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pdc 2008 posts

Filed under: Fun, Windows, Microsoft, Beta

Another Windows 7 secret revealed; desktop to have slideshows

Windows 7 Personalization Settings
"Teach a man assembly, and he'll write device drivers for a day. Give a man a disassembler, and he'll figure out every secret hidden in the Windows 7 pre-beta."
I swear, I'm never going to get tired of posting about Rafael Rivera finding cool stuff hiding in the guts of our Microsoft products. He's done it yet again; this time, Rafael has uncovered another couple of Windows 7 shell goodies people have been asking to see for quite some time now. What's the latest discovery? Rafael is coining it "Desktop Slideshow;" it's a new setting hidden away in your Personalization settings that allows you to select multiple images to create a fading slideshow on your desktop.

"But wait," you're thinking, "I can a) do that on my Mac already and b) there are third-party utilities that let me do this on my Windows PC." That's true... but can your Mac or your third-party utilities automatically pull desktop wallpapers from an RSS feed? No? Well, Windows 7 can. Check out Rafael's blog Within Windows for more details, and a tool to let the masses check out the shiny new features once he's got the finer points worked out.

Filed under: Windows, Microsoft, Beta

"Superbar" unlocked in PDC build of Windows 7

Windows 7 Superbar
Certified reverse engineer and rather impressive hacker (in the good sort of way) Rafael Rivera, of Uxtheme patching fame, announced on TWiT that he discovered our sneaky friends over in Redmond actually did enable that cool new "superbar" version of the taskbar in the version of Windows 7 that was handed out to guests at PDC (you know, that one that Lee showed off). The superbar was demoed during the various Windows 7 presentations, but the general consensus was that the feature hadn't been completed by the time the PDC handout build was prepared.

However, Rafael simply couldn't take no for an answer, and dug down into the innards of the pre-release version of Windows 7 to find that some rather sneaky developers at Microsoft simply rigged it to only appear for certain users with computers on Microsoft domains. Upon flipping a bit, he discovered that the superbar (albeit a slightly lesser version than demoed) could be enabled on the pre-beta build. He posted a very simple walkthrough guide and helper application for those of you that are graced with the PDC build of Windows 7, but still longing the shiny bits shown off by Steven Sinofsky at the Windows 7 keynote.

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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