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."

Comments

Sounds interesting.

[AltGrendel]

Anyone know of something similar for Linux?

Re:Sounds interesting.

[HTH NE1]

Also, this idea you speak of, was it patented? I am guessing that it was not, as Microsoft has a well paid legal team at their disposal which would most likely prevent unauthorized usage of patented ideas.

A legal team such as the USPTO?

You can't patent an idea. An idea must be realized as an invention before it can be patented.

For example, you can't patent the idea of a flying man. You can however patent an airfoil suit that allows a man to fly.

this is why I no longer mess with betas

[Saint Stephen]

when I worked at MS, I used to always install the IDS and IDW builds. Not the dailies - they never worked. But I got really tired of learning about possible features that would never really exist, and now from the outside world I'm tired of learning about betas, because it's never exactly like the shipping product. Who cares? I'll just learn about it when it's done.

It does me zero good to know about things that I'm not going to create myself. If MS will implement it in five years, I'll learn about it in five years.

Re:K.I.S.S

[nine-times]

I've read (though I don't know for sure and can't find backup at the moment) that Microsoft's GUI design is much more of a trial & error approach than Apple's. They throw stuff in, put it in front of users, ask users what they think, and study the users' reactions in a scientific sort of way. If it make test users' workflows more efficient by Microsoft's measures and causes positive reactions in test users, then the design is used. There exact process may be much more complicated than that, but from what I've heard, that's the general idea.

I've read that Apple's process, on the other hand, has a little more emphasis on the opinions and views of GUI designers and experts, as well as the personal opinion of Steve Jobs. (again, supposedly)

It wouldn't be clear to me at the outset which approach would give better results.

Virtual Desktops?

[Hatta]

Are virtual desktops going to be in Windows 7? I haven't tried the beta, and all I get with google is some stuff about RDP. Any desktop without virtual desktops is pretty much unusable for anything non-trivial. What is taking them so long? UNIX has had them since the early 90s.