XP’s old looks have first been beautified with Vista’s sleek, shiny looks, and now it’s time to upgrade them with Windows 7’s set of visual improvements.
With Vista’s failure to capture the market’s attention, Microsoft didn’t want to reiterate that mistake and did its best to make out of Windows 7 what Vista should have been: a success. Even if 7 has raked a plethora of accolades from well known, trustworthy testers, there is still a percentage of skeptics that, although long for the sleek looks of the newer OSes released by Microsoft, cling with the utmost stubbornness to old, reliable XP, which for many has become obsolete or is rapidly heading towards this state.
The Windows 7 beauty session for your plain-looking but great-running XP takes 10 steps in which you have to opt for different enhancements, addressing aspects such as screen resolution, DPI setting, installation type, general system user interface for the Windows 7 look, system applications’ UI, Windows interface, installation of third-party apps necessary to bring XP’s looks closer to the latest OS fashion trend. Desktop enhancements and user account personalization are also present in the transformation procedure. Read More»
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The Firefox Superbar is about to be kicked to the next level with the integration of Ubiquity. Right now all that is available from Mozilla is the Taskfox Prototype, an illustration of what Ubiquity blended into Firefox’s fabric would look like to the end user. Of course, you can watch the video embedded at the bottom of this article in order to get a perspective over Taskfox for Mozilla’s open-source browser. Taskfox is essentially a feature Mozilla plans for Firefox, and which was inspired by the ubiquity experiment.
“The main thing we haven’t prototyped is the interaction of the awesome bar results and the Taskfox commands. We know that this is a major remaining question so we’ll be prototyping that soon. We’ve more or less ignored that interaction for this prototype,” revealed Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla Labs. “Being able to navigate results with the keyboard is lacking in Ubiquity proper. We’ve tried to solve that in TaskFox.”
But fact is that the video doesn’t actually do Taskfox justice. In this context, Mozilla has made available a demo of the feature, put together with HTML, Javascript, and jQuery. The Firefox Taskfox demo can be accessed via this link, and obviously users will need Firefox in order for it to work. Typing slowly is advised in order to get the best experience possible. Raskin applauded the success of Ubiquity (over one million downloads), an experiment from Mozilla Labs which inspired Taskfox (see the second video embedded below). Read More»
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Microsoft has made a range of resources available for download in an effort to streamline the process of leveraging the Windows 7 evolution, focusing, among other aspects of the operating system, on the Aero graphical user interface advances. An illustrative example in this context is what the Redmond company referred to as an intermediate solution addressing managed code developers specifically. The Taskbar Sample .NET Interop Library is a new managed code wrapper that Microsoft hopes will make the lives of managed code developers easier.
“The Taskbar Sample .NET Interop Library allows developers to: create and manipulate JumpLists including tasks and items; display Dynamic Overlay Icons, Thumbnail Toolbars; use the Taskbar progress bar; control Custom Thumbnail Preview, and custom Preview also known as AeroPeek,” revealed Yochay Kiriaty, Windows 7 technical evangelist on the Client Platform Evangelist Group. Read More»
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