Too many posts these days about Win 7. But I’m very excited about it. I’m talking to all friends around and buzzing them about getting it installed 🙂 . Maybe the ones I speak to are already tired and sick of me 🙂 .

I’d like to share here one thing, which IMHO is one of the best usability in the new OS.

When you download (in IE) or copy (in Windows Explorer) something, you know the standard progress bars in the window, where the copy goes on. So far, if you want to see the progress, you’d have to switch to the window, or leave the window open. And as a person, who always wants to see how it’s going, I was doing that very frequently.

Not in Windows 7. As I already said, Windows 7 integrates the progress bar(s) directly in the task bar. Here’s how it looks (the red border):

You can clearly see the greenish part, which shows that I’m copying something large in Explorer and the progress is about 1/4 right now.

When I discovered that feature, I was amazed. So simple and so useful. I’ve never seen that so far in other GUIs (maybe they do have it, I just have not seen it yet).

Another thing, which I also like, is the “stack” indication (the yellowish border). This was a feature widely discussed in the forums, I’m just mentioning it here, because I (too) like it very much.

The bad thing with the progress indication is that it takes additional programming in order to get that working. It’s implemented in Windows 7 in-the-the box applications, but if the application does not support it, its progress (whatever it’s doing) will have to be monitored the old way.

However, if the application supports the standard Shell for copying/moving, it will work “the Windows 7 way”.