You may have heard that Microsoft unveiled their successor to Windows Vista last week during the PDC. The new operating system will be called Windows 7, as it’s Microsoft’s seventh operating system to date. While it’s still in pre-beta form, they handled out copies of the upcoming operating system to developers and walked through some of the new features. Looking through the list I couldn’t help but feel like they were simply playing catchup with Apple’s OS X Leopard operating system as some of the features feel like crappy rip offs of features already present in OS X. Posted some screen shots below for a short comparison.

Desktop:
With Windows Vista and previous MS operating systems, if you have a lot of applications/documents open on your screen and you wanted to look at the desktop you could either minimize all the windows one by one, or click on a button on the taskbar that would minimize all windows at once. With Windows 7, placing your cursor on the corner of the screen, “hides” (as seen in next two screenshot) the windows and allows you to see the screen.

Windows 7: Loads of open windows.

Windows 7: Windows “hidden” to expose the desktop.

Hmm sorta useful I guess….but OS X already has that feature and it works better and looks sexier! As you can see in the screenshots below, first you have a screen full of open applications. Now one downward swipe of your fingers on the multitouch trackpad and it displays a miniature version of all the open applications, allowing you to easily find any window that was previously hidden. Want to see the desktop? Well one upward swipe with your fingers on the multitouch trackpad and ZOOM, open windows fly off the screen displaying your desktop!

OS X: Lots of open windows.

OS X: Swipe fingers down on touchpad to see all open apps.

OS X: Swipe fingers upwards on touchpad to see desktop.

Windows 7 Widgets/Gadgets:
Apple calls them widgets, Microsoft copied them and calls them “gadgets” in Microsoft Vista. In Vista, these gadgets were in a sidebar on one side of the screen. In Windows 7, the sidebar is gone, but as you can see in the screenshot below, the gadgets can now TA-DA be placed anywhere on the screen.

Hmm…that seem’s pretty familar..OH wait…OS X has the same feature! (screenshot below).

So yeah looks like microsoft is just ripping off features thats have been available on OS X for a while now. There are some upcoming features that sound cool, but with the way Vista went, I won’t believe a word of what they’re saying Windows 7 will be like until I can actually see it with my own eyes.

(Note: On macs without multitouch trackpads, the features above can be activated using keyboard shortcuts and also by moving the cursor to one of the corners of the screen…as MS copied)

The new generation of Ipod nanos were announced at todays “Let’s Rock” event in SF around 10:30ish a.m (but you already knew about that because all of us geeks were following live blogs of the event from 10am this morning right?).

Changes:

- Cosmetics. Has a oval cross section. Went back to the “thin tall” factor of the 1G and 2G nano (3g nano was fat and short). Looks pretty sweet. Check out image below.
- built in accelerometer (same as iphone). This will allow games designed with the iphone in mind to play on the nano. Sweetness! It will also allow the nano to switch to cover flow mode (the mode in which instead of listening song titles/album titles it displays album covers instead that you can flick through through the use of the click wheel) ..and it also allows for the next bullet point
- Shuffle songs by shaking the nano! Now thats cool!
- Genius mode (this is also being added to the ipod touch and to itunes). Here’s Apple’s description of this feature:

“Say you’re listening to a song you really like and want to hear other tracks that go great with it. The Genius feature finds the songs in your music library that go great together and makes a Genius Playlist for you. It’s like having your own highly intelligent, personal DJ.”

- improved battery life (up to 24 hours)
- headphones with built in mics and built in remote control.
- voice recording capability
- Use of more environmentally friendly materials

Changes to the ipod touch were also announced, but I’ll skip that for now due to time constraints. It looks like the iphone now and includes the genius feature. Also has external volume control and speakers like the iphone. Aside from that there’s also a new version of itunes (version coming out and NBC will be returning to the video store (they left itunes a year or so ago because they wanted to charge around $5 per episode for their tv shows including heroes, but Steve Jobs did not want to charge customers any more then $1.99 at the time).  Also out by the end of this week will be iphone software version 2.1 that is supposed to reduce number of dropped calls, improve battery life, crash less and provde faster backups. Mine hasn’t crashed much and my backups are also fast, but I know some readers of this blog have those issues so hopefully 2.1 will fix those problems.

Oh and heres more info on the new nano and touch. Cool thing about apple is most of the time their products are available to buy at the same time as the announcement.  Oh and there was supposed to be some Microsoft announcement today as well..but who cares? (new zunes…blah).

Just ordered a 16gb ipod nano to use in the gym. It’ll be replacing my older 30gb ipod whose screen is starting to give up (I sat on it) and i a lil bulky for the gym..don’t want to use my iphone in the gym because then it’ll be covered in sweat at the end of each session. Ordered the black nano…second on the left in the pic below. Can’t wait till it arrives! I should have just gone to the apple store in a day or two and picked it up personally instead or ordering it online but I doubt I’ll have a chance to go to the apple stores anytime soon.