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UI Features That Didn't Make It Into Windows 7
TRNick writes "TechRadar talks to Windows 7's Senior User Experience Designer and discovers the interface ideas the Windows 7 team almost, but didn't put into Windows 7, and the stages various UI features went through to their final form. Quoting: '... The next prototype, in February 2007, was called the Bat Signal; when you moved your mouse over an icon in the taskbar, the full window would pop up on screen, highlighted by beams of light (a little like the Batman signal projected over Gotham City). Bat Signal made it easy to find the right window but it caused other problems: 'sometimes people toss the mouse down to the bottom of the screen when they're typing because they don't care where the mouse is and the Bat Signal pops up and that's really intrusive in their flow.' Bat Signal evolved into Aero Peek in Windows 7; you can hover over an icon to get thumbnails and hover over a thumbnail to get a preview of the window."
"... sometimes people toss the mouse down to the bottom of the screen when they're typing because they don't care where the mouse is ..."
Many years ago -- about 25 years, maybe a bit more -- others realized the exact same thing: Users don't want to see the mouse while they're typing. The solution at the time was to simply hide the mouse pointer at the first touch of a printable key. Amazing!
One of the little reasons I like my Mac.
Well, some guys from ZDNet presented it as a Windows 7 beta and nobody noticed the difference.
4.2 works fine for me BTW and I switched to it from 3.5.10 for everyday use, but the former releases indeed were quite unfinished.
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
Then I realized that it's not really cluttering anything, just that I am not used to the looks.
IMHO, it was never so much a problem of "clutter" with the Windows XP "Luna" aka Fischer Price interface so much as it was inefficient use of space. The buttons, borders, title bars, etc...were all just a tad bigger than they really needed to be. While there may be some users who enjoy the "big buttons" look I and many other users were never really fans. Microsoft would do well to learn a bit more about their different classes of user (and there were more than just "classic" OR "luna" users with XP) and offer some more logical choices for different user interface designs. Personally, I use the Stardock WindowBlinds software (which plugs into the theme APIs provided in Windows XP and above) with the "soft crystal" theme (a modified copy of a KDE style interface) as my UI of choice because it is space efficient, unobtrusive, and substantially less 90s than "windows classic".