With Vista behind us, enthusiasts can now start looking into future developments of their favorite operating system. Microsoft’s ‘Professional Developers Conference’ (PDC) of late has shed a satisfactory degree of light on the impending seventh iteration* of the Windows-platform, and revealed numerous incremental improvements over an already very mature OS. As many speculated, the improvements made to Windows have proven to be mainly evolutionary and fit-and-finish-based. This fact predominantly shines through in the ‘User Experience’ of the latest development milestone (M3). Let’s focus on the current state of the Windows Taskbar for now.

* According to Microsoft; there has been a lot of controversy on the web about this.

Hello OS X Dock

Windows 7 will only partially retain its current task-management paradigm, as Microsoft’s currently prototyping a ‘new’ way of navigating your way through windows. This revolutionary –old- method, as it turns out, is very reminiscent of Mac OS X’ dock, which mixes app launchers and running applications in a [somewhat] arbitrary fashion.