Too many places to click!

What's the problem with tabs (or any other MDI)? I suddenly have two place to click to choose which application to use. We've tried fiing this problem for years. First, when we use mostly SDIs, the computers weren't powerful enough to make this a problem. When it did become a problem, we tried grouping windows together in the same taskbar entry. People hate it. They lost windows all the time. Later, we "solved" this problem by using tabbed interfaces to simplify the taskbar, but we've really only moved the problem.

Like a lot of people, I run 60-70% of my apps in the browser. Maybe more on some days. A lot of these applications are my first choices. It screws with me. Let's say I'm listening to music and I want to change my playlist. Do I go to the taskbar (if I'm listening in Rhythmbox), Go to the notification area (if RB is hidden there), or go to one of my browser tabs, possibly in another browser window (if I'm using Pandora or the like)? I can't train myself because the situation is always different?

I have taskbar buttons and tabs, then I have more tabs inside my tabs for apps like Zoho, and I have the system menu, the application menu, and quite possibly a third menu inside my browser. I can't even remember whether the web page I'm looking at is even in the web browser, or whether it's in Miro or Rhythmbos. Arrrrgghh!

Are a global menu and a tabbed window manager part of the answer? I don't know. What do you think?

Shock and Horror!

Shock and horror! Windows 7 sometimes misidentifies hardware and assigns generic drivers which don't unlock all the features of the hardware, leaving, for example, Ed Bott without a working microphone and no way to get mutli-touch, even with the correct drivers.

Ed Bott also doesn't like the new icon-only taskbar, so he re-enables text+icons.  It took him months to get used to the default icon combination strategy, instead of the "combine when taskbar is full" method he was used to from Vista.

What about the file manager? Well, it now has an "insistence on using namespaces that aren’t tied to a hierarchy with some sort of disk device at the top." Does that sound familiar to anyone? It replaces this with Libraries, making the sidebar look remarkably like another OS I know of. If you thought I meant Nautilus, I was actually talking about OS X, but either OS will work. Bott says that Windows users will need to be trained to use Libraries because they represent an "initial conceptual hurdle of understanding."

Some (very few, apparently) of your legacy programs may not run in Windows 7 so you'll need to use a virtual machine running XP with some shared folders in order to get around that. Luckily, it has seamless mode, also available in VirtualBox.

This may have sounded like a rant against Windows 7 or even Ed Bott. It was no such thing. In fact, I am going to praise Ed. His opinion of Windows 7 is that it could probably be released as ready right now. "From a features and capabilities point of view, Windows 7 is essentially done." His final judgement?

Overall, I’m impressed with how reliable this Windows release has been. It also seems more than adequate in terms of performance. I haven’t taken a stopwatch to measure speeds and feeds, but overall, every common operation in Windows 7 feels snappy and responsive, even on old hardware. I haven’t seen significant changes in startup and shutdown times over Windows Vista on the same hardware.

How did he come to this conclusion with so much that's different and so much that needed tweaking?

Instead of that conventional review approach, I want to share my experiences after six months of using Windows 7 full time. My attitude over that six months has been to keep an open mind, learn how the operating system works, and incorporate its features into my work style. If you’re planning to evaluate Windows 7, I urge you to try the same approach: Keep an open mind, try to figure out how it works, and see if maybe some small changes in old work habits can pay big dividends in productivity.

Thank you, Ed Bott, for taking the time to review an OS properly. I wish more reviewers did that.