Some new features of Windows 7

Listening to the PCPro podcast recently announcing some of the new features of Windows 7, I can't stop thinking that I've heard it all before. In fact I am using several of the features mentioned now... on my Mac!

1. Multi-touch

Apart from multi-touch working very well on the iPhone is there much of a point to being able to smear your fingers over your monitor on a desktop machine, or even a laptop? Apple has been using multi-touch and gestures on its laptops for a while now, and I would certainly prefer using the rotate feature on the touch-pad than the screen itself. Verdict: Have been using this technology for a while now.

2. Large icons

So icons that are a bit like the Mac 512pixel icons? Or icons like the scalable ones used in Ubuntu and other versions of Linux? Large icons may seem trivial but it certainly helps when you have very high resolution displays and can set your desktop to look great at any size. Verdict: Been using large icons for years on the Mac and Linux.


My Mac's hard disk icon is so detailed you can read the label!

3. Virtual hard disks

"Windows 7 will offer the option to create virtual hard disks, both fixed size and dynamic. You can attach vhd's from XP and Vista and boot from Windows 7 vhd's natively." - PCPro Podcast 28.

The Mac has had this feature for years. The virtual hard disks the Mac uses are called dmg's. These disk images can be mounted, read and written to, they can be a fixed or dynamic size and they can use real-time encryption. The only thing you can't yet do on the Mac is boot from a dmg, unless you do so with VMWare, Parallels desktop or Virtual Box. Linux also offers the ability to mount virtual hard disks. 95% of virtual disk functions can be done on the Mac already.

4. Device stage

3rd party manufacturers will be able to have more control over what is displayed during device installation and usage. The PC Pro team seem to think this will just be abused by manufacturers wanting a chance to sell you more stuff. Verdict Mac and Linux don't have this, thank God.

5. Homegroup

Making home networking easier. "New PC's added to the home network can automatically share their documents photos and video with other Windows 7 PC's in the house with the ability to search other PC's as if they were on your own machine." - PC Pro Podcast 28

All the Mac users out there will be screaming, "but isn't that just bonjour?" Bonjour does precisely this and more, including the ability for inter-machine remote control (using VNC built into the OS) and zero config network printer setup. Spotlight (the Mac's central search facility) is able to search across machines on the network. To cap it all, Apple make the bonjour software available for Windows for free!

Apple's implementation of bonjour is an adaption of Linux's zero config open standard. Since this is an open worldwide standard, shouldn't Microsoft by adopting zero config so that all machines can share data easily on any network? No of course not, they want to make their own incompatible version and ignore open standards!

Blast - and there I was telling myself not to have another rant!

If Microsoft do not succeed with launching windows 7 to the masses then I believe they will be dead in the consumer market space. I'm using those and better features already, these announcements are at best "meh" and at worst just a blatant copy of technologies that have existed on other platforms for ages!