, if you reach the barriers abruptly it’ll move the entire window as if you were pulling on it. There is also some inertia so content keeps scrolling if you swipe your finger.

If you’re looking to buy a notebook in the not too distant future to support Windows 7, bear in mind some of the cool touch and tablet functionality that will be enabled and decide if you want to touch your trackpad or your screen.

Update: Yes, I did use Aero Shake in the demo, very cool indeed.

If you really like Windows 7, and I do mean really like, then you might be interested in these “Windows 7″ t-shirts. These look different to the ones Microsoft staff were wearing at PDC08 which was just the Windows logo embossed – these however feature a stylized version of the internal Windows 7 logo screen printed on the side making it still somewhat authentic.

The green one is gently worn, both extra large (so that rules me out). Now bidding from $6.99 on eBay. The seller seems to be quite the merchandise collector.

One of the most compelling features of the Windows Home Server is the automated image backup to the network share. However if you find a home server a little too much (or expensive) like I do, then you’d be glad to know Windows 7 will make the job of making “Windows Complete PC Backups” at least half as easy by allowing you to backup straight to a network share.

Whereas in Vista you could only do a complete backup to hard disk or DVDs (with files you could backup to network share), taking it one step further to the network share makes it much easier to do backups especially since you can’t backup to the same drive as the operating system. And I don’t think anyone will juggle 71 DVDs to backup their 500GB hard drive. I guess now’s as good a time as any to buy a NAS device.