There have been rumours floating about what all Microsoft's next operating system will have.
However, most of these have been mere speculations. For the first time this week Microsoft publicly demoed Windows 7 at D: All Things Digital conference in California. The high point of the new OS, called Windows 7 presently, is the "multi-touch" interface.
Other than, the touchy feely look, the demo also showed a user manipulating photos, browsing a map and playing an onscreen piano with simple one and two-finger taps and gestures.
Windows 7 is likely to hit the market in late 2009 or early 2010. Here's looking into all the new additions that are likely to form part of Windows 7.
Windows 7 will be made for iPhone-like touch-screen applications, an alternative to the computer mouse. This means that users will be able to control the next version of Microsoft Windows with touch controls.
Microsoft showed a new application called "Touchable Paint" that lets a user paint with their fingers, as well as software to organise photos or navigate maps by touch.
Company Chairman Bill Gates framed the new feature as an evolution away from the mouse. The ability to use touch to give users fingertip control of their screens could help revolutionise how computer desktops and mobile phones are controlled and would be an alternative to existing mice, keyboard and pen-based user controls.
Microsoft is seeking to one-up Apple, which made touch-screen software central to the success of its iPhone mobile device, which combines computer, phone and Web features and has sold around 6 million units in its first 11 months.
With Windows 7, Microsoft hopes to create a more life-like photo experience. As per the demo, new photo applications developed for Windows 7 will allow users to arrange and examine photos as they would on a table.
It will also allow users to write, rotate or zoom them. There also seems option of 3D slideshow, grid and scatter views
Another feature is the mapping app that seems to have modified from the Microsoft's Surface, a device for interacting with large tabletop computer displays, team's own Concierge application.
Like Concierge, it calls up data from Windows Live Local and Microsoft Virtual Earth.
Sessions of Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference, scheduled for October, also throws some light on the new operating system.
As per the session details, Windows 7 will enable users to advance the graphics capabilities of their applications while carrying forward existing investments in their Win32 codebase, including GDI and GDI+.
New enhancements to DirectX will help Win32 applications harness the latest innovations in GPUs and LCD displays, including support for scalable, high-performance, 2D and 3D graphics, text, and images.
In a blog post earlier this week, Microsoft's Chris Flores said that Windows 7 will be an evolution of the Vista kernel and one of our design goals for Windows 7 is that it will run on the recommended hardware we specified for Windows Vista and that theapplications and devices that work with Windows Vista will be compatible with Windows 7 .
According to another session at the conference, a single application will help reduce mobile battery life (presumably in laptops and other mobile devices) by up to 30 per cent.
Windows 7 will provide advances for building energy-efficient applications.
The session write-up says: "In this session we will discuss how to leverage new Windows infrastructure to reduce application power consumption and efficiently schedule background tasks and services."
According to a session on Web services, Windows 7 will introduce a new networking API to support building SOAP based Web services in native code. It's likely to have native support for running virtual hard disks, specifically disk images in Microsoft’s own VHD format.
Courtesy: Indiatimes News Nework
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