Windows 7 has a shiny new user interface that aims to make it easier to accomplish tasks on your computer without getting distracted by all the eye candy. But before settling on the new Windows taskbar, Aero Peek feature and other design elements, Microsoft considered a number of other possibilities. TechRadar has a look at some of them.

For instance, an early toolbar design had a taskbar with thumbnails of running programs instead of icons and pop up menus. But the icons were too small to be usable. Another version used a "Bat Signal" because when you scrolled your mouse over an icon the full window would open on the desktop, and a spotlight would shine up from the taskbar at it.

You can find more early ideas for Windows 7 at TechRadar.

One of the most noticeable new features in Windows 7 is the shiny new taskbar. While it bears a passing resemblance to the taskbar that we've grown to love/hate over the past decade or so, the new taskbar represents a new paradigm in window management for Microsoft.

There's no text, and there's no quick launch bar. When you open a program, an icon will show up in the taskbar. Open multiple windows and by default they'll b grouped together under a single icon, but by scrolling your mouse over that icon you can get live previews of what's going on in each window.

You can "pin" items to the taskbar, which gives you easy to access shortcuts in a manner that's similar to the old quick launch area. But when you launch an item from its shortcut Windows won't add a new icon to the taskbar. Instead, you can access any running instances of that program by clicking on the taskbar shortcut.

But you know what? You won't find any of this information in the Windows 7 help files. In fact, when you search for taskbar in the help and support area, nothing shows up at all. If you right click on the taskbar and select properties, there's a link that asks "How do I customize the taskbar," but it takes you to a help file that was clearly written for Windows Vista users. It shows the Vista taskbar and doesn't offer any information about the Windows 7 version of the taskbar.

To be fair, Windows 7 is currently beta software, and a lot of code has been borrowed from Windows Vista, not just the help documents. But I kind of expected that Microsoft would update the help files before releasing a public beta to help users navigate some of the major changes in the new operating system.

As Adam reported earlier, the Superbar has been unlocked in Windows 7. Apart from adding even more visual pop to the improved Desktop Window Manager, it adds some long-absent functionality.

Apart from better visual task tips with smooth transition effects, it's fixed another minor annoyance. At last you can click and drag taskbar buttons to re-order them. I've always been a little irritated by the fact that I couldn't do that in previous Windows versions, and was glad to see the change.

Grouped application windows will preview as pictured: hover the button, and the thumbnails expand into view. Hover a thumbnail and the red x appears, allowing you to close (duh) the program.

Microsoft is officially introducing Windows 7 today at the Professional Developers Conference. The company will also be making an early build of the next generation Windows operating system available to developers, but it will probably be a little while before the rest of us can get our grubby little paws on it.

As expected, Windows 7 looks a lot like Windows Vista so far. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I don't know too many people who take issue with the way Windows Vista looks. It's performance, especially on older machines with slower processors and less RAM than newer computers, on the other hand, has been less than stellar. It looks like Windows 7 will carry many of Windows Vista's design elements, while tweaking a number of things below the hood.

You can find a boatload of new screenshots of Windows 7 at ZDNet, Ars Technica, or on Flickr. Feature-wise, Windows 7 adds support for multi-touch inputs, has an improved task manager, and uses fewer system resources than Vista.

As you can see from the image above, Windows 7 also has a new taskbar which combines features that are currently divided between the taskbar, and quick launch menu. You don't get text descriptions of items in the taskbar anymore, but clicking on an item brings up a list of actions you can perform with that program. Window management has also been improved. You can maximize any window just by dragging it to the top of your screen.

And if you have multiple windows open but want to read something on one of them without actually switching windows, you can just sroll your mouse over the icon in the taskbar to "peek" at it. This turns any other windos that are blocking it transparent. This comes in handy when you just want to read something quickly, or if you want to see the weather, clock, or other gadget hanging out on your desktop without minimizing all of your open windows.

You can clear up space on a Windows desktop by minimizing applications you're not currently looking at to the taskbar. But what happens when the taskbar is so overrun with programs that you can't make heads or tales of it? Wouldn't it be nice if you could just minimize your applications to the system tray? TrayEverything is a Windows utility that lets you do just that.

Just download and install (or download the no-install ZIP version) of TrayEverything and run it. You'll see a list of running applications. Right click on any program you want to minimize to the system tray and it will disappear from the desktop and Windows taskbar. In the system tray you'll see a small icon representing the program. Just click that icon to bring the program back up.

Note that TrayEverything needs to be run each time you want to minimize an application to the system tray. Once it's restored, clicking the program's minimize button will send it to the taskbar, not the system tray. If you're looking for a more permanent solution, you might want to check out Trayconizer, a command line utility that you can add to any program shortcut in order to automatically minimize it to the system tray whenever you hit the minimize button.

[via gHacks]

There are plenty of things the Windows shell does really well, but there are other relatively minute details that have been overlooked since Windows 95 that really piss us off - like the ability to click and drag taskbar buttons.

Thankfully, this 600k app that will let you do just that. Taskbar Shuffle is 32-bit Windows-only (it works on all versions, 95 to Vista), obviously, and it gives you free reign over your taskbar buttons and system tray icons. Yes, at long last you can drag them all around to your heart's content.

We first looked at Taskbar Shuffle in 2006, but it's such a simple app with such great purpose that it deserves another look.

There are a couple added features as well, like the ability to middle-click to close a task button or group and tweaking for the "group similar buttons" function. Several improvements have been made since 2.0: settings are no longer stored in the registry, shuffling buttons in a group is possible, and it is now portable (and we love portable).

Of course you're going to give up a few resources, but the cost is minimal. Taskbar Shuffle uses only 5mb of memory barely any CPU. It's a tradeoff we're willing to make to gain some long-awaited functionality.

While we know a lot of folks like to pan Windows Vista's new graphics as useless eye candy, there are a few aspects of the Aero interface that are actually pretty useful. For example, in Windows Vista you can get a real-time thumbnail preview of running applications by scrolling over the Windows taskbar. But you can get this feature without switching operating systems, thanks to Visual ToolTip, a free application from Chris'n'Soft.

In order to run Visual ToolTip, just download and unzip the file and click on VisualToolTip.exe. The settings menu will open up, but you don't have to configure anything if you don't want to. You can just start scrolling your mouse over your taskbar to see previews of your running applications. You can click on the Visual ToolTip icon in your system tray if you do want to adjust the image size or animations.

Because Windows XP lacks some of the under the hood features included in Vista, Visual ToolTip doesn't show you real-time previews, but it will make a new snapshot every time you mouse over an icon. In other words, if you've got a video playing, you won't see a tiny video show up in the thumbnail. But you should see the frame that was playing when you moused over.

Visual ToolTip also packs a program launcher dock which you can use to replace the Windows taskbar. But there are far better dock applications out there, including RocketDock and ObjectDock if you're looking for a program launcher.

[via Life Rocks 2.0]

Windows makes it easy to rearrange the items in your quick start menu by clicking and dragging. But for some reason, you can't move the items in your taskbar.

A while back we told you about Taskbar Shuffle, a simple program for reorganizing running programs in your taskbar. It's a lightweight program taking up just about 600k of memory. But for the memory frugal, Taskix does pretty much the same thing while using just 70k.

There's nothing to install. Just download and unzip Taskix, and click on the exe file. Then drag and drop to your heart's delight. If you want to disable Taskix, click again and select the "Deactivate" button.

[via CyberNet]

From the "Why didn't somebody think of this before?" files...

Taskbar Shuffle is a simple Windows utility that allows you to rearrange the order of your taskbar items by dragging and dropping. And now I'm wondering how I'm going to fill an entire post with info about Taskbar Shuffle, because there's not much more to say beyond that! It is refreshing in its simplicity. (I'm suddenly reminded of something one of my computer science professors once said about Unix programs... "Each program does only one specific thing, but it does that thing really well.")

Taskbar Shuffle is a free download and is compatible with Windows all the way back to 95. It kind of amazes me that Microsoft didn't include this functionality to begin with!

GroupBar is an interesting new take on the taskbar from Microsoft Research's VIBE group. As the name implies, GroupBar's primary function is grouping, in particular grouping sets of windows. Superficially, GroupBar looks not unlike the standard Windows taskbar, if a tad funky, but in addition to the taskbar's usual abilities, GroupBar lets you arrange its item (called "tiles") into groups, rearrange them via drag-and-drop, and perform actions on all tiles within a group. This allows you to close an entire group of windows, or minimize, maximize, or restore them. There's also a "Layout Group" function which will arrange your windows in pre-defined ways, and a "snapshot" function that lets you save the position and state of a group of windows and restore it later. GroupBar can be placed on any edge of the screen, and you can use multiple GroupBars simultaneously. GroupBar is a free app (and, from the sounds of it, not without a few bugs) and is probably totally unsupported.

[Link and screenshot via Lifehacker]

The first two fall under "taskbar enchancements," and the last is a nifty new virtual desktop manager. One of my biggest pet peeves in Windows is the management of the taskbar. First, I should be able to reorder the items in the taskbar. Enter Taskbar Shuffle, which allows you to simply drag-and-drop the items as you see fit. What a concept! Now even if I've got Photoshop lined up first (even though it was last, as it took longest to launch), I've still got IE with a dozen little windows minimized, crawling across the bottom of my screen, with no idea what's going on in each window. So I use Visual Task Tips to show me a preview. It's a light shell enhancement that lets me mouse over an item in the taskbar, and it pops up a teensy preview window. That helps more than you may realize until you start using it. Finally, when the taskbar won't cut it, there's always shifting around to different desktops entirely. Dexpot (sent in by Arun K.) is a great desktop manager in a field full of such beasts. Dexpot will manage up to 20 virtual desktops, and it does it quite well. Between these three tools I've significantly improved my workflow because I no longer have to hold things in my own brain as a sort of temporary RAM. Instead, I just dump everything into the computer in real-time, and let the computer manage the data. I can scan through what I'm working on faster as a result. All of these are free, although Dexpot requires a license if you use it in a business environment.

[Taskbar tools found on digg and digg]

Okay, I have some OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) tendencies. One of them is that I like the first program on my taskbar to be Outlook, and the second one to be Firefox, and I want them that way all the time. Back, way back, when I was running Windows 2000, I had a utility that allowed me to move things around to the way I wanted them when I needed to. I can’t remember the name of that program, but in any event it ceased to matter once I had upgraded to XP, as it didn’t work in XP. Thankfully, TaskbarPP allows me to get back to my neat and tidy ways.

Note that the link we’re pointing to here is a Babelfish translation, and can therefore be less than 100% clear at times. The application works great in English regardless.

[via Lifehacker]