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)